Category Archives: Events

Sessions Submitted for DDD North

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3 months and 3 DDD events are getting closer. DDD 10 takes place on the first week of September and has completely sold out (within minutes of opening), DunDDD will be happening on the 17th of November but in the middle is DDD North.

For those not in the know the DDD (Developer! Developer! Developer!) conference series are free, community-run conferences that take part across the UK and even further a field in Ireland and Australia. The success of the DDD series is in part down to the passion, dedication and drive of the organisers but much more importantly the commitment the development community puts in by turning up, speaking and providing feedback. Traditionally the conferences have a .NET/Microsoft focus, especially at the main (and original) event held in Reading however the regional events have seen a wide variety of alternative technologies and languages reach the agenda.

One of the great things about DDD conferences is democracy. Most of the events allow potential delegates to vote on sessions which gives the organisers an idea of what is popular and can then be used to decide who make the agenda. It also helps for room capacities.

I have got 2 talks up for DDD North this year and if you’re going to DDD North and would like to see either of them, please vote for them!

A Day in the Life of a Support Developer

Legacy projects, maintainance contracts, supporting code written by people who have long since left. The frustrations, the “WTF!?”s, the realisation that you can make it better, at the very least for yourself, but also for your fellow developers. These are all things I am sure many developers experience when working in support teams or on legacy projects and it is something I have learnt a great deal from.

>In this session I will show how, with help from people such as Michael Feathers (Working Effectively With Legacy Code), Uncle Bob Martin and The Pragmatic Programmers (Andrew Hunt & David Thomson) you can survive support desks and legacy projects while retaining your sanity. There will be code examples, hints & tips and open discussion.

Working Effectively

Umbraco is a Content Management System that has been making waves in the .NET development community lately (for various reasons). Because of it’s flexibility, extensibility and relative ease of use for the end-user, It is widely used and very popular with digital agencies using the .NET stack. However being an established CMS there are many tools, patterns and practices you can apply to Umbraco development that can significantly improve your productivity (and make life a little easier for your designers too!).

This session will cover areas such as:

  • Project and folder structure
  • Automation with Rake
  • Writing clean code without codebehind (or clogging up your Razor views)
  • Optimising use of the Umbraco Node API.
  • Hints and tips for faster, more efficient umbraco development

If you’re interested in working more effectively with Umbraco, this is the session for you!

DDD Scotland 2011–Voting opens

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Session submission for DDD Scotland 2011 is now closed and I have to say, what am amazing collection of subjects and talks!

Fun fact for you, more sessions were submitted to DDD Scotland 2011 than were submitted to DDD 9, c’mon the Scots? Winking smile

Jesting aside, this is the part where we turn control over to you, the community and ask you to vote on the sessions you want to see on the day. DDD Scotland is a democratic process and it is the community who whittles down 88 sessions to the 20 or so that will actually run on the day. Voting is now open so what are you waiting for? Get voting!

The Sessions

  • A Quantum of Computing
  • Developing SharePoint 2010 with Visual Studio 2010
  • How to create Data Driven Silverlight Apps with No Code
  • Snake Charming : IronPython for fun and profit
  • Cross-platform apps : HTML5 for mobile devices
  • Building a Silverlight BI and Mapping Dashboard
  • Is your code S.O.L.I.D ?
  • So you want to try Scrum?
  • Enterprise Applications in minutes!
  • Introduction to Android Development using Monodroid
  • Real World Application Development with Mvc3, NHibernate, FluentNHibernate and Castle Windsor
  • Developing Windows Phone 7 Applications using Silverlight
  • Genetic Algorithms
  • Streams of Streams – Your Rx Prescription
  • Beginners Guide To Continuous Integration
  • How to really annoy your Security Tester
  • Dealing with legacy code: Twibbon.com
  • Functional Alchemy: Tricks to keep your C# DRY*
  • Dynamic Alchemy: Real-world uses for dynamic C#
  • Azure Table Service – getting creative with Microsoft’s NoSQL datastore
  • How to manage your manager
  • Moving to Windows Phone 7 Development for .NET Developers
  • Creating Slick Windows Phone Applications
  • A Primer to RavenDB
  • A Complete Beginner’s Guide to CUDA and CUDA.NET
  • Being Dynamic with Ruby
  • From .NET to Rails, A Developer’s Story
  • Testing Ruby and Rails
  • Powershell from a DBA perspective
  • Is this advanced T-SQL or just something I don’t know?
  • Produce Cleaner Code with Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP)
  • Creating custom build activities for TFS 2010
  • Unit Testing, Test Driven Development and the Walking Skeleton
  • Touch Me, Stretch Me, Squeeze Me: The Windows 7 WPF Multi-Touch Story
  • Automating Testing With Windows Virtual PC
  • Writing Custom FxCop Rules
  • Grok Talk Workshop
  • Planning Your Internationalization Strategy
  • CQRS and Friends: Possibly distributed systems, intentionally.
  • Creating your Own Software Company: A Survival Guide
  • Designing for Others: Lessons from Commercial API Development
  • Panel Discussion – The state of the Web.
  • Building for the Modern Web – Flash, ASP.NET, Silverlight, HTML5 & Mobile Devices
  • Building for the Mobile Web – iPhone, Droid, WP7 & all the others too
  • Crap Code – The code hiding under your bed
  • Making Crap Code Better – Real world Coding Standards
  • Cloud to Scale? No. Write fast code!
  • Building software to fail – Logging, Exception Handling, Tracing, Instrumentation.
  • Natural Laws of Software Performance
  • A guide to installing Google Analytics
  • Introduction to Kanban
  • How Far Can I Push It?
  • Delivering High Quality Live and On-Demand Video to Multiple Devices
  • Deploying and Synchronising Websites Using the Web Deployment Tool
  • Ba-da-Bing! Using the IIS SEO Toolkit to Improve your Site’s Ranking
  • Rx Framework Deep Dive
  • Caliburn.Micro: Painless MVVM apps for Silverlight and WPF
  • TeamCity – taking it to the next level..
  • Controlling Humanoid Robots: A Networked Approach
  • SpecFlow – functional testing made easy
  • Building composite applications with Open frameworks
  • Building hypermedia-driven applications with OpenRasta 3
  • Package Management deep-dive with OpenWrap
  • How to build a framework, and why you almost never should.
  • ASP.NET MVC Localization
  • A Step into Workflow Foundation 4
  • Data Mining the Social Web
  • Asymptotics and Algorithms – What You’ve Forgotten Since University
  • .Net Collections Deep Dive
  • Building seriously scalable websites with ASP.NET with and without Windows
  • Schrödinger’s website – Testing web content with Google Website Optimiser
  • Did I redis right?
  • The new era of PHP frameworks
  • Introducing Doctrine 2, a PHP ORM done right
  • Computer, earl grey tea, hot
  • Media Center and Windows Home Server – Marriage in your living room
  • Fitting a new kitchen sync – oData, oData, oh oh oh
  • The dark parts of Mono
  • Don’t Make Me Wait – Achieve Faster Websites
  • Real World SLUT (Silverlight Unit Testing)
  • Learning software development the right way
  • Silverlight with Bing Maps
  • Defensive programming 101
  • Parallel… Parallelise… Pallar… Doing stuff at the same time in .NET 4.0
  • Rewriting software is the single worst mistake you can make – apparently.
  • Behavioural Driven Development (BDD) with F#
  • Getting Started with Silverlight Games Development
  • The lumberjack’s guide to logging
  • Simplifying Silverlight Concurrency with F# Asynchronous Programming

DDD Scotland 2011 – Call for speakers

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Wow, the dedication and drive to further skills in the UK development community continues to amaze and impress me. DDD 9 registration was full in just 12 minutes that is over 300 places gone in a phenomenally short space of time!

Back up here in Scotland though we are hoping to harness that enthusiasm from the community with DDD Scotland 2011 and so with that in mind Scottish Developers have issued a call for speakers. We are looking for people to submit sessions for this year’s event and the same simple rule as always applies, sessions must be related to software development. See simple.

If you have a session that you think would fit the bill or even if you have an idea for a session (you have 5 months remember!) then please, submit it : http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/scotland2011/

Session submission will be open until Sunday 6th February and community voting will open on Monday 7th February.

We look forward to your submissions!

Scottish Developers – Upcoming Events

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Wow, I haven’t actually posted anything this year so I feel it is time to fix that with an update from Scottish Developers. Oh and this is also the first post using a new theme (well, new for my blog anyway). I am starting to tire of WordPress so am seriously considering writing my own site in ASP.NET 4.0 / MVC 2 just to play with things. Anyway, here are the upcoming events on the Scottish Developer’s calendar.

March

  • Wednesday 16th, Dundee – Web Application Testing With Selenium
    I will be doing a final run of my introductory talk on testing web applications using Selenium at the University of Dundee. There are still places available for this talk so please see the registration page for more details.
  • Thursday 25th, Glasgow – Guathon!
    Geek celebrity Scott Guthrie (Scott Gu), vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, will be spending an entire day in Glasgow talking on Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 3.0. Places are limited for this event so head over to the Guathon page and get registered asap!
  • Friday 26th, Edinburgh – Geek Dinner
    We will be taking an evening off from the code and presentations at the end of the month while reflecting on the teaching of The Gu from the previous day. At present we don’t have a restaurant in mind for this yet but we are open to suggestions. Since we need to get an idea of numbers for the dinner, if you are interested in joining us please make sure you register first.

April

  • Wednesday 14th, Edinburgh – Introduction to SOLID
    Chris Canal will be providing an introduction to SOLID and how it can be used to build more maintainable software which reacts better to change. There are still places available for this talk so please see the registration page for more details.
  • Monday 19th, Edinburgh & Tuesday 20th, Glasgow – Jesse Liberty
    Silverlight guru Jesse Liberty will be speaking for us in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Details for this should be available soon, keep an eye out on the Scottish Developers blog for updates.
  • Wednesday 28th, Dundee - SSL/TLS – Just when you thought it was safe to return
    If you are interested in internet security this is a talk you wont want to miss. Arron Finnon will be explaining why SSL/TLS is not as secure as we believe and will be pointing out the vulnerabilities with this very commonly used security technology. There are still places available for this talk so please see the registration page for more details.

May

  • Saturday 8th May, Glasgow – Developer Day Scotland 2010
    This is a day not to be missed and the highlight of the Scottish Developer’s calendar. Join us for a day of presentations, grok talks and geekery at Glasgow Caledonian University. 20 speakers, 4 rooms and various topics including  jQuery, Defensive Programming, HTML 5, Code Contracts and Silverlight. We are getting close to full for registrations so make sure you don’t miss out and get signed up ASAP. More information can be found on the conference home page.
  • Saturday 8th May, Glasgow – DDD Scotland Geek Dinner
    Come chill out after DDD Scotland and catch up with developers, speakers and the organisers to share stories and experiences over a good meal in the heart of Glasgow (exact venue yet to be decided although we expect to be in the Merchant City area). Afterwards you can retire to a bar or pub to continue conversation or head out to a club to party.

All of this information can be found in a handy iCal format from our Google Calendar.

    Scottish Developers: Tayside DevDrinks

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    Scottish Developers

    This should have been posted and promoted earlier but things have been pretty hectic lately.

    I am organising a wee get-together in Dundee this week for any developers who wish to attend, the details are as follows:

    Where/When

    Dundee: Wednesday, 9th September @ 19:30

    The Event

    The nights are drawing in, the days are getting colder so what better time to announce a gathering of like-minded souls in a warm friendly pub for a few drinks and some conversation. If you are in or around the Tayside area come along to Laings Bar in Dundee next week and join us for a something we hope to make a monthly event (in Dundee). No agenda, no speaker, no registration, just some drinks and chinwag.

    This should have been advertised sooner but September sprung out of nowhere but we do look forward to seeing you there.

    The Venue

    Laings Bar, 8 Roseangle, Dundee, DD1 4LR

    From: http://scottishdevelopers.com/2009/09/06/tayside-devdrinks/

    So if you are interested, just come along to Laings Bar this coming Wednesday and have fun. If you get lost send me a message on Twitter :)