An Afternoon With Glenn Block

Scottish Developers in association with Storm ID present An Afternoon with Glenn Block
Glenn is in Edinburgh on the 12th of March – he’ll be spending the afternoon at StormID’s Leith office and you are invited!

Register for An Afternoon With Glenn Block in Edinburgh, Edinburgh, City Of  on Eventbrite

The day will be split into two parts.

Favourite subjects from The Block

The first couple of hours will see Glenn focus on talking about his current work basket – expect to see him talking about Windows Communication Foundation, web APIs, HTTP, REST, MEF, Patterns & Practices and his experiences at the recent mvcConf 2 event!

Block unblocked chalk talk – your chance to ask Glenn anything he can answer

The second half of the afternoon will be “yours” – a chalk’n'talk if you prefer. It will be your chance to have an open and frank conversation with Glenn, to ask him questions, to challenge him and to get answers to those questions that you’ve been saving for such a celebrity!

About Glenn

Glenn is a PM on the WCF team working on Microsoft’s future HTTP and REST stack. Prior to WCF he was a PM on the new Managed Extensibility Framework in .NET 4.0. He has experience both inside and outside Microsoft developing software solutions for ISVs and the enterprise. He has also been active in involving folks from the community in the development of software at Microsoft. This has included shipping products under open source licenses, as well as assisting other teams looking to do so.

Glenn is a featured blogger over at CodeBetter, read what he’s writing about here:

http://codebetter.com/glennblock/author/glennblock/

His official Microsoft blog can be found here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/gblock/

Register for An Afternoon With Glenn Block in Edinburgh, Edinburgh, City Of  on Eventbrite

Discovering Startling Things from Your Version Control System

BCS Event: Monday 11th April, 6:30 pm.

Speaker: Michael Feathers, Chief Scientist at Obtiva Corporation.

University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9ABmap (click on Informatics Forum in the list of buildings).

Synopsis

The industry is awash in an epidemic of bad code. We all know what bad code looks like – it’s opaque and impenetrable. But, we spend little time trying to figure out how it got that way. We assume it’s tight schedules or lack of discipline, but perhaps there’s more.

In this talk, Michael Feathers will relate several things that he’s learned by taking a longitudinal view of a system – by issuing queries of a code base and relating the results back to events on a team. The more we know about how we behave as teams in our code, the more likely we are to be able to control our development well enough to hold bad code at bay.

Upcoming Book Club Events

We have two upcoming book club events, one in Edinburgh and one in Glasgow.

There is no real formality to the event. Just read the book (or as much of it as you can) prior to the event and come along to discuss it. You don’t have to have read any of the book prior to coming along although you will get the most out of the event if you do.

We’ll put together some questions to get the conversation started and we can all take it from there. If the book raises any questions for you then feel free to bring them along and we can use that as a point of discussion.

Also, we will note down any books that were mentioned during the course of the event to put in the poll for the following event. If you want feel free to let us know of any other books you may be interested in.

Outside of the meetings themselves, if you have any suggestions for books to discuss please let us know by emailing us at support@scottishdevelopers.com and we’ll put it in an upcoming survey for a community vote.

Edinburgh

The upcoming Edinburgh meeting will be on RESTful Web Services. You get get the book here:

We meet up at 19:00 with the discussion on the book kicking off at 19:30 on 16th March in the Outhouse on Broughton Street Lane. Register Here.

Glasgow

The voting from the last book club meeting in Glasgow nominated Clean Code as the book of choice. Since this may be a rather large book to digest in one go, we’re just going to tackle the first part on the Principles, Patterns and Practices of writing clean code, which appears to be chapters 1 to 16 and represents two thirds of the actual book.

You can get the book here:

We will be meeting at Waxy O’Connor’s on West George Street. If you are travelling from Edinburgh, the pub is 2 mintues walk from Queen Street Station, if that. We meet up at 19:00 with the discussion on the book kicking off at 19:30 on 26th April. Register here.

Job: LAMP stack in Edinburgh

We’ve just received this job advert from a GFI, based in Edinburgh:

The Company

GFI Software provides web and mail security, archiving and fax, networking and security software and hosted IT solutions for small to medium-sized enterprises (SME) via an extensive global partner community. GFI products are available either as on-premise solutions, in the cloud or as a hybrid of both delivery models. With award-winning technology, a competitive pricing strategy, and a strong focus on the unique requirements of SMEs, GFI satisfies the IT needs of organizations on a global scale. The company has offices in the United States (North Carolina, California and Florida), UK (London and Dundee), Austria, Australia, Malta, Hong Kong, Philippines and Romania, which together support hundreds of thousands of installations worldwide. GFI is a channel-focused company with thousands of partners throughout the world and is also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

GFI has grown rapidly over the last two years, both organically and through acquisition, including HoundDog Technology in Scotland and Sunbelt Software in Florida, USA. The company has identified a strategic opportunity arising from a combination of the technologies developed by these two companies to develop a new product that will combine the class-leading VIPRE anti-virus technology with the Software-as-a-Service platform that underpins the GFI MAX RemoteManagement system. The new product will be a hosted endpoint security solution that will allow customers to deploy, configure, manage and report on the company’s industry-leading and award-winning security solutions across a range of fixed and mobile device platforms. This will deliver the most comprehensive security solution in the easiest to use and most scalable product on the market. Over time, further elements of the GFI technology suite will be integrated with this new product.

The Role

GFI is seeking to recruit ambitious software developers to be part of the establishment of a new development organisation based in a centrally-located office in Edinburgh. The new team will work closely with other parts of GFI’s development organisations but will have full responsibility to deliver this strategic new product for the company. As part of the development of the initial product, the team will develop a platform that will be used to build and deploy further hosted products as part of GFI’s future product roadmap for its hosted solutions. This is an opportunity to be part of a fast-paced, high-visibility and challenging new product development project.

The development approach within GFI is based on Agile methodologies, including Scrum and test-driven development. Production of high quality, efficient code is required; flair, creativity and flexibility are expected.

The successful candidates will be highly skilled in Object Orientated Programming with in -depth knowledge of PHP or another comparable, dynamic language. Knowledge of Javascript, MySQL and Linux would be beneficial (SQL, HTML and CSS skills are expected).

Required Skills

  • Object Orientated Programming
  • PHP (or one of Perl, Python, Ruby)
  • Relational database design with SQL
  • HTML and CSS

Beneficial Skills

  • Javascript
  • MySQL
  • Linux

Attitude is very important to us. The successful candidates will be positive, enthusiastic professionals who are passionate about software development with a constant desire to learn more and want to take ownership of their work to make a lasting impact on the development of the business and to make the role their own.

Experience

At least 3 years software development experience in a professional environment is required, as is experience of working on high-availability, high-volume applications. Experience of Agile Development would be highly beneficial.

Qualifications

The successful candidate will ideally have an honours degree (or equivalent) in a software related discipline.

In order to apply, send your CV with a covering letter to maxjobs@gfi.com

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