Amazon are hiring at their Development Centre in Edinburgh!

29 September, 2011 by Leave a Comment

 

Amazon are looking to fill a number of positions at their Development Centre in Edinburgh.

There are four roles available:

Senior Product Manager/Business Analyst

Senior Software Engineer

Software Development Engineer

Graduate Software Development Engineer

Amazon’s Development Centre is located here:  Waverley Gate,  2 – 4 Waterloo Place,  Edinburgh EH1 3EG.  It’s an excellent location, it’s as close to Waverley railway station as any office can be!

The on-site amenities are fantastic – we were lucky enough to have enjoyed a short tour of the facility earlier this month!  It’s not all about work work work: there’s recreational space (with a pool table!), a library of books and a fully-equiped kitchen and break-out area.  The office environment is relaxed and offer peace and quiet when required.  There’s a huge writeable wall too – great for planning the next big thing!

If you’re looking for a new challenge and would like to your great mind to work alongside other great minds, here’s your opportunity!

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Job: Mobile Developer in Edinburgh

13 September, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Storm ID LogoOur friends over at Storm ID are recruiting a Mobile Developer.

Storm ID is a top digital agency with a dedicated mobile team.

We’re seeing huge growth in mobile opportunities on the back of our bespoke web and social apps.

We’re looking for a full-time native iOS and Android developer with the skill and experience to play a key role in our ambitious mobile team.

Fancy it?

LET’S DO THIS »

The full job ad is available at http://bit.ly/StormMobileJob and specific requirements can be found on Storm ID’s blog at http://blog.stormid.com/2011/09/were-hiring-full-time-mobile-developer.html

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Software Freedom Day – Dundee

8 September, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The third Saturday in September (the 17th) is Software Freedom Day and the University of Abertay, Dundee will be hosting an entire day of talks and demos all arranged by The Open Society and the Tayside Linux User Group.

Who Are We

“The Open Society” and the “Tayside Linux User Group” have long been establishing their names within the local Free and Open Source Community, as centres of support and advocacy for people from all walks of life. This September we will be showcasing some of the best that our local community has to offer.

What is Software Freedom Day

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality software in education, in government, at home and in business – in short, everywhere! The non-profit company Software Freedom International coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, give-aways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organize the local SFD events to impact their own communities.
visit softwarefreedomday.org »

Who Should Attend

This is a real opportunity for people in Dundee and surrounding areas wishing to find out more about FOSS, its culture, its ethics and more importantly how to get started with it. Talks and Practical demonstrations throughout the day , for the novice computer user to the technical evangelist – you are sure to find something to interest you.

The event is completely free and open to everyone;

  • We have 13 talks on 2 tracks
  • Lots of Demo Software and Machines
  • Plenty of great enthusiastic people

You can find more information at http://sfd.the-os.org.uk/

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Newsletter – September 2011

6 September, 2011 by 2 Comments

Welcome

Summer may be drawing to a close and autumn switfly approaching but at Scottish Developers we have been busy putting together a really impressive calendar of events for the next few months as well as setting the ball rolling on not one but two DDD events in Scotland.

Here are some of the highlights.

A Developer’s Morning With Microsoft

Friday, 9th September 10am – 1pm @ Microsoft Edinburgh
Price: FREE

Microsoft’s Edinburgh office at Waverly Gate are opening their doors to the development community this week and have lined up some top-notch sessions for us.

The morning will be kicking off with a keynote from Microsoft’s UK Managing Director Gordon Frazer and will be followed bySteve Plank speaking on getting to grips with Windows Azure. The morning will conclude with  Steven Clarke giving a sneak peak at the next version of Visual Studio and the user experience improvements Microsoft have been developing for the platform.

This is a great opportunity for developers to touch base with the folks at Microsoft.

More information and registration

Mark Rendle Tour

Long time community speaker and software architect Mark Rendle is coming to Scotland for a tour of our nation and will be speaking in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen while he is north of the border.

In Glasgow Mark will be speaking on “Zen and the Art of Software” and “How to Manage Your Manager” (which we highly recommend). The Edinburgh leg of the tour will see “Functional Alchmey” and “CoffeeScript 101″. We are still firming up plans for Dundee but expect details of these locations to be published this week.

Our friends up in Aberdeen, The Aberdeen Developers .Net User Group, are hosting Mark’s session in the North East and you can find more details on their website.

Keep an eye on the Scottish Developers website for updates on Dundee.

“The Happy Developer” – Is It A Myth

Tuesday, 1st November, Glasgow
Price: FREE

Ever ask yourself “Am I happy as a software developer?”, what’s the answer? This is exactly the question Andy Gibson will be asking during his talk in November. Andy is trying to build a picture of what makes a “happy” developer, a productive developer and a loyal developer. He will be doing this through case studies, experience and a lot of audience participation.

Got some workplace horror stories? Advice? Questions? Come along and join in.

More information and registration

DunDDD
Saturday, 19th November, Dundee

Scottish Developers are proud to announce the next in the Scottish “Developer! Developer! Developer!” series, DunDDD which as the name suggests, will be help in Dundee on Saturday 19th November.

Building on the success of DDD NoSQL last year, Scottish Developers have teamed up with Tony Rogerson, Andy Cobley and the School of Applied Computing at Dundee University to bring you an even bigger event this year.

We are still working out the details at the moment but there will be an announcement later this week with full details of how to get involved as well as that moderately important component, a website.

Check our blog or twitter feed for updates

Until next time…

We have more events in the pipeline so keep an eye on our blog at http://www.scottishdevelopers.com

You can also follow us on Twitter - @scottishdevs

Thanks for reading.

Andy Gibson
Chairman, Scottish Developers

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Event: “Functional Alchemy” and “CoffeeScript 101″

6 September, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Scottish Developers are pleased to present two talks by Mark Rendle on Tuesday 11th October 2011 in Edinburgh.

Mark is currently employed as Principal Software Architect by Dot Net Solutions Ltd, creating all manner of software on the Microsoft stack, including ASP.NET MVC, Windows Azure, WPF and Silverlight. He is a Windows Azure Development MVP.

Mark’s career in software design and development spans three decades and more programming languages than he can remember. C# has been his favourite language pretty much since the first public beta, when you had to write the code in a text editor and compile it on the command line. Those were the days. You kids today, with your IntelliSense and your ReSharpers, don’t know you’re born…

Things vying for Mark’s attention lately include functional programming, internet-centric applications, the Azure cloud platform and NoSQL data stores.

Register for Functional Alchemy and CoffeeScript 101 in Edinburgh, Edinburgh, City Of on Eventbrite

Functional Alchemy: Tricks to keep your C# DRY*

C# 3.0 and LINQ have made anonymous delegates and closures a hot topic. C# 4.0 improves on them. But these “functional” features have applications beyond messing about with IEnumerable. In this session I’ll present 10 simple and not-so-simple uses of first-class functions to help cut down on repeated code and improve maintainability; hopefully you’ll discover a new and exciting way of approaching coding problems.
The main thrust of it is that F# is cool and groovy but there’s a lot of mileage in functional-style programming in C#, which people are using every day, so let’s look at some cool examples there.

*Awarded “Top Speaker by Knowledge of Subject” at DDD South West 2010.

CoffeeScript 101

Hidden deep within JavaScript, there is an elegant, powerful and clean language waiting to be discovered. This subset of the language was documented by Douglas Crockford in JavaScript: The Good Parts. Now, that subset is accessible through the CoffeeScript language. It’s like Python and Ruby spent a wonderful night together and spawned a beautiful baby scripting language that is succinct, expressive and compiles to The Good Parts.

Modules, classes, lambdas and more are supported, and you can interact with your existing JavaScript code, as well as all the diverse, wonderful libraries that are out there jQuery.
This session will cover the basics of the language, and interoperability with existing libraries. I’ll also show you how to integrate CoffeeScript into your development process, with Visual Studio and other tooling as well as runtime compilation for on-the-fly changes.

Location

 The Corn Exchange,
35 Constitution Street,
Edinburgh,
EH6 7BS

Agenda

18.30 – Doors open
18.55 – Welcome
19.00 – CoffeeScript 101
19.55 – Break
20.05 – Functional Alchemy: Tricks to Keep Your C# DRY
21.00 – Close

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Upcoming Glasgow Events

5 September, 2011 by Leave a Comment

First up in October is Zen and the Art of Software & How to Manage your Manager:

Zen and the Art of Software

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a book about Quality; what it is, where it exists, and how we may try to attain it. In this talk, I will use passages from the book to introduce ideas on how we, as software developers, might try to improve the Quality both of the software we create and of ourselves. I’ll talk about what “Quality” means in the context of software, how to measure it, and the importance of close interaction with users at all stages of software development.

How to Manage Your Manager

Developers and managers generally don’t understand each other. Developers know the arcane languages of machines and are motivated by inexplicable forces. Managers seem to spend half their time in meetings and the other half emailing each other Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. The result is that both sides end up frustrated, feeling that the other is stopping them from doing their job to the best of their ability.

In this talk, I will share some of the things I’ve learned in 20 years of being managed, including:

  • How to get the PC you want, with the two big monitors and a decent CPU.
  • Also, how to get extra software, training, and even sent to conferences.
  • How to adopt best practices, like TDD, pairing and daily stand-ups even though your manager doesn’t know what they are, and probably doesn’t care.
  • How to earn the respect of people who seem to actively like wearing suits.
  • Maybe, possibly, how to respect them just a little bit.

Then in November is “The Happy Developer” – Is it a Myth?

“The Happy Developer” – Is it a Myth?

It’s a great time to be a developer right now don’t you think? Even in all of the economic chaos we still have it pretty good so what reason would any of us have to not be happy in our jobs?

The answer, as it turns out, is quite a lot. We have had our rants about poor management choices, the lack of proper code reviews, having to work with outdated/inappropriate technology, processes and methodologies, demands and pressure from those above us and we put up with it because at the end of the day, it pays the bills.

In this session I will explore with you the pitfalls of being a developer in these difficult times and with the help of some case studies and good old-fashioned reasoning, give suggestions on how these frustrations can be addressed.

If you are stressing out over a problem in your job, bring it with you, this is built entirely on experience from developers who have been there.

Audience participation is encouraged and this session is not technology or platform specific.

Click on the links above for more information and to register for each event. All the above events are technology and platform neutral.

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Job: .NET Developer in Edinburgh

1 September, 2011 by Leave a Comment

We have received some information from Games Analytics who are looking for a .NET developer to join the ranks. The job is based in Edinburgh:

We are looking for an experienced .Net developer with good experience of MySQL and web development.

The project is to bring a web application from MS SQL to MYSQL, implement a new database architecture in collaboration with our DBA and extend the application with new functionality.

The developer should have experience in web application development ideally with large data sets. The application is part of our analytics suite so an understanding of analytics is useful but not required.

The project is expected to take 40 days, with follow on work as new functionality is added on a project by project basis.

For more information or to apply, please contact Chris Wright <chris.wright@gamesanalytics.com>

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