Book Club – February 2011 – The Pragmatic Programmer

17 January, 2011 by 1 Comment

In February Scottish Developers starts its book club. It will alternate between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The first book on the agenda is The Pragmatic Programmer, from Journeyman to Master.

You can now get more details and sign up for The Pragmatic Programmer in Glasgow. In March the book will be RESTful Web Services in Edinburgh – Further details to follow.

We are aiming to keep the books fairly technology independent (focussing on higher level processes and practices) in order to appeal to a wider audience. If you have any suggestions for books you’d like to see in the future then please contact us at support@scottishdevelopers.com

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Developer Day Scotland 2011 – Call For Speakers Open

5 January, 2011 by Leave a Comment

DDD Scotland LogoHot on the heels of the record-breaking sell-out of DDD 9 in 12 minutes yesterday (congratulations to the DDD 9 team!), we are pleased to announce that session submission for DDD Scotland 2011 is now officially open! You have until the 6th of February to submit as many sessions as you wish however they MUST be within the scope of Software Development.

You can submit sessions via the DDD website at
http://www.developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/scotland2011/Default.aspx

For those of you unfamiliar with DDD events, check out our earlier post.

 

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Developer Day Scotland 2011 – Date Announced

23 November, 2010 by 2 Comments

DDD Scotland Logo

Building on the success of Developer Developer Developer Day 2010, we are currently in the process of organising next year’s event and are pleased to announce that DDD Scotland 2011 will be held on Saturday 7th May 2011 at Glasgow Caledonian University.

Developer Developer Developer events are founded on a number of principles which we think makes it unique and well worth a single day of your time once a year.

DDD events are free. It doesn’t cost you anything to attend. Think of any large conference that you might like to go along to. They costs hundreds of pounds, if not more. Sure, we might not have all the bells and whistles of a big fancy conference, but at the end of the day what do you want out of an event like that? Do you want the glitz and schmaltz or do you want to learn something new?

Speakers from the community. We invite people that have something to say, a story to tell, or an experience to learn from. This year we had 65 session submissions from all sorts of folks and on all sorts of subjects. The majority of these people are real day-to-day software developers or DBAs that actually work for a living.

DDD events are democratic. All the sessions are voted in by the community, so we only put on what people have asked to see. This year the 65 sessions were whittled down to 20. We had sessions ranging from ASP.NET MVC to MonoTouch, from Defensive Programming to HTML5 and from concurrency to behaviour driven development delivered by both community new comers and veterans alike.

No Marketing BS. The core philosophy for the sessions are that they contain useful information. Stuff that you can either take back and start using the next day or (if not yet available) to start planning how to move to that technology.

To paraphrase the Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, Developer Day Scotland is of the developer community, by the developer community and for the developer community.

(Ok, so many of those words were written by my predecessor, Colin Mackay, but they are still true)

Call for Speakers

We will be opening the call for speakers shortly

Call for Sponsors

We wont lie, running a free community event like DDD Scotland isn’t a cheap thing to do and it is only through the support of our sponsors that we can make it happen. Last year one of our sponsors, Storm ID, produced the speaker t-shirts that are worn on the day and they included the Storm ID logo, those t-shirts have now been seen as far afield as Perth, Australia. If you are interested in sponsoring DDD Scotland 2011 and would like more information, please contact us: support [at] scottishdevelopers dot com.

You can get updates on Twitter by following @scottishdevs and @dddscot

The official DDD Scotland website will be live shortly and will be available from http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com

Regards,
Andy Gibson, Chairman, Scottish Developers

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Call for speakers

15 September, 2010 by Leave a Comment

We are preparing to start up our regular events once more after a hiatus over the summer and we thought it would be a good time to put out an open invitation to speakers (both new and experienced). We are looking for talks which are ideally 60 – 90 minutes long and we are open to topics as long as they are development focused and are not marketing a product.

We are also keen to hear from people wishing to do grok talks so if you have any you would be happy to do for us or if you think you could put one together we would like to hear from you.

If you are interested please send an email including your name, geographical location and information about the talk(s) you would be willing to do for us to support [at] scottishdevelopers.com.

We look forward to hearing from you

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Web Application Testing With Selenium – Wednesday 17th March 2010 in Dundee

26 January, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Testing is a fundamental part of the development process regardless of how you approach it however GUI’s have always been trickier to test and web based UI’s are some of the hardest. JavaScript, AJAX and browser compatibility are all things that make web UI functionality quite difficult and time consuming to test properly.

Enter Selenium, a web application testing framework which makes the creation and automation of complex web user interface tests a joy. Selenium is comprised of 4 components, Selneium Core, Selenium IDE, Selenium RC and Selenium Grid.

  • Selenium Core is the heart of the framework
  • Selenium IDE provides an easy to use interface for creating and running tests from within Mozilla Firefox
  • Selenium RC allows integration of Selenium into a variety of popular langauges such as .NET, Java and Ruby

This session will introduce you to Selenium and explain the core features of the framework before showing you, through live ASP.NET demonstrations, how it can be harnessed in your own web development.

The Speaker

Andy Gibson is an Information Systems Developer for an international computer games studio with a background in web application development including ASP.NET MVC, PHP and jQuery. He is always on the lookout for new technologies to playwith and loves to learn what he can about things especially in the webdevelopment arena.

Keen to give back to the community, Andy has spoken at a number ofcommunity events including DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Scotland and is currently an active committee member for Scottish Developers.

The Venue

We are meeting in the Queen Mother Building at Dundee University. After the meeting we normally retire to the the bar at Laing’s

The Agenda

18:45 Doors Open
19:00 Welcome
19:10 The Talk (Part 1)
19:55 Break
20:05 The Talk (Part 2)
20:45 Feedback & Prizes
21:00 Retire to the Pub

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Contractual Obligations: Getting up and running with Code Contracts – Wednesday 17th 2010 February in Dundee

26 January, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Code Contracts is Microsoft’s implementatoin of Programming by Contract for .NET (also known as Contract Programming, or Contract-First development).  Code Contracts are a way of adding executable specification documentation to your code; they can also work hand-in-hand with your unit tests.  All-in-all, the aim of Code Contracts is to improve the quality and reliability of your software.

With Code Contracts you can: specify a method’s pre-requisites (pre-conditions) and what it guarantees to do for it’s caller (post-conditions); you can also specify what conditions must always be in-place throughout the the lifetime of an object (object-invariants).  Code Contract conditions can be tested at runtime and, if you’re using Team System, they can also be analysed and tested statically after your application has compiled. Using the features of code contracts in conjunction with your unit tests can help you find potential problems in your code sooner.

Code Contracts will be part of .NET 4.0 and are also available for .NET 3.5; they’re language agnostic and integrate into Visual Studio (08 & 10).

The aim of this session is to show you how to write code contracts: method pre and post condtions along with object-invariants and we’ll look at how Code Contracts work.  In addition, we’ll also be looking at using Code Contracts with TDD and how to use Contracts with Interfaces.

The Speaker

Barry Carr has been developing software since 1987.  Barry has written software for many business sectors, including: Chemical; Pharmaceutical; Oil and Gas; Banking; Accounting; Legal Accounting; Public Sector and now Mining and Geology. Barry has also developed and sold his own software components to other developers. Always keen to keep his skills current, Barry devotes a lot of his personal time to technical development as well as keeping abreast of the current trends in the world of software development. Barry is also active in the software development community running the Dundee branch of Scottish Developers.

When he isn’t coding, Barry likes to spend his time with photography, reading and unashamedly listening to progressive rock (especially while coding).

The Venue

We are meeting in the Queen Mother Building at Dundee University. After the meeting we normally retire to the the bar at Laing’s

The Agenda

18:45 Doors Open
19:00 Welcome
19:10 The Talk (Part 1)
19:55 Break
20:05 The Talk (Part 2)
20:45 Feedback & Prizes
21:00 Retire to the Pub

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SQL Injection Attacks and Tips on How to Prevent Them

24 September, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Wednesday, 28th October 2009 at 19:00 – 21:00
Queen Margaret Building, Dundee University

The Talk

In light of some recent events, such as the man who was convicted of stealing 130 million credit card details through a SQL Injection attack, it is imperative that developers understand what a SQL Injection Attack is, how they are carried out, and most importantly, how to defend your code against attack.

In this talk Colin Mackay will demonstrate a SQL Injection Attack on an application in a controlled environment*. He’ll show you where the vulnerable code lies and what you can do to harden it.

Although this talk uses C# as the application language and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 as the database engine many of the concepts and prevention mechanisms will apply to any application that accesses a database through SQL.

* Demonstrating an attack on a real system without the owner’s consent is a breach of the 1990 Misuse of Computers Act, hence the controlled environment.

The Speaker

Colin Angus Mackay is a Software Developer living in Glasgow. He has been programming since the age of 9 starting with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. He became a professional software developer in 1994, using a Smalltalk based language called Magik. In 1996 he started using C++ commercially and in 2002 migrated to the emerging language of C#.

Colin has received a number of awards including Code Project MVP (for 5 years) and Microsoft MVP (for 3 years). He is a member of the British Computer Society and a Member of the Institution of Analysts and Programmers. He is currently the chairman of Scottish Developers and has organised the last two Developer Day Scotland conferences (with a third in the works).

You can find out more about SQL Injection Attacks on his blog amongst other things.

The Venue

We are meeting in the Queen Mother Building at Dundee University. After the meeting we normally retire to the the bar at Laing’s

The Agenda

18:45 Doors Open
19:00 Welcome
19:10 The Talk (Part 1)
19:55 Break
20:05 The Talk (Part 2)
20:45 Feedback & Prizes
21:00 Repair to the Pub

Registration

Space is limited, we would therefore ask that you sign up.

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Credit Crunch Code – Time to Pay Back the Technical Debt

22 July, 2009 by Leave a Comment

When

Glasgow: Tuesday, 8th September 2009 @ 18:30

The Talk

Technical debt is the cost of putting off good development practices. This debt, must be paid back to avoid the “interest payments” becoming crippling. This presentation will focus on a number of common developer (and project) behaviours that can lead to the build up of technical debt in a project, and together we will discuss and collaborate on methods to mitigate against them.

The Speaker

Upon leaving school Gary went into the banking industry where he worked his way to (near) the top, leading a special projects group tasked with solving the problem of how America’s low paid could afford to buy housing. Having made a fortune by selling mortgages to people whom he knew could not hope to repay them, he then made a second fortune selling on that debt to large financial institutions. Shortly after that Gary was invited to leave the banking industry and now works as a technical evangelist for Developer Express. Gary is committed to the "community" in the UK, and further afield, and can often be found speaking at community events up and down the country; except DDD7, but he doesn’t care about that at all, nope not one bit.

The Venue

We are meeting in Room M402 on the 4th Floor of the George Moore Building at Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, G4 0BA

 

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Got something to say, but not enough for a full presentation?

9 February, 2009 by Leave a Comment

On Wednesday 18th February in Dundee Scottish Developers will be running an evening of Grok talks and Micro-presentations. If you want to talk about something come along and tell us about it!

A Grok Talk is a short 10 minute presentation or demo where you give people enough information to understand something new.

A micro-presentation is a short slide based presentation where you have a maximum of 20 slides and a maximum of 20 seconds per slide.

If you are interested just sign up and bring your laptop. If you don’t want to bring a laptop and your presentation is purely slide based we’ll have a laptop with PowerPoint 2007 on it that you can use.

If you don’t want to talk then that’s fine, just come along and take in information from a variety of people on a variety of subjects – There will be something for everyone.

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Developer Day Scotland 2 – Call for Speakers Open

21 November, 2008 by Leave a Comment

The Call for Speakers for Developer Day Scotland 2 has just opened. Developer Day Scotland 2 will be held in Glasgow on the 2nd May 2009.

If you would like to speak at Developer Day Scotland then the current proposals and the submission guidelines are available on the Developer Day Scotland website. You can submit sessions on any topic you like if you think they will appeal to a software development audience. Ultimately the community will vote for the sessions it wants to see.

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