Events « Scottish Developers

Refresh Edinburgh July – Pre-Highland Fling Social

17 June, 2011 by Andy Gibson Leave a comment

The Refresh guys will be hosting a pre-Highand Fling social evening on Thursday 7th July at the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh.

Refresh Edinburgh is a community of web developers and designers interested in cutting-edge web technologies. We want to gather great minds, share our knowledge, promote local talent, and be more than we think we can be. We also want to drink and talk geek.

The night before the Highland Fling conference, Refresh Edinburgh are having a get together. The event is graciously sponsored by Storm ID and will feature drinks, free whisky tasting and some chat with like minded web folk.

This event is open to Fling attendees and Edinburgh residents alike.

Tickets are free but limited. We’re putting them online in batches to give everyone a chance to get one.

First batch online at 12pm Friday 17th June
Second batch online at 10am Wed 22nd June
Third batch TBC

To register for the event head over to http://refreshedi-jul11.eventbrite.com

Filed under Events Tagged with edinburgh, Events, Refresh

The Highland Fling Conference – Web Standards In Scotland

16 June, 2011 by Andy Gibson Leave a comment

Back for it’s 3rd instalment The Highland Fling brings top speakers in the world of Web Standards right to your doorstep and is back again this year in Edinburgh on July 7th.

Modern web design has become a complex beast with many different facets. We’re on the cusp of a revolution with specific areas of the HTML5 spec / CSS3 gaining traction and browsers reaching common ground on how to display the sites that we build.

How do do you tame the beast and set a good baseline from which you can build amazing web sites and applications?

The Highland Fling 2011 will not only give you practical advice on how to do this, it will show you how a back to basics approach will help elevate your game to new levels.

Tickets are £155 each and speakers include Steve Marshall, Jack Osborne, Mike Rundle, Remy Sharp, Rachel Andrew, James Edwards and the host for the day Christian Heilmann.

For more details and tickets see: http://thehighlandfling.com/

Filed under Events Tagged with edinburgh, Events, web standards

Social Innovation Camp comes to Scotland this weekend

15 June, 2011 by Andy Gibson Leave a comment

One of the sessions on the Alternative track at DDD Scotland this year was from Glen Mehn and he spoke about Social Innovation Camp which will be invading the nation’s capital this coming weekend (June 17th – 19th).

From 7pm, Friday 17th June to 4pm, Sunday 29th June 2011, at the Informatics Ventures Forum in Edinburgh, we’re bringing together some of the best of the UK’s software developers and designers with those at the sharp end of social problems.

They’ll have just 48 hours to build web-based solutions to a set of social problems – from back-of-the-envelope idea to working prototype, complete with software.

One of the ideas we’ll be helping to develop over the weekend will be a project called Volunteer Impact – inspired by the happiness-tracking app, Mappiness, this is a tool for volunteers to self-measure the impact volunteering has on their personal well-being.

If you’re interested, sign up here: http://www.sicamp.org/si-camp-uk/scotland-2011/weekend-sign-up/

It is shaping up to be a cracking event so if you are interested and have the time to spare, get yourself signed up!

Filed under Events Tagged with edinburgh, Events, SI Camp

DDD Scotland 2011 – Agenda

14 March, 2011 by Andy Gibson 3 Comments

We are pleased to announce the agenda for this year’s DDD Scotland. We will keep this up to date and it will reflect any changes as an when we make them.

We are working to get the agenda published on the DDD Scotland website however this may take a few days

Time	Track A	Track B	Track C	Track D	Track E
08:45 – 09:20	Registration
09:25 – 09:30	Housekeeping
09:30 – 10:30	Creating your Own Software Company: A Survival Guide	Streams of Streams – Your Rx Prescription	Introduction to Android Development using Monodroid	From .NET to Rails, A Developer’s Story	CQRS and Friends: Possibly distributed systems, intentionally.
09:30 – 10:30	Kendall Miller	Ray Booysen	Chris Canal	Colin Gemmell	Andrea Magnorsky
10:30 – 10:40	Break
10:40 – 11:40	Asymptotics and Algorithms – What You’ve Forgotten Since University	Defensive programming 101	Building seriously scalable websites with ASP.NET with and without Windows	A Step into Workflow Foundation 4	Caliburn.Micro: Painless MVVM apps for Silverlight and WPF
10:40 – 11:40	Gary Short	Niall Merrigan	Chris Hay	David Muir	Barry Carr
11:40 – 12:00	Break
12:00 – 13:00	Making Crap Code Better – Real world Coding Standards	Parallel… Parallelise… Pallar… Doing stuff at the same time in .NET 4.0	Don’t Make Me Wait – Faster Websites 101	Unit Testing, Test Driven Development and the Walking Skeleton	Behavioural Driven Development (BDD) with F#
12:00 – 13:00	Phil Whinstanly	Colin Mackay	Duncan McDougall	Seb Rose	Phillip Trelford
13:00 – 14:30	Lunch and Grok Talks
14:30 – 15:30	Is your code S.O.L.I.D ?	SpecFlow – functional testing made easy	Real World SLUT (Silverlight Unit Testing)	The dark parts of Mono	Building composite applications with Open frameworks
14:30 – 15:30	Nathan Gloyn	Paul Stack	Daniel May	Toby Henderson	Sebastien Lambla
15:30 – 15:40	Break
15:40 – 16:40	Functional Alchemy: Tricks to keep your C# DRY*	How to build a framework, and why you almost never should.	Produce Cleaner Code with Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP)	Introduction to Kanban	Rewriting software is the single worst mistake you can make – apparently.
15:40 – 16:40	Mark Rendle	Richard Dalton	Gael Fraiteur	Chris McDermott	Phil Collins
16:40 – 17:00	Closing

Filed under Developer Day Scotland, Events Tagged with developer day, developer day scotland, Events, glasgow, glasgow caledonian university

Newsletter – March 2011

11 March, 2011 by Andy Gibson Leave a comment

Welcome

Apologies for not sending out a newsletter in February but we are making up for it this month!

If you have looked at our events calendar recently you will have seen a lot of activity. Tomorrow we have Microsoft’s Glenn Block coming to Edinburgh to talk about his work on MEF, WCF, REST and more followed by a more social conversation with him over dinner. In a couple of weeks Colin Gemmel will be speaking to us in Glasgow on Being Dynamic With Ruby and of course we have our Book Club events in both Edinburgh and Glasgow too. If you are interested in concurrecny in .NET then you might want to check out Colin Mackay’s talk in April on “doing stuff at the same time in .NET 4.0“.

All events (with the exception of the Glenn Blook evening dinner) are free.

On the DDD Scotland front, today is the last day of voting so if you haven’t already done so, remember to vote for the sessions you want to see on the day! Registration will open at 12.30pm on Monday (14th March).

A Day With Glenn Block

On Saturday 12th March Microsoft’s Glenn Block will be at Storm ID‘s offices in Edinburgh talking to us about his work and also taking part in a chalk and talk session where you, the audience, can ask him questions.

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.

This is a fantastic opportunity to speak to the man that brought us MEF and a host of other things who also gives back to the community. After his session Scottish Develoeprs will be taking him out for a meal and you are invited to join us.

The afternoon event is free however if you wish to attend the dinner you will need to pay for your own meal.

For more information see:

DDD Scotland 2011

As mentioned before, voting for the big day closes today at 11.59pm so remember to get your votes in before then. We will be finalising the agenda this weekend and speakers will be notified before registration opens at 12.30pm on Monday.

Hotel for DDD Scotland

If you are from out-of-town and are looking for a hotel to stay in for DDD Scotland we’ve got a deal with Ramada Jarvis again this year for a 2 night stay at £67 per night B&B from Friday 6th May 2011 to Sunday 8th May 2011.

Here is the link: http://bit.ly/f2osec

The Sponsors

It is not possible to put on an event like DDD Scotland at no cost to the delegates without the support of our sponsors. The following companies have stepped up to the mark and are supporting the community by sponsoring the event.

School of Engineering and Computing

If you would like to sponsor DDD Scotland and get your brand out to over 200 industry professionals and students get in touch! Drop us a line at support@scottishdevelopers.com

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

Filed under Newsletter Tagged with Announcements, Events, Newsletter

Event: Being Dynamic With Ruby

9 March, 2011 by Andy Gibson Leave a comment

This month we have a bit of Ruby for you with Colin Gemmell.

The Talk

It should come as no surprise that Ruby is a dynamic language but do you know how to use this to you advantage. In this talk we will look at how to use Ruby’s dynamic nature to keep you code DRY, write less code and make your code easier to maintain. As a final example we will see how to use these same tricks how to create a simple DSL

The Speaker

Colin Gemmell is a Web/Application Developer from Glasgow. He has gained a wide range of experience in his short time as a developer working on everything from enterprise applications to small promotional web-sites. After 3 and a half years working in .NET he made the jump to Ruby on Rails and hasn’t yet looked back (but there’s still time). An avid follower of agile principles and practices and a growing interest in agile project management, he is always happy to pass on his views of software development to anyone that will listen.

Colin has recently started the Glasgow Ruby User Group which held it’s inaugural meeting at the start of the month

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.

After the meeting we normally retire to the back bar at Waxy O’Connor’s

The Agenda

18:00 Doors Open
19:00 Welcome
19:10 The Talk
20:20 Feedback & Wrap-up
20:30 Retire to the Pub

Filed under Events Tagged with Events, glasgow, glasgow caledonian university, Ruby

An Afternoon With Glenn Block

25 February, 2011 by Andy Gibson Leave a comment

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!

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 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/

Filed under Events Tagged with .net, edinburgh, Events, Glen Block, microsoft

Newsletter – January 2011

27 January, 2011 by Andy Gibson Leave a comment

It’s good to be back!

It’s hard to believe that the first month of 2011 is almost through, it has definitely been a busy few weeks. We held our first event of 2011 last week with my talk on What’s New inASP.NET MVC 2.0 & 3.0 and I must say not only was it great to be speaking again, but it was even better to see such a good turn out.

We have been working hard to start fleshing out our events calendar for the coming months and there is some great stuff to look forward to in February. Colin Mackay will be hosting the inaugural meeting of the Scottish Developers Book Club while Jarrod McGuire will be speaking to us about installing Google Analytics and we have teamed up with Scot Alt.Net to put on a “beers” event in Edinburgh.

In this month’s newsletter we are announcing the launch of our Book Club, we’ll be talking a little more about DDD Scotland 2011 and we have some new regarding Scot Alt.Net and Scottish Developers. As a side note, the Scottish Developers committee will be present at DDD 9 this coming Saturday so if you are making the trip we look forward to seeing you. It is always great to catch up with fellow developers from north of the border who are attending this highly successful event.

Scottish Developers Book Club

The IT and software development industries move quickly. Mobile computing, HTML 5, REST, Agile, operating systems, concurrency, Lean, progressive enhancement, user experience; are all buzzwords that fly both thick and fast in any tech related conversation. We hear them on an almost daily basis and they are just a select few of the thousands technical terms which keep us busy. How does the modern developer keep up with everything?

One of the ways many of us keep our skills current is by reading and we feel some of the best knowledge and wisdom in software development comes from books. To this end, Colin Mackay has taken on the creation of a book club for Scottish Developers.

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

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 (focusing 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.

DDD Scotland 2011

We are currently looking for speakers for this year’s conference which will be held at Glasgow Caledonian University on Saturday 7th May 2011.

Session submission will be open until 11.59pm on Sunday 6th February and can be found at http://www.developerdeveloperdeveloper.com /scotland2011/.

We are looking for 1 hour long sessions and they can be on anything you wish, as long as they are focused on software development. We will accept sessions for any platform, technology or subject (within sensible reason) and you can submit more than one.

Once session submission has closed we open the floor once more to you, the community to vote on the sessions you want to see on the day. Voting will open Monday 7th February and at the end of it we will publish the agenda and open the doors for delegate registration.

An event like DDD Scotland is a prime opportunity to promote a brand or company and as such we are offering sponsorship packages to companies that are interested in getting their name out in front of an active and enthusiastic development community. For more information concerning sponsorship please contact us - support@scottishdevelopers.com

Scot Alt.Net and Scottish Developers

We are pleased to announce that Scottish Developers has partnered with Scot Alt.Net to bring you social events such as the Edinburgh Beers in February and also dinners which some of you will have no doubt attended in the past.

In addition, we will be cross-promoting events in the hope we can strengthen both groups and appeal to a wider audience.

We are also keen to work with other user groups across Scotland so if you are a community leader (for any software/IT related user group) and are interested in working with us, we want to hear from you! Drop us a line -support@scottishdevelopers.com.

Until next time…

So, lots of things on the horizon and we look forward to seeing you at some of our upcoming events. If you can’t make it to DDD 9 this weekend check out our blog next week as we will be bringing you some of the highlights. You can also follow the antics through Twitter by following the #ddd9 hashtag and@developerday.

You can also follow us on Twitter - @scottishdevs

Thanks for reading.

Andy Gibson
Chairman, Scottish Developers

Filed under Newsletter Tagged with Announcements, Events, Newsletter

Event: A guide to installing Google Analytics

14 January, 2011 by Andy Gibson Leave a comment

Register for A guide to installing Google Analytics in Glasgow, United Kingdom on Eventbrite

Scottish Developers would like to welcome a new speaker to the floor, Jarrod McGuire who has very kindly agreed to talk on installing Google Analytics. The talk will take place on Thursday 17th February 2011 at Glasgow Caledonian University.