Newsletter - December 2010

Season’s Greetings

With Christmas nearly upon us and the New Year right behind it I felt this would be a good time to bring some news from Scottish Developers to your inbox. It has been a while since our last newsletter and indeed our last event but wheels have been turning and gears have been grinding behind the scenes.

Colin Mackay has stepped down as Chairman of Scottish Developers and is now functioning as our Treasurer and Sponsorship Coordinator and I (Andy Gibson) have stepped up to take on his previous role. Colin and I will be looking after things in the west of Scotland while Barry Carr and Craig Murphy continue to look after our events in the east.

In this newsletter we have some exciting news about the popular, very successful DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! events and a call for you, the community, to help us shape the user group in 2011.

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper!

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper (DDD) first started in May 2005. As you might imagine, it’s a developer-oriented event. Its key drivers are: it’s free, it’s held on a Saturday, you get a free lunch, you get to choose from over 20 sessions delivered by your peers and you get to mingle with like-minded community and industry individuals!

The DDD magic also stems from the fact it is you, the community, that makes the event what it is: the organisers do not choose which sessions make it on to the agenda, you do! There is a democratic voting process that allows you to choose your favourites from the submitted sessions.

Right now, voting is open on sessions for DDD 9 with the event being held on January 29th 2011 in Reading. You can help choose which sessions make it onto the agenda by casting your votes on the DDD 9 website but you better hurry, voting ends at midnight on 24th December (Friday)!

DDD Scotland 2011

Further afield on the events calendar is our very own DDD event, DDD Scotland which is now in its 4th year and will take place at Glasgow Caledonian University on Saturday 7th May 2011.

We follow the same process as the main DDD event and will be opening the call for speakers any day now so if you have a session you want to put forward, keep an eye on http://www.developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/.

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 [at] scottishdevelopers [dot] com

More details on DDD Scotland 2011 will be available soon so watch this space!

Community Focus

Our goal as a user group is to provide support to developers across Scotland regardless of technology, platform or experience level. To this end we have been looking into how we can better serve the community.

In order to better understand our members and what you want to get out of engaging with Scottish Developers, we have prepared a survey. We would be very grateful if you could spare 10 minutes of your time to complete it. The answers you provide will allow us to improve as a user group and will enable us to better support the growing software development community in Scotland.

You can find the survey at http://bit.ly/dvxBbY

In addition to the survey we are also looking for speakers who would be willing to run talk sessions for Scottish Developers in the New Year. You don’t have to be a pro on the speaking circuit or a regular speaker at events and conventions. All we ask is that you have a session relevant to software development and that you are passionate about the subject.

If you are interested in performing a talk session please send some information about yourself, where-about in Scotland you are located and the abstract for your talk to support [at] scottishdevelopers [dot] com.

Well, that’s it for this month’s newsletter and also this year but check our website at http://www.scottishdevelopers.com to be kept up to date with the latest events, job postings and news.

You can also follow us on Twitter - @scottishdevs

Enjoy the festive season and we hope to see you in January.

Andy Gibson
Chairman, Scottish Developers