Newsletter - January 2011

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 [email protected].

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 - [email protected]

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 -[email protected].

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