Amazon Web Services with Daniel Sikar

Daniel Sikar has been using Amazon Web Services since the first interfaces to Amazon’s book and music inventories became available — so there is no one better to present Skills Matter’s EC2 and S3 Workshop.

This 1-day concise, hands-on workshop provides an introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with a focus on Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).

The course will be delivered by Daniel Sikar who works as both a trainer and a consultant, and has been involved in Amazon Web Services since its inception, back in 2004.

Through a series of exercises, you will learn how to:
- Configure the AWS toolkits
- Run your own virtual machine in the AWS cloud environment as well as understand the scalability it offers.

Daniel is an enthusiastic and very likeable trainer, with an obvious passion for Amazon Web Services.

Follow the link to where you can find out more and book your space whilst seats are available.   The next date in London is scheduled for May 24th, with further dates already arranged into the Autumn.  Please note: these are only small groups, not mass seminars, and the last few places will go quickly.

If you can’t wait until May to get your Cloud & Grid fix, register now for the Skills Matter Cloud & Grid eXchange 2010 where the leading experts on Cloud and Grid technologies, high scalability and performance, come together — with an umissable day of discussion and learning the result.

NService Bus with Udi Dahan

Udi Dahan brings his skills and experience to Skills Matter to present a free In the Brain of Session on enterprise computing.  Register now to secure your place and avoid disappointment.

Project lead of NService Bus (the leading SOA framework for .NET), Udi is an expert on software architecture and design — as well as a very popular and dynamic speaker.

While Udi is in London this February, as well as his free evening seminar he will also be presenting his Distributed SOA course at Skills Matter

Distributed SOA next running on 15-02-10 is a 5-day course teaching how to build large, scalable distributed SOA systems using various architectural techniques.  You will learn how to use loosely-coupled messaging communication to build and design large scale, distributed SOA systems.

Udi returns to Skills Matter on 20-05-10, and brings with him the essential course on NService Bus.  This 2-day workshop teaches users how to work with NService Bus effectively in operations to smooth communications.  On this course you will build an enterprise application to understand better the architectual issues and scalability problems faced.

Click here for info on Distributed SOA and to book, and here for info and booking on NService Bus.  Note that Skills Matter courses are not mass seminars, and the last few places will go quickly.

Core NHibernate with Ayende Rahien

Ayende Rahien will be coming to Skills Matter On 25th February to present his lessons learned from building the nhibernate profiler.  This is a free evening seminar, and places are strictly limited so register now to save your place.

If you are a .NET developer and you would like to learn how to use NHibernate to simplify database access from your applications then check out Ayende Rahien’s 3-day course at Skills Matter on NHibernate.

You will learn to use object/relational mapping to isolate your object domain from relational storage by building a simple, practical application that demonstrates all important data management patterns.

Ayende Rahien (aka Oren Eini) is an active member of the opensource .NET community and commits to several open source projects, includng NHibernate and Castle.  Ayende is also the founder of several other opensource .net projects, including Rhino Mocks, NHibernate Query Analyzer, and Rhino Commons.

You will take away from this course the skills to use NHibernate to simplify database access and spend more time improving domain model integration with castle and other advanced features.

The next date for Ayende’s NHibernate course is February 24, 2010 — book your place now!

Open Source .NET: with Gojko Adzic

Are you a .NET architect wanting to learn about the most popular Open Source .NET tools?  Or a .NET developer wanting to learn about modern development practices and how to implement them in .NET with the most popular Open Source libraries and tools?  Perhaps you are a Java developer newly starting with .NET, and looking for tools that are equivalents of what you are used to in Java?

Look no further!

The inimitable Gojko Adzic — author of Bridging the Communication Gap presents his course on Progressive .NET, where you will learn to apply the best in Open Source practices by way of building a practical application from scratch. You will gain a solid foundation in the practical aspects of test-driven design and agile acceptance testing.

In between running Neuri Ltd, Gojko Adzic is the best-selling author of several printed and online guides on acceptance testing, including Test Driven .NET Development with Fitnesse, and Getting Fit with .NET. Gojko is a popular blogger, as well as a frequent speaker at Agile and Open Source related conferences. Since September 2006, he has been posting his opinions, reviews and guidelines for software development on The Quest for Better Software.

This course is next running in London on May 26, 2010 — and if you book before April 26, you can get your seat for the discounted price of £1,435. But hurry, this price won’t be around forever and places are limited.

Book your place now and take advantage of this early booking discount!

Spring, Java and JEE: New Year courses

Happy New Year from Skills Matter and Amazon!

2010 is just around the corner.   Now is the perfect time to gain new skills and sharpen your competitive edge as an enterprise architect or developer, to become more productive on your current projects or to find greener pastures

To make the training opportunity a little more tempting, we are offering our community a Two-for-One Special if you book any of the following courses at least one month in advance.

In addition, if you book any of these courses before December 31, you will receive an Amazon Gift Certificate worth £100! As soon as the payment for your course has cleared, we will email your gift certificate. So get your skates on and start learning and earning!

How to claim: Simply enter promo code SM1339-623095-AMZ when you book your seat online and you will be entitled to a £100 Amazon gift certificate.

Terms:

• The Gift Certificate will be assigned to the email address given for each delegate booked and will be sent once full payment of all course fees has been received.
• The offer cannot be applied retrospectively to existing bookings.
• The offer is only applicable if a valid promotion code is used when booking online.
• Our standard terms and conditions of sale apply.
• This offer is valid for the following courses:
  • Core Spring – 26/1 and 23/2
  • Hyperic – 20/1
  • Hibernate – 20/1
  • JavaServer Faces – 2/2
  • Gradle – 2/2
  • Java Power Tools Bootcamp – 15/2
  • OSGi – 16/2
  • Coherence – 11/3

Conferences at Skills Matter

SKILLS MATTER SUCCESSFULLY HOSTED 7 CONFERENCES IN THE NEW BUILDING

We have moved! Our new home is at 116-120 Goswell Road near Barbican. To learn how to find us, read more here.

The three-story building, a former garment warehouse, has been converted into a bright, modern and spacious training & events centre for 21st century IT professionals. The increased and flexible office space will enable us to deliver more courses, hold more events and better serve the developer community.

Since our move on Nov 23, we have successfully hosted 7 conferences. Learn more about them, watch podcasts, view photos by following the links below.

• Agile Testing eXchange, Nov 27
• Lean & Kanban eXchange, Dec 1
• Droidcon London, Dec 2
• Ruby on Rails eXchange, Dec 3
• Functional Programming eXchange, Dec 7
• Groovy & Grails eXchange, Dec 9-10
• Open Source in Finance eXchange, Dec 15


Check out photos from all the conferences at our official Flickr page

The new Skills Matter Exchange!

The Skills Matter team have now moved in to our new offices in central Clerkenwell, at 116 – 120 Goswell Road, London.   All our events, courses and exchanges are now here — just a short walk from Barbican, Old Street and Farringdon tube stations.

Our new offices are fully equipped with WIFI, projectors, and a funky break-out area, the Skills Matter exchange provides a venue for events from 4 to 125 people and is ideal for conferences, training courses and meetings.

Update your address books — our new telephone number is +44 (0)207 183 9040.  You can see the new location and get directions to our new space here.

Ruby Bootcamp & Ruby on Rails eXchange

Get the full Ruby on Rails experience with Skills Matter’s own Ruby workshop — run by the exceptional David Black.

Author, conference speaker and trainer, David is a respected Ruby programmer and will leadusers through 3 days intensive learning.  You will learn the basics of the Ruby programming language, and then extend your knowledge to the Ruby object model, built-in classes, string and text handling, sockets and network programming, code testing, metaprogramming, and many more subtopics.

You will then have a ‘day off’ from the Ruby course, so that you can attend the annual RoR eXchange 2009, a London Ruby conference, where you can join 125 fellow ruby enthusiasts to hear about the latest developments and ideas from 6 expert speakers.

Places are going fast — book now and make sure you don’t miss out on your chance to attend!  For more information, visit the Skills Matter site.

Deming’s Red Bead Experiment

Tonight’s free event at Skills Matter takes us into the brains of Benjamin Mitchell & David Joyce — where they will recreate Dr W. Edwards Deming’s famous Experiment on Red Beads.

This classic learning tool helps illustrates the impact that a system, and traditional management approaches, can have on individuals who work within a system.  The experiment introduces many of Deming’s ideas about management, including some of his 14 Points for Management.  It also introduces the Statistical Process Control Chart.

Originally used by Dr Deming as part of his four-day seminar, the experiment represents a corporation formed of “willing workers”, quality control personnel, a data recorder and a manager.

The corporation’s aim is to produce white beads by dipping a paddle into a container of beads.  The paddle has 50 holes in it to hold the bead. The container of beads contains not only white beads, but some defective red beads. The production of beads is controlled by an approved procedure.

After the experiment there will be a discussion of some of issues addressed by the experiment, which might including: understanding variation in work, the role of a the system on the performance of the workers, the effectiveness of managing with slogans, the usefulness of targets, annual appraisals and financial rewards and how to improve quality.

We will also relate this experiment to approaches to Software Development and the management of software development teams.

Places are filling fast for the event — so don’t miss your chance to register!

Players In The Cloud

Cloud computing is maturing and is here to stay. Names change but the principle remains; CPU, Memory, Disk Space and Bandwidth are a commodity.

Tonight at Skills Matter Daniel Sikar hosts an unmissable free session on cloud computing, and in this one-hour tour, attendees will become familiar with several cloud computing vendors and the services and interfaces they offer.

It’s not too late to register to attend!