I mentioned last time about the Agile Testing & BDD eXchange.  Remember that one?  Probably Europe’s  hottest event on BDD, Agile Testing, User Interaction, Automated Testing and heaps more.  We had the experts: Gojko Adzic, Chris Matts, Matt Wynne, Christian Hassa, David Evans, Andrew Kemp and Lasse Koskela.

Now you can watch the videos here: http://skillsmatter.com/event/agile-testing/agile-testing-bdd-exchange-2011/js-432

Before we’d even had a chance to catch our breath in November, the month was already over — and December brought with it Skills Matter’s first-ever Clojure eXchange.

Functional Programming is a hot topic for the Skills Matter community, and 2011 saw the continued rise of Scala, the growth of our F# community, and the first London Clojurians meetup at Skills Matter.  The time was ripe for the inaugural Clojure eXchange, with keynote speaker Uncle Bob Martin.  The UK border agency had other ideas, however, and Uncle Bob needed to deliver his talk to the conference from the USA, via Skype.  The Clojure community are far too cool and Agile to let this hiccup dampen any spirits, and some storming talks were delivered by Bruce Durling, Robert Rees, John Stevenson, Stathis Sideris and Philip Potter.

Watch all the videos here: http://skillsmatter.com/event/scala/clojure-exchange/js-432

The last conference of 2011 aboard the good ship Skills Matter was the 5th annual Groovy & Grails eXchange.  Skills Matter were among the first to run Groovy events, and we continue to work with the biggest experts in the areas of Groovy, Grails and Gradle — attracting the Grooviest developers in town.

It might have been the fifth annual Groovy and Grails eXchange, but enthusiasm has by no means diminished — over two days we had Guillaume LaForge, Marcin Erdmann, Erik Pragt, Andres Almiray, Hans Dockter, Luke Daley, Peter Ledbrook, Russel Winder, Jeff Brown, Marc Palmer, Burt Beckwith, Andreas Arledal, Stefan Armbruster, Tomas Lin, Donovan Frew, Robert Fletcher, Marco Vermeulen, Nicolas De Loof, and Andrew Kemp.  It’s exhausting just reading all the names!

Once you’ve got your breath back after that lot, you can catch up with all the videos here: http://skillsmatter.com/event/groovy-grails/groovy-grails-exchange-2011/js-432

That’s what you missed at the end of 2011, but stay tuned because in just the first few months of this year we have more conferences coming up, including the Functional Programming eXchange in March, Scala Days in April, Progressive Tutorials in both .NET and Java this May — plus all the usual In the Brain talks, technical User Groups and expert training courses that make Skills Matter the place to go to learn, innovate and share.  See you soon!

First up is the sold-out Agile Testing & BDD eXchange at the end of this week. The Agile Testing & BDD eXchange is one of our longest-running and most popular conferences, this year’s exchange hosts high profile presentations from Gojko Adzic, Chris Matts, Matt Wynne, Christian Hassa, David Evans, Andrew Kemp, and Lasse Koskela.

If you haven’t got tickets already, don’t lose heart completely: you will be able to watch all the videos as they are published here.

Before the end of the month, on November 28th, the internationally renowned Uncle Bob Martin comes to Skills Matter to deliver his 3-day Advanced Test Driven Development Workshop.

This is a intense, hands-on and exercise driven TDD course written and delivered personally by Uncle Bob Martin, focusing on the design of clean, robust, and maintainable unit and acceptance tests. Join Uncle Bob for these 3 days and you will be among the lucky few to learn the principles of test design, and the practices of keeping tests clean. More importantly, you will learn the principles of designing applications for testability.  Get more info and sign up here.

Uncle Bob is also going to be giving a free In the Brain talk to a full house of eager architects on November 28th as he presents on “Why can’t anyone get Web architecture right?“.

Uncle Bob asks when we will learn that “WEB” is not an architecture? When will we finally remember that an application is an application regardless of whether it is delivered on the web, or on a fat client, or on a text terminal? Uncle Bob asserts that the delivery mechanism is NOT the architecture.

This event is totally full and we have now even closed the waiting list — but as with the Agile Testing & BDD eXchange, you can still watch the videos the next day here.

Following on from Uncle Bob, the TDD samurai Damjan Vujnovic comes to Skills Matter on November 29 with a talk on Component-based, event-driven micro-architecture for building JavaScript applications.

It might sound like a mouthful, but in this talk Damjan will use the power of Test-Driven Development and event-driven paradigm to steer the architecture towards a loosely-coupled, component based system.  There’s still some places left for this free talk, so sign up now while you can here.

Still buzzing from his conference appearances this year, Robert D. Schneider presents Mission Critical Service Testing Using soapUI Pro at Skills Matter over two days from December 1. Robert’s two day Mission Critical Service Testing Using soapUI will teach you how to use the powerful capabilities of soapUI Pro to answer important questions prior to placing these services into production.

If you are a Software Developer or Architect, QA Tester, IT Manager or Web Professional and want to learn how to employ test automation to improve the quality of your software projects, find out more here.

And Robert will be giving a free In the Brain talk on December 1 on one of the hottest topics for the Skills Matter community: Big data and NOSQL. Robert will explore why the new non-relational database technologies are gaining so much traction, how they work, and how you can decide if they’re the right fit for you.  Sign up for free here.

Before the year is out, Skills Matter is also excited to be welcoming the globe-trotting Agile Testing expert Janet Gregory. Janet starts her Practical Agile Testing workshop on December 7, and doesn’t leave for three days — not until she has demonstrated ways to overcome common cultural and logistical obstacles in transitioning to an agile development process, and how your whole team contributes to the success of any testing practices, including test automation.  The places for Janet’s Agile Testing workshop won’t be around for long, so make sure you check it out and sign up here.

As usual, while these might be the Agile Testing highlights for now it doesn’t all end there — we will return with plenty more Agile Testing in the new year, with Gojko Adzic, more from Uncle Bob, and Pekka Klarck’s Robot Framework.

But what experts or subjects would you most like to see covered? Let us know and we can make it happen.

Join a delegation to Silicon Valley and the legendary SxSW Conference!

Be the winner of the first SVc2UK Appathon and have a chance to go to Silicon Valley and South by Southwest Conference

London’s SVc2UK Appathon registration is filling up fast so register TODAY to secure a ticket!

Go to http://groupspaces.com/SVC2London/item/179198 and register now!

What?

On the weekend of October 8-9 Skills Matter will host an “Appathon” where students and developers in the community will have access to government data sets (data.gov.uk) including heath, education, and the environment to build applications on well-known consumer facing platforms.  Corporate partners  and local developer and business mentors will be available to assist student  as they create useful apps for consumers.

Prizes

Winning teams get to:

• Attend an exclusive award ceremony in central London
• Attend a high profile industry event at Tech City London, rubbing shoulders with leading entrepreneurs and investors the likes of LinkedIn Co-founder Reid Hoffman
• join a delegation to tour  Silicon Valley  and attend the legendary South by Southwest Conference!

Register Now!

London’s registration is filling up fast so register TODAY to secure a ticket!  Go to http://groupspaces.com/SVC2London/item/179198 and register now!

Please see http://skillsmatter.com/event/java-jee/sillicon-valley-comes-to-the-uk-svc2uk-london-apathon/js-2768 for more details of SVc2UK
Email svc2uk@nacue.com if you have any questions.

Skills Matter and FuseSource have joined together to bring to London a free Community Day covering Apache ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, CXF and Camel.

Apache committers and the founders will come to Skills Matter on Tuesday, October 11th. Join Claus Ibsen, James Strachan, and Rob Davies — along with open source champions who have successfully implemented these projects in production — for talks including Claus Ibsen & James Strachan on From Enterprise Intergration Patterns (EIPS) to Production with Apache Camel, Logica on Mission Control at the European Space Agency, Rob Davies on Enterprise-class distribution of Apache ActiveMQ at Apex Networks, Rob Davies on Apache ServiceMix, Karaf, ActiveMQ and James Strachan on the Fuse IDE Tool and Fuse Fabric strategy.

This is a rare opportunity to ask your questions of some of the most successful and popular Apache projects, as well as a chance to learn, innovate and share skills — and all for just a day out of your schedule.

Find out more and sign up for free at http://form.fusesource.com/LP=133.

FuseSource have also announced today they are also hosting three new Apache webinars. Find out more below!

Getting Started with Apache ServiceMix
Date: October 18th 2011
Speaker: Jon Anstey
Time: 4pm-5pm (London)

Learn first-hand how easy it is to integrate enterprise applications using the power and flexibility of an open source ESB, Apache ServiceMix. ServiceMix has a pluggable architecture that allows organizations to use their preferred service solutions in their SOA. Any standard JBI or OSGi-compliant service engine or binding component – including BPEL, XSLT or JMX engines – may be deployed to a Fuse ESB container, and Fuse ESB components may be deployed to other ESBs.  Roll up your sleeves and learn how to design, deploy and test integration infrastructure in this hands-on webinar.

Find out more and sign up for free at https://fusesource.webex.com/fusesource/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=716654083&SourceId=SkillsMatter

Part I: Database Integration with Apache Camel
Date: October 27th 2011
Speaker: Charles Moulliard
Times: 9am-10am (London)

Enterprise integration projects often include databases, and creating Apache Camel message routes in the context of database connection and transaction management are nontrivial. The first part of this 2-part webinar series will introduce you to several integration components and demonstrate how easy it is to configure them to give access to the information persisted in a database. Particular attention will be given to the pros and cons of each component, and when to use each. We will also cover how to avoid losing messages during database connection calls using transactions.

Find out more and sign up for free at: https://fusesource.webex.com/fusesource/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=716212576&SourceId=SkillsMatter (Europe)

https://fusesource.webex.com/fusesource/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=717947569&SourceId=SkillsMatter (North America)

Part II: Transaction Management with Apache ServiceMix and EIPs
Date: November 22nd 2011
Speaker: Charles Moulliard
Times: 9am-10am (London)

When integrating a database with an ESB such as Apache ServiceMix, special attention must be paid to the transactions specifically when a middleware is used internally to transport messages between applications layers. Moreover, when data is retrieved from a database and is passed through different Camel routes, there is a risk that the data could be split, aggregated and then resequenced, or lost, when a system crashes, if the system is not properly architected.

In the second part of this webinar series about Database Integration with Camel, we will focus on creating transactional routes with Apache ActiveMQ and a database.  We will also introduce you to the different mechanisms that allow you to handle JMS and JDBC transactions to avoid processing duplicate messages when not using a Global Transaction Manager, and how to persist messages during aggregation, resequencing or idempotent processing.

Find out more and sign up for free at https://fusesource.webex.com/fusesource/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=716654083&SourceId=SkillsMatter

https://fusesource.webex.com/fusesource/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=712080778&SourceId=SkillsMatter (North America)

The 2011 Progressive .NET Tutorials If you missed it, where were you?! Don’t be too disheartened if you didn’t get to make it along — because very shortly we will be announcing #prognet12! The inimitable Ian Cooper has once again agreed to be the programme lead, so you can expect more from the biggest experts. And don’t forget — on November 3&4 Skills Matter host the first-ever Progressive F# Tutorials? These two days of tutorials feature some of the biggest authorities on F# — including Don Syme! Also giving expert tutorials will be Dave Thomas, Robert Pickering, Chris Marinos, Tomas Petricek, Phil Trelford, Zach Bray and more.

And if you want to learn and share more skills around Agile Development, Agile Testing, Software Craftmanship & BDD look no further than the one-day Agile Testing & BDD eXchange on November 18, with Gojko Adzic, Chris Matts, Matt Wynne, Christian Hassa, David Evans, Simon Ogle and Lasse Koskela. While you consider signing up for the Progressive F# Tutorials and the Agile Testing & BDD eXchange, why not check out all the videos from the Progressive .NET Tutorials 2011 — follow the links below!

Day 1
Christian Hassa & Gaspar Nagy on Defining Acceptance Criteria in Gherkin
Ian Cooper & Sebastien Lambla on Solving the Packaging Puzzle
Christian Hassa & Gaspar Nagy on Automating Gherkin Acceptance Criteria with Specflow
Dylan Beattie on Front-end Tips for Back-end Devs

Day 2
Simon Brown on Load Testing for Developers
Damjan Vujnovic on Test-driven Development in JavaScript
Paul Stack on Continuous Integration to Continuous Delivery
Adam Granicz on Advanced WebSharper Tutorial

Day 3
Ian Robinson on RESTful Web Service Development in .NET
Jon Skeet on Async Methods in C# 5
Mark Rendle & Steven Robbins on Introduction to Nancy and Simple.Data
Nathan Gloyn on You Think You Know Agile?

Stay tuned for details of next year’s Progressive .NET Tutorials!

The week was started as it was going to continue, with Semantic Web style from the legendary Brian Sletten.  It was a rare visit for the talented Mr Sletten, but that made it all the more valuable for the dedicated developers who joined his five-day workshop — and at risk of spoiling the ending, I can tell you know that every one of them made it through all five days.  What did they have to say about the class?  I think one Twitterer spoke for the whole class with ” Must admit my mind has been blown away by what I have learned this week“.  Brian’s response? “Mission Accomplished”.

In true Skills Matter style, while Brian was with us he kindly gave an In the Brain talk — “REST: Beyond the Basics“.  Brian was taken at his word and went beyond the basics of REST on into security, Hypermedia-driven Representation design, and versioning of RESTful services. Follow the link to watch the Skillscast recording from Tuesday night for free on the Skills Matter site.

Globetrotting Agile Testing expert Janet Gregory touched down at Skills Matter on Wednesday, for three days of Agile Testing.  As warm and friendly as she is expert in her field, Janet is always well-received when she comes to London — and her talk to the community on Wednesday on Agile Testing Practices was filled almost to capacity.  Did you make it along?  If you didn’t — you know you can watch the skillscast video of Janet Gregory on ATDD and Agile Testing, don’t you?

The last Thursday of every month at Skills Matter welcomes the Hacker News London Meetup group — for readers of the amazing Hacker News, as well as assorted tech and startup junkies. This month brought talks and demos from:
Jacob Aldridge on Paul Graham’s Trough of Sorrow
Robert Rees and Simon Hill on Looking for Wazoku
Federico Marani on Building tabs.to
Mark Fernie on Retroshare

I also had the pleasure of meeting Sanford Dicket, a man known for many things but not least for his support of New York tech scene and his work on the Texai robotic telepresence.  If you have the chance to bump into Sanford, he’s a fascinating person to speak to — and if you don’t get a chance, you can watch his live presentation of Texai at the New York Tech Meetup last year here.

What does next week bring to Skills Matter?  Other than a bank holiday on Monday, there is a lot going on.

London Software Craftmaship Community: Crafting Object-Oriented code – August 30

In this London Software Craftsmanship Community coding session, developers will work in pairs to solve a given code kata.  BUT WAIT!  There are rules.  Developers will be presented with a set of rules they need to stick to, driving their design towards object-orientation and crafted code. TDD is mandatory. At the end, a couple of pairs will present their code and we will discuss what we learned. Bring a laptop with your favourite tools installed. Suitable for any Object-Oriented language.  August 30: sign up here.

WebOS London:What now for WebOS? – August 30

This is the first official meetup of the WebOS group — and what a lot there will be to discuss! The night will feature a quick demo of the TouchPad; a show and tell of Pre-, Pre2, TouchPad, and any other WebOS devices we have handy. This will be followed by “everything you need to know about using the TouchPad”, including how to install Preware and patches to make it even faster and the regular feature “App of the Month and Patch of the Month” where we highlight and demo an app and a patch that we think rocks, and ask the audience for their suggestions. The evening is rounded off with open discussion on “What now for WebOS?” and then more discussion in the pub! August 30: sign up here.

Neo4J User Group : Modelling with Graphs – August 31

Neo4j is a powerful and expressive tool for storing, querying and manipulating data.  However modelling data as graphs is quite different from modelling data under with relational databases.  In this talk, Alistair Jones will cover modelling business domains using graphs and show how they can be persisted and queried in the popular open source graph database Neo4j.  Alistair will also discuss strategies for deciding how to proceed when a graph allows multiple ways to represent the same concept, and explain the trade-offs involved. August 31: sign up here.

In The Brain of Allan Kelly: What does it take to be an Agile company? – September 1

Everyone wants to be Agile, or so it seems. But what does that mean? What does the Agile company do that others don’t? In this talk Allan Kelly considers what it means to be Agile and what you need to do to be an Agile company, rather than a company which just follows an Agile method. September 1: sign up here.

In The Brain of James Strachan: Riding the Camel – August 31

Integration is often hard and messy. In this talk, James Strachan will introduce you to the Enterprise Integration Patterns as a way to describe and define integration solutions. Then James will introduce Apache Camel as a really simple and powerful way to solve your integration problems – where integration literally becomes writing integration rules in “lego style” by wiring together EIP patterns, endpoints and beans. This is done using the Camel DSL, which comes in multiple flavors such as Java, XML, Groovy and Scala. September 1: sign up here.

Simon Brown’s Software Architecture for Developers Workshop – Sept 1-2

Simon Brown’s 2-day Software Architecture for Developers course is about broadening your software development skills and has been designed to take full advantage of the technical knowledge that you already have.  This could be Java, .NET or something else. Simon Brown’s software architecture development course will make you more ‘architecturally aware’, and will help you to build better software. It’s about pragmatic and real-world software architecture rather than academic “ivory tower” software architecture and is presented by Simon Brown. Software Architecture for Developers is a comprehensive two day training course that will jumpstart your way to becoming a software architect. Book here: http://skillsmatter.com/course/java-jee/software-architecture-developers/js-2601

In The Brain of Simon Brown: Effective Sketches – September 1

The code might be the architecture but at some point in time youʼre going to have to explain how it works and thatʼs when the whiteboard pens make their appearance. Where do you start though? How much detail should you include? Technology decisions included or omitted?  UML or block diagrams?  Join deliberate practice expert Simon Brown for a look at some typical diagramming bloopers, and he will show you how to produce effective sketches. September 1: sign up here.

And that’s how it looks next week — not a bad line-up for a four-day week!  Don’t forget, as always you can follow us on Twitter, “Like” us on Facebook, join our LinkedIn groups, sign up to our newsletters, or best of all you can receive our Open Source Journal posted directly to your home or workplace.  Spread the word and support the Skills Matter community.

Tom Wilkie gave one of the hottest and most-talked about presentations to OSCON 2011 — anyone wanting to see what the buzz is all about should catch his free In the Brain seminar “Castle: Re-inventing storage for Big Data” at Skills Matter this September 27.

The standard Linux storage stack wasn’t designed for write-heavy big data workloads, nor is it well-suited to modern hardware: large, slow SATA disks, SSDs or many cores.

Castle, an open-source project, is a ground-up overhauling of RAID, file systems, and the POSIX interface. It is released under the GPL and runs as part of the Linux kernel. Our target is 1 million random inserts per second to disk on a $1,000 commodity box, and we’re nearly there. Castle is also the core of the Acunu Data Platform, which delivers up to 100x higher performance for applications written for Cassandra and other tools.

Sign up for the free talk on September 27 here — this is your chance to put your questions to one of the leading minds working with Big Data. Places are limited, so register early.

If you are interested in Cassandra and all things NOSQL, sign up today for the London Cassandra User Groupon September 5.  This month  group are continuing the “Cassandra vs” theme from the last meeting by taking a look at HBase. We’re lucky to have Nick Telford talking on the subject who has used both Cassandra and HBase in a real “big data” production environment at Datasift. We will also be looking at Cassandra more closely, examining how it deals with various failure modes. This talk will be given by Richard Low from Acunu who big data experts and offer professional support for Apache Cassandra.

In addition to the talks there will be, as usual, beer and  and plenty of opportunity to meet other Cassandra users and enjoy robust discussions around NoSQL.

Droidcon is the UK’s largest conference talking exclusively about Android development and applications.

Droidcon 2011 returns to London’s Islington Design Centre on the 6th-7th October 2011 and will feature the undisputable cream of the Android developer world.

Droidcon has grown tremendously — in line with the exponential interest in the Android platform.  This year, upward of 600 Android enthusiasts will rub shoulders and shake hands with the premier experts in the field to dig into every aspect of Android and its ever-growing ecosystem.  High on the agenda this time around are Android for the Tablet, Android in the Enterprise, Android for Games, Android for business, Augmented Reality, multi-mobile — and a whole lot more.

The first day will be community-led with a full day Barcamp and democamp, where participants take charge and take to the stage to propose talks, discussions and showcase their applications.  This is the place where the cutting edge of Android is at it’s very sharpest.

The second day of Droidcon will be the conference day high with presentations from some of the world’s foremost experts in Android presenting on the latest applications and usage of the mobile platform.  Already confirmed to appear are two Google of the greatest Developer Advocates for Android in Richard Hyndman and Nick Butcher, “Commonsguy” and author of the Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development Mark Murphy, Mustafa Isik aka CodeSurgeon, and Yosi Taguri (programmer on the voice-activated game “Pah!“).

It doesn’t end there, either — also lined-up for what promises to be possibly the biggest Android developer conference in the world are Alan Goode on Mobile Security, Harald Naumann on 6LoWPAN, Carl-Gustaf Harroch of Novoda on Android’s Message-driven Architecture, Al Sutton on Concurrency, Multi-core and Honeycomb, Kieran Gutteridge on iOS to Android Made Easy, Matthias Kaeppler on kick-starting Android Application Development, Friedger Müffke on Historify and Other Aggregating Applications, James Parto on Operator API, and Terence Eden on the Reality of Mobile Advertising.

If you’re an Android developer, there’s really no excuse not to sign up for Droidcon 2011.  You don’t need to try to imagine what you will miss out on if you don’t join us — just reread the topics and speakers here.  In short, you don’t want to miss it — register here and sleep soundly, knowing you will be part of Droidcon 2011.

Monday night at Skills Matter was welcomed in by the London Ruby User Group, with two expertly delivered talk. The first talk came from Gareth Rushgrove about using configuration management tools like Chef to set things up, and Vagrant to easily manage the virtual machines from the command line. Watch Gareth’s LRUG talk here: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/chef-vagrant/js-2511.

Paul Mucur followed gave a presentation on Puppet, on how configuration management allowed him to not only install and configure servers quickly and in a repeatable way, but also let him feel confident about the consistency of each and every machine to which he deployed. Watch Paul’s LRUG talk here: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/ajax-ria/lrug-puppet/js-2511. Remember, our recordings include video, slides and coding from the talks — and are usually available the morning following any presentation at Skills Matter. Our podcasters are the unsung heroes of Skills Matter — if you see one around, show them some love!

Following hot on the heels of the London Ruby User Group, the London Ajax User Group took to centre stage on Tuesday night. Civil unrest over the weekend and on Monday in the cities had made some people understandably concerned about making it home — but those that came along to Skills Matter for LAUG were impressed with a talk from Jonathan Evans on Developing Web Apps with the Cappuccino framework. Cappuccino is not just for breakfast any more — and you can see for yourself what the fuss is about by watching the video here: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/ajax-ria/jonathan-evans-on-developing-web-apps-with-the-cappuccino-framework/js-2511.

A combination of factors meant that talks originally planned for Wednesday night were all postponed — including the London Scala User Group on Scalaz with Chris Marshall, a talk on Coffeescript with Andrew Chalkley, and a talk from the excellent Allan Kelly on How to be an Agile Company. But attendees were encouraged not to lose heart, the events have all been rescheduled. Check out the list below for details!

In The Brain of Allan Kelly: What does it take to be an Agile company? – September 1

Everyone wants to be Agile, or so it seems. But what does that mean? What does the Agile company do that others don’t? In this talk Allan Kelly considers what it means to be Agile and what you need to do to be an Agile company, rather than a company which just follows an Agile method. September 1: sign up here.

London Scala User Group: Practical Scalaz: making your life easier the hard way – September 14

Previous talks have concentrated on the fundamentals and construction of the scalaz. In this talk, Chris Marshall (one of only four scala gold-badged users on StackOverflow) will concentrate on using Scalaz to help make certain tasks easier and to avoid repeating yourself. September 14: sign up here.

So what is on the table for next week at Skills Matter?

The inimitable Martine Devos will be with us imparting several decades worth of real-world Scrum experience to two enthusiastic classes at Skills Matter. This is your chance to get yourself certified by a real enthusiastic and persuasive expert — Martine delivers her Certified ScrumMaster and Estimation class on August 15 & 16, followed by her Certified Scrum Product Owner class on August 18 & 19. Martine takes no prisoners with these hands-om and immersive Scrum courses — if you want to get that Scrum certification, you have to jump in!
Certified Scrum Master: Aug 15-16 — book here.
Certified Scrum Product Owner: Aug 18-19 — book here.

F#unctional Londoners Meetup Group: Gary Short on Applied F# – August 16

In this presentation, Gary Short looks at how he uses F#, and we’ll see examples of F# used to calculate values for some of the metrics that are important in my line of work. August 16: sign up here.

In The Brain of Miles Sabin: Encoding Unboxed Union Types in Scala – August 16

In this talk, advanced Scala expert Miles Sabin will show how we can encode union types in Scala. If you’ve ever wanted to know how to play cool and practically applicable tricks with Scala’s type system, then this is the place to be. August 16: sign up here.

In The Brain of Andrew Chalkley, Introduction to CoffeeScript – August 18

Andrew Chalkley will review the core functionality of what CoffeeScript has to offer. Even if you don’t adopt CoffeeScript as part of your toolkit, it’s worth a look to learn how the resulting JavaScript is compiled in order to help with performance and other JavaScript best practices. August 18: sign up here.

So that’s how it stands for the next week — you’ve got Functional Programming from the F#unctional Londonders Meetup Group, Andrew Chalkley on CoffeeScript, Miles Sabin’s advanced Scala talk on encoding unboxed union types, and word-class Scrum training. What more could you possibly want — other than, in the words of Elvis Costello, “peace, love and understaning”? Just wait until you see what is coming up later in the month!

If you’d like to stay up to date with Skills Matter, there are dozens of ways you can do it — you can follow us on Twitter, “Like” us on Facebook, join our LinkedIn groups, sign up to our newsletters, or best of all you can receive our Open Source Journal posted directly to your home or workplace. If you like what we do, share the wealth — tell others on all your social networks! After all, wasn’t it by recommendation that you found out about Skills Matter?