Apps for Good have to date run several “Dragons Den” style events, where teams of school pupils have presented to a panel of industry expert “dragons” the apps that they have devised to tackle problems they see among their peers and in their communities.

Building on the success of these events, CDI Europe has announced the first “Apps for Good Awards” (AFGA2012). 

Through AFGA2012, student teams from over 40 UK schools will have the chance to win exclusive prizes from top technology sponsors such as Dell, Barclaycard and the Nominet Trust.

Winning entries will receive prizes including having the winning apps built by one of the AFGA sponsors, tickets to top venues and a trip to the London finals to present in front of top industry experts.

You can read more about the AFGA categories and the event itself here, and to get more information about the incredible work that CDI Europe is doing with Apps for Good, you should go here.

After all, who could possibly not want to make the world a better place?

The sun is out and here at Skills Matter HQ we’re watching out eagerly for the ice cream man — but even more exciting than an ice cream with a flake in it is the big names in Domain Driven Design, CQRS and Software Architecture that we have coming to join us over the coming weeks and months.

We’ve lined up a steady flow of architecture rock stars for the summer, including headliners Udi Dahan, Greg Young and Eric Evans, supported by experts Simon Brown, Andreas Ohlund and Alberto Brandolini to provide an exciting range of talks, discussions and practical workshops on all things architecture.

The only thing we’re missing is you — we’d love to see you soon!

James Hurst will be introducing OpenResty – offering Lua programming for the Nginx web server. This provides a powerful and very high performance web programming environment, with non-blocking i/o central to the design. Originally developed to power the largest e-commerce site in China, it has recently started to be more widely adopted.

Sign up for the first London Lua user group at Skills Matter here: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/ajax-ria/scripting-nginx-with-lua/js-4289

Paul Ardeleanu — “Geek in Chief” at Hello 24 — comes to Skills Matter on May 22 to present on Native vs HTML5 – particularly why, when and how to use them his.  Paul will talk about how HTML5 is the ubiquitous platform for the web and how it cannot be dismissed any longer as a incomplete solution. It is both something entirely new and what HTML was always supposed to be. Once you “get it’, it’ll change the way you think about the web..  Sign up here.

Gradle guru Luke Daley will be at Skills Matter to present on Managing Javascript with Gradle.  Luke will looks at some of the options for managing your client side code assets such as JavaScript in your Gradle builds with some of the Gradle plugins that have sprung up in this area. We’ll look at minification, unification, dependency management and other issues that need to be tackled for modern web software development. May 22 – sign up here.

Still buzzing from the Progressive Java Tutorials and Progressive NOSQL Tutorials, the Neo4j User Group will be at Skills Matter on May 23 with a talk from Toby O’Rourke and Michael McCarthy who will be presenting their experiences of Introducing Neo4j into a Relational Database Organisation.  Sign up here.  Neo4j leader Jim Webber is also looking for speakers to give lightning talks at future meetings: If you have something to share, send your pitch on over to jim@neotechnology.com!

May 24 is going to be a busy night, as Gael Fraiteur comes to Skills Matter to give a talk on Multithreading beyond the lock keyword.  As multi-core hardware becomes ubiquitous, system developers can no longer rely on a superficial knowledge of multithreading programming. In this talk, Gael will dust-off low-level synchronization primitives and show how to design programs that make better use of multiple cores. Check out the companies and their tech passions here — and sign up while you can.

Head to head with Gael Fraiteur comes Christophe Coenrates on May 24, with his talk on Cross-Platform Mobile Apps with HTML, JavaScript and PhoneGap. Christophe will cover modern strategies to build large JavaScript projects using JavaScript MVC frameworks, and how to use PhoneGap to leverage the native capabilities of your device in JavaScript and to package your HTML application as a native app for distribution through the different app stores. Sign up now

And what is there to check out and catch up on from this week at Skills Matter?

London Ruby User Group: Ruby’s bin men and Dependency Injection
In The Brain of Phil Trelford & Tomas Petricek: F# for Commodities Trading
In The Brain of Oren Eini aka Ayende Rahien: Sharding And Scaling with RavenDB
Groovy Grails User Group: Building a MongoDB application with Grails
London Clojure User Group:(perfect? clojure environment)
London .NET User Group:Community Retrospective on a Decade of .NET
London Android User Group:Mozilla on Alternative Markets and Distribution

Don’t forget to keep up with the Skills Matter Tumblr — it’s good for announcements and videos, plus it looks cool.  Along with Twitter and this blog, it’s worth following.  But don’t forget to sign up for next week’s events!

HTML has emerged as a powerful alternative to “native” to enable cross-platform mobile application development. But how do you build large, complex, and native-like mobile apps using HTML, JavaScript and CSS?  Christophe’s talk will cover modern strategies for building large JavaScript projects using JavaScript MVC frameworks, and how to use PhoneGap to leverage the native capabilities of your device in JavaScript and to package your HTML application as a native app for distribution through the different app stores.

Christophe Coenraets is a Technical Evangelist for Adobe where he focuses on Rich Internet Applications, Mobile, and Enterprise Integration. In this role, Christophe has helped some of the largest financial services companies design, architect and implement some of their most mission critical applications. He was one of the initial members of the Flex Product Team in 2003.

Sign up on Skills Matter here — but hurry, space is limited!

NOSQL continues to gather momentum in the Skills Matter community. In 2011, Skills Matter ran our first ever NOSQL eXchange with talks from Jim Webber, Emil Eifrem, Russell Brown, Brendan McAdams, Dave Gardner, Ian Robinson, Aleksa Vukotic, Robert Rees and Tom Wilkie. We covered everything from MongoDB to Neo4j, from Riak to Scala, and Cassandra to CouchDB. It was a day to live in infamy.

2012 gets even better: with the first annual Progressive NOSQL Tutorials. Did you make Progressive NOSQL Tutorials? If not you missed Apache Cassandra, Couchbase, CouchDB, MongoDB, Neo4j, Riak and RavenDB! Don’t fret though, you can already watch many of the videos here.

Featuring:
John Zablocki on Couchbase
Tom McMillen on CouchDB
Chris Harris on MongoDB
David Mytton on MongoDB
Jim Webber on Neo4j
Nicki Watt & Michal Bachman on Neo4j
Oren Eini aka Ayende Rahien on RavenDB
Phil Jones on RavenDB
Matt Heitzenroder on Riak
Rune Skou Larsen on Riak
Tom Wilkie on Apache Cassandra
Malcolm Box on Cassandra

Allan Kelly — the author of Business Patterns for Software Developers — comes to Skills Matter on April 30 to present his talk The What and Why of Agile.  Join Allan Kelly as he sets out to answer the questions “What is Agile?”, “Why is Agile beneficial?” and “How might a team start to adopt Agile”. Armed with the answers to these questions Allan will to show why large organizations are using it, and why the UK Government IT strategy advocates Agile.  Sign up here.

Sam Newman & Vladimir Sneblic of Thoughtworks will be here on April 30 for a talk giving A Technical Introduction To Continuous Delivery, and will introduce Continuous Delivery for a technical audience, showing how it builds on the foundation of Continuous Integration to help shift teams to push button releases all the way to production.  This event is organised in partnership with ThoughtWorks who will be raffling copies of the book Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation, by Jez Humble (ThoughtWorks).  April 30: sign up here.

The London Java Community continues to draw the crowds — and next week brings the popular “code share event” to Skills Matter. Dave Snowdon and Ged Byrne lead the event that aims to ignore the big long explanations of “JVM with a limited vocabulary of bytecodes” and looks at how some of the functional features of languages like Scala or Clojure actually work. May 1 – sign up here.

Coding architect Dmitry Buzdin — author of the popular blog on GWT and Agile — joins us at Skills Matter on May 1 for his talk on the State of the Web and will lead discussion about pros and cons of current approaches and technologies in Web development.  Dmitry warns not to expect any coding tutorials here, but we will try to do everything possible so the picture of state of the art in Web development as it stands today in presenter’s brain is transferred to you seamlessly. May 1 – sign up here.

The buzz from BDD has never been buzzier right now — CukeUp! rocked Skills Matter a few weeks back with talks on all things Cucumber and BDD, and on May 2 Semantic Web expert Brian Sletten will be at Skills Matter to give a talk on Testing REST with BDD. Brian will use a Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) tool like Cucumber to establish reusable steps and comprehensive, but lightweight testing strategies for testing REST APIs. May 2 – sign up here.

As always, don’t forget to watch all the videos from this week’s events at Skills Matter:

Find Your Ninja Project : Cool Projects in April
In The Brain of Simon Brown: How much up front design is just enough?
In The Brain of Rob Harrop: Working with Continuous Deployment
Neo4J User Group : Neo4J Tales from the Trenches
In The Brain of Tom Bassindale & Peji Faghihi, Using Real User Metrics to Measure Performance

Gavin Bell — author of the O’Reilly book, Building Social Web Applications — comes to Skills Matter this May.  The talented Mr. Bell will be giving you the benefit of his experience on the evening of May 8 when he asks “Is Everything Social?”.

Gavin will take a brief look at how privacy and competition change social activity, then the rest of the session will activity based. Covering Product design and social object centric design, within a scrum framework, you’ll look at the problems of finding somewhere to live; personal banking; present buying and scientific publishing and try to design good products for these areas.

As with all our “In the Brain” talks, it’s free to attend — so make sure you sign up now to find out how privacy and competition change social activity.

Next week, on May 3 – 4, Skills Matter launches the first-ever Progressive Java Tutorials in London, an annual Java conference offering a unique blend of product and experience mixed, and tempered with theory and practice.

These two days will feature tutorials from leading experts in the Java & JVM world, presenting a contemporary Java use-case or technology.  You will be able to gain experience and skills, by attending hands-on, practical Java & JVM tutorials, on specific technology stacks, which match the morning talks

On the first day there will be Jan Machacek on Polyglot applications in Java and Spring — showing you just how easy it is to use Scala and Java in one project, Brian Sletten on Information Resources: Moving Beyond Objects, exploring explore REST and its implications on a resource-oriented environment.  In the afternoon, David Morgantini and Akash Bhalla will be Exploring enterprise Java outside of Java EE by way of a hands-on test-driven journey through writing a rich web application using Simple Framework and a NOSQL backend.

The second day of the Progressive Java Tutorials goes one louder, starting the day with Anirvan Chakraborty on Connecting to Neo4j using Spring Data — showing how to use Spring Data Neo4j to build a Spring-based web application based on the graph database Neo4j. Going head to head with Anirvan is Kito Mann of JSF Central on Full Stack Java EE. Kito makes the case for why it’s time to take another look at Java EE, provides an overview of the different parts of Java EE 6 and shows how you can quickly you can build a complete web application with ease.

The afternoon takes the Progressive Java to boiling point — with Agile Development guru and software craftsman Jon Jagger running his CyberDojo — a great practice environment for learning about coding, test driven development, team dynamics, and collaboration. And one of the highlights of Scala Days 2012, Viktor Klang, will be looking at Future Scala Futures — with a hands-on tutorial exploring Futures and Promises using the new APIs and how they can be used to compose asynchronous dataflow.

If you’re interested in Java, JVM, JEE, Scala, Neo4j as well as cutting edge software craftsmanship, come along to the tutorials — and be able to say you were there when the Progressive Java Tutorials began.

Udi Dahan — the software simplist — comes to Skills Matter on April 18 to present his talk Modeling Distributed Systems with NServiceBus Studio.  Join Udi for a first look at NServiceBus Studio – a modeling environment based on the decades-old principles behind NServiceBus yet fully integrated with code-generation into Visual Studio.  Sign up here.

The WordPress London User Group is growing in popularity at Skills Matter and next week they have three talks.  Dan Thornton & Robert Rhoades will be speaking on Building a Successful Business with WordPress and eCommerce, Steve Jones is speaking on WordPress plugins – the classy way and Chris Adams is speaking on Workflow with WordPress. April 19 – sign up here.  

Javascript Samurai Damjan Vujnovic is a firm favourite in the Skills Matter community, with his passion and knowledge of testing and javascript.  Damjan will be here on April 19 for a talk on Test-driving backbone.js applications, and will look at how we can use a unit-testing framework like jasmine to drive the design and excercise the behavior of various application components.  Sign up here.

Registrations are closed, but on April 19 Martin Odersky –the creator of the Scala language — will give an introduction to Scala and give a demonstration of its capabilities. It’s a rare occurrence that we have to not only close the registrations but also the waiting list because of overwhelming popularity — but the creator of Scala has done it.  If you didn’t manage to sign up, you will be able to watch the skillscast video of the talk here.

April 23 is another exciting night at Skills Matter — as we invite the community to Find Your Ninja. Skills Matter and MiniBar have teamed up to bring great developers, software architects, testers and coders together with interesting tech companies and start ups (and vice versa).  Up to 10 Tech Companies will pitch their coding projects – young web start-ups as well as more established ones, with innovative projects – to software developers looking for interesting, agile projects using progressive technologies. Check out the companies and their tech passions here — and sign up while you can.

Don’t forget to watch all the videos from this week’s events at Skills Matter:

In the Brain of Ed Cortis: Radical team transformation through leadership and agility
London Ajax User Group:AMD in Depth
In The Brain of Mike Amundsen: Essential Node.js for Web Developers
DeNormalised NOSQL Meetups: NOSQL and the effects of Big Data

A recent addition to the Skills Matter information channels is the Skills Matter Tumblr — it’s like a visual Twtter: good for event announcements, videos from talks and articles we think are interesting.  Along with Twitter and this blog, it’s worth following.  But don’t forget to sign up for these events!