It’s been an unusually damp week in London at Skills Matter — but that hasn’t stopped our friends and experts from coming to our Clerkenwell home.
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 Br
ain 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.
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