Weekipedia: next week @skillsmatter

It’s hard to tell just recently whether Spring has sprung around Skills Matter — or if something somewhere has  just sprung a leak.  Our sunflowers are growing, but in between all our expert events we’ve started to build a wooden ark.  But moving swiftly on, Skills Matter offers the ideal place to shelter from the rain to learn and share ideas — and skills — with a great community.  So what have we got to keep you dry?

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

It’s gonna be big: Progressive Java Tutorials @skillsmatter

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.

Feelin’ Groovy

Skills Matter looks set to be the grooviest place in all of London this December.  Among the famous faces appearing to deliver expert training and presentations will be Guillaume LaForge, Graeme Rocher, and Dierk König.

Dierk König gets Skills Matter into full swinging style on 09 December, with his Practical Groovy for Developers workshop — which he will also be delivering personally.  This course gives you a two-day introduction to Groovy, along with its areas of applicability with specific, real-world examples.

No Groovy training from the experts is ever complete without an accompanying Practical Grails for Developers workshop.  Dierk follows his Groovy course with an intense two days on Grails.  Over the two days of Dierk’s Practical Grails workshop, you will learn how to build industrial-strength web applications for the Java Virtual Machine.

Training doesn’t get much groovier than this — Dierk König is a committer to Groovy and Grails, as well as being the co-author (with Guillaume Laforge) of the best selling Groovy in Action book.  Dierk also appeared at Skills Matter’s First International Grails eXchange, back in 2007.

December’s Groovy and Grails extravaganza doesn’t end there, either — Guillaume LaForge and Graeme Rocher take Skills Matter by storm with the 4th annual Groovy & Grails eXchange, on December 16th and 17th.

Graeme Rocher is the project lead and co-founder of the Grails web application framework, as well as the author of the Definitive Guide to Grails — while Guillaume LaForge (as well as being coauthor of Groovy in Action) is the Groovy Project Manager and Spec Lead of JSR-241, the Java Specification Request standardizing the Groovy dynamic language.

Last year’s Groovy & Grails eXchange was standing room only, with every ticket sold for the conference — and the buzz for 2010 is already increasing in volume.  Follow updates on Groovy & Grails eXchange 2010, including speakers and programmes, or just suggest ideas and topics on Twitter, using the tag #grailsx.

Finally, don’t miss the Groovy Grails User Group — next meeting on the 22nd of November.