Friday Round-Up

Friday Round-Up: 4 – 8 August

Things are heating up in the Skills Matter office as we approach our eagerly anticipated end-of-year conference season, in both London and New York. We have been delighted to announce a host of new speakers and keynotes (more on that below), as well as finalise the line-ups to a number of conferences.

Not forgetting about our wonderful user groups, we had some fantastic talks from the London Clojurians and Swift London – as well as a hands-on session from London Haskell. Be sure to check out the recordings below – we were particularly impressed with Tom Booth’s use of Clojure to create his own digital Pollock…

The Week in Skillscasts

Every week we record the majority of meetups and user groups that come to our offices in London for evening events and talks. These are our Skillscasts – and they’re all available for free on Skillsmatter.com!

The London Clojure Community hosted three talks from three experienced and talented devs. First up Tom Booth, who currently works on the Gov.uk Performance Platform, showed us how he taught himself Clojure outside of his everyday work commitments by trying to model painting. Using the abstract work of Jackson Pollock, defining the workspace (vectors, canvas, gravity etc.), Tom takes you through how he built his very own digital Pollock.

Robert Rees, Developer Manager at the Guardian, introduced us to Mori – a Javascript library that brings the immutable data structures of Clojure to Javascript along with a lot of the sequence operation functions and some of the reducers library. In this talk Robert explains why he believes that it is a really important, practical way to bring the principles of Clojure into the hands of everyday Javascript development.

Finally, we escaped DSL hell as Tom Hall from Futurelearn re-imagined netlogo and geomlab as Clojure DSLs. Tom showed us how embedding them in Clojure makes the implementation easier, gives greater power to the user and enables extension.

We were also joined by Swift London this week, as they held a hands-on session giving everyone the chance to experiment with a variety of areas of Swift, beginning some new projects and working together to solve problems in some existing ones.

The Week in Blog

Dan Cunningham of #hack4good did a great round-up of their recent workshop at Skills Matter; we caught up with George Dinwiddie to talk about BDD, the need for conversation and the art of writing scenarios; we launched the Groovy & Grails eXchange 2014 Call for Papers!

The Week in Conferences

ChetSpeechless-5

It was cheers all round as we confirmed Google’s Chet Haase as this year’s keynote at Droidcon London. He’s keeping the content of his talk pretty close to his chest, but we can confirm that he will be treating delegates to the very latest developments in Android technologies and APIs.

Chet is a senior software engineer at Google, and has previously worked as a senior computer scientist for Adobe, senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems and was the DirectX Drivers Manager for Micron Technology. When he’s not making Android graphics and animation better, or speaking at conferences around the world, he writes on CodeDependent and Enough About You (amongst a whole number of books).

Chet joins what is already shaping to be the best line-up we’ve ever had at Droidcon, so make sure you head on over and book your ticket now!

And in other conferences this week:

 

Friday Round-Up: 7 – 11 July
In The Brain of Heiko Seeberger

In The Brain of Heiko Seeberger

You may expect this blog post to begin with a reference to a particular unexpected football score this week. However, as the author of this post was knocked out of the office sweepstake by the same winning team last week he lost interest by Tuesday. So let’s talk about what went down at Skills Matter HQ instead…

Here’s what you may have missed at Skills Matter this week!

The Week in Skillscasts

Every week we record the majority of meetups and user groups that come to our offices in London for evening events and talks. These are our Skillscasts – and they’re all available for free on Skillsmatter.com!

WTF is Deep Learning with Jeff Abrahamson, at the Deep Learning London Meetup on Skills Matter.

Monday evening brought us two talks from the London Big-O Meetup, who parleyed on the subjects of the Burrows Wheeler Transforms and the Master Theorem.

Ole Schulz-Trieglaff, of the Computational Biology R&D department of Illumina in Chesterford, discussed the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) – an algorithm used in well-known data compression tools such as bzip2. He explained how it works, permuting the input characters in the text and grouping similar characters close to each other, and why this is useful for subsequent compression by run-length encoding or move-to-front transforms.

Christina Nicolau, a specialist in working with large scale enterprise web applications, delved into the Master Theorem as she looked at the out-of-the-box method for computing the complexity of certain classes of Divide et Impera algorithms. Watch the Skillscast now to look inside the box to see how the magic happens!

It was the turn of London Ajax on Tuesday, who also brought along two fantastic speakers for their July meetup which focussed on React – the low-level library for event-driven programming in PHP.

Areeb Malik went big with React as he looked at what happens when you stress test Javascript. Have you ever wondered what happens when you throw 6 megabytes of code at it? Now you can find out!

Areeb was joined by Markus Kobler who explored React and the importance isomorphic single page apps as he walked through building an app that delivers a better user experience.

The Deep Learning London meetup were in on Wednesday to answer the question that we know has been on all of your minds; WTF is Deep Learning? Neither machine learning nor deep learning are new topics, but they have both seen remarkable advancement in the last decade. Watch Jeff Abrahamson as he delves into this rapidly advancing field, looking at what we now call deep learning, its origins, and its applications.

Finally on Thursday we were joined by the awesome Heiko Seeberger, Director Services and Akka Engineer for Typesafe, for his In The Brain talk on high availability with Akka Cluster and Akka Persistence in Scala or Java, along with various advanced Akka features and patterns such as spray (or Akka HTTP).

Brand new User Group meeting soon!

chefWe’re delighted to welcome Chef Users London to Skills Matter for their first ever UK meetup.

Chef is an open source systems integration framework from Chef that allows you to describe the configuration of systems and infrastructure in code. It brings the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure.

Using Chef, you write cookbooks which describe the desired state of your systems and infrastructure. You then define roles, which are collections of cookbooks and attributes to be applied and apply them to your systems.

Their inaugural meetup is on the 31st July, when Harry Thompson and Steven Danna will introduce two talks for the evening exploring Devops, Kurtosys and more! Register your place here.

Friday Round-Up: 6 – 9 May

blog-post-6-9-may

Here’s what you may have missed at Skills Matter this week!

The Week in Skillscasts

Every week we record the majority of meetups and user groups that come to our offices in London for evening events and talks. These are our Skillscasts – and their all available for free on Skillsmatter.com!

blog-post-6-9-may-2

The London Clojure Community came along to Skills Matter HQ on Tuesday with three fantastic speakers around the topic of Robots, Haskell & Hedge Funds. The evening took the community through topics like DSL and Haskell, with the aim of leaving us better Clojure programmers.

Patrik Sundberg looked at running a hedge fund in Clojure as he presented a case study of a commodity hedge fund making the unusual choice of building their own infrastructure in Clojure. Patrik presented his road to Clojure, how it came to shape a business infrastructure, what it was used for and the lessons learnt in the process.

Dave Snowdon then explored robot control in Clojure as he outlined a small DSL written in Clojure that aims to make it possible to generate animations in a more readable way.

Fianlly, Bodil Stokke looked at Haskell for Clojurists. The talk explained that for Clojure to retain its competitive edge it’s imperitive to keep a healthy interest in the whole field of computer science – especially Haskell, a close cousin to Clojure.

Wednesday brought the London Java Community for a talk on Cloud Developer’s DHARMA. Daniel Bryant looked to redefine ‘done’ for Cloud applications, as he looked at lessons from both a theoretic and practical perspective built from the Cloud Developer’s ‘DHARMA’ rules – Documented (just enough); Highly cohesive/loosely coupled (all the way down); Automated from code commit to cloud; Resource aware; Monitored thoroughly; and Antifragile.

Also on Wednesday, Farid Tejani, Managing Partner at Ignitr consulting, looked at overcoming the challenges to Lean/Agile adaoption in the finance industry for an In The Brain talk. Farid discussed some of the tests people face within Finance and how they manifest themselves and explore how they might be overcome.

Finally, the F#unctional Londoners came on Thursday with Ben Hall to explore using F# to model how physics and biology create organs. This fascinating talk showed how Ben took advantage of different features of F# and other tools to understand the results of a hybrid simulator in F# which allows us to explore how stem cells grow in an organ, and how breakdowns can lead to cancer growth.

The Week in Blog

Crafting Games for Fun and Profit – a guest post from Jonathan Frawley; While It’s Compiling with Cate Huston

Next Week in Brief

Monday: Learning to Code, How to win developers and Deprecating ActiveResource (with the London Ruby User Group); Intro to programming using Python (part 1)

Tuesday: A discussion on Meteor with London Ajax; Models of Automation and Automating Google Analytics tracking (with London Selenium); Scalable Real-time Analytics with Storm Trident

Wednesday: CQRS & Scala + Spoiwo with London Scala Users’ Group

Friday Round-Up: 28 April – 2 May

friday-blog-post

We were delighted to welcome two new user groups to Skills Matter this week, with MEAN Stack on Wednesday and Codebar on Thursday.

The MEAN Stack user group met for the first time in early March, and this week they came along to our venue for the first time. The group is aimed towards anyone interested in learning more about MongoDB, ExpressJS, Angular JS and Node.js – if you’re interested in the MEAN Stack, or just interested in Javascript as a programming language, then you should definitely get yourself along to their next meetup.

Codebar is a new group that’s aiming to make tech more diverse though helping to teach programming skills. They’ve organised free sessions on HTML, CSS, Javascript and Ruby, all with the goal of helping groups of people who are under-represented in the tech industry. They also host some great tutorials on their website!

The Week in Skillscasts

Every week we record the majority of meetups and user groups that come to our offices in London for evening events and talks. These are our Skillscasts – and their all available for free on Skillsmatter.com!

friday-blog-post2

We began the week with three In The Brain talks. First up was Luke Hohmann who took the evening off during his Certified innovation Games for Customer Understanding course to come and discuss Enterprise Retrospectives. Luke explored how to use online collaboration games to improve agile movement, bringing focus to teams as a whole, improving individual units and solving the issues that affect multiple teams or are beyond the control of any single team.

Shashikant Jagtap also joined us for a talk on Headless BDD & Responsive Test Automation, expanding on the processes and discussion from his previous talk of the same title at this years CukeUp! conference. This time around, Shashikant looked at Headless browsers such as PhantomJS and Zombie, how to speed up the entire BDD process and integration with popular tools such as Cucumber and Behat.

Finally on Monday Adam Gundry, a Haskell Consultant for Well-Typed LLP, gave a talk on overloaded record fields for Haskell. Find out how, with the help of Simon Peyton-Jones, Adam has extended Haskell to overcome some of the common frustrations with records.

The London Java Community were joined by Richard Warburton Tuesday for a talk on performance and predictability. Richard talked about why access patterns are important and the fact that fast code needs a harmonious environment to operate. He went on to discuss how this can work well with hardware such as RAM, disks and SSDs, and the unifying themes treating memory access patterns in a uniform and predictable way.

Neo4J were joined by three speakers – Yan Cui, Mark Wright and Nigel Small – for an evening about the graphs of gaming and recruitment on Wednesday. Nigel gave an overview of Zerograph features, and talked about its protocol and ZeroMQ connection management. Mark then discussed private social networks, before Yan looked at modelling a large scale social game with Neo4J.

Wednesday also saw MEAN Stack’s first meetup at Skills Matter, when they were joined by Mark Chapman and Tamas Piros. Mark looked at using the MEAN Stack to remove CRUD whilst Tamas explored geospatial data in the MEAN Stack.

Thursday brought the F#unctional Londoners and Michael Newton to Skills Matter HQ, as they looked at creating type providers in a hands-on session that provided expert advice on constructing and hacking existing providers, using the brand new Visual Studio.

The London Java Community were joined by Sam Adams, one of the lead developers at LMAX Exchange. Sam has been part of the team that built one of the fastest trading platforms in the world, and he brought his skills and knowledge to cover the architecture behind LMAX Exchange.

Finally, Codebar brought three speakers along – Swathi Kantharaja, Rosa Fox and Jarkyn Soltobaeva – for an evening looking at making the jump into coding as easy as possible.

The Week in Blog

udi_dahan_in_the_brain

Udi Dahan talked to us about NSBCon 2014; the F#unctional Londoners tell us what they’ve been up to; Daniel Steinberg talked to us about what motivates iOS developers.

Next Week in Brief

Tuesday: Robots, Haskell & Hedgefunds with the London Clojure Community

Wednesday: In The Brain of Farid Tejani; Cloud Developers DHARMA with the London Java Community

Thursday: Mixing biology and physics together, with the F#unctional Londoners

Friday Round-Up: 22 – 25 April

blog-post-friday-round-up-22-25

Here’s what you may have missed at Skills Matter HQ this week!

The Week in Skillscasts

Every week we record the majority of meetups and user groups that come to our offices in London for evening events and talks. These are our Skillscasts – and their all available for free on Skillsmatter.com!

Catherine Breslin talks at Thursday's Women in Data meetup

Catherine Breslin talks at Thursday’s Women in Data meetup

Beginning the week for us, the London Java Community hosted Arun Gupta, the director of RedHat, for a discussion on what’s new in WildFly 8. Arun talked about RedHat’s open source Java EE 7 compliant application server which provides a ‘core’ distribution that is ideal for framework authors.

The London Phonepap & Javascript user group brought two speakers along for an event discussing Nobackend apps with PouchDB and rendering performance using Chrome DevTools. James Nocentini delivered the first talk showing how he built a real offline mobile app and how PouchDB helped him to avoid creating a backend.

Next up Matt Gaunt, a developer advocate for Chrome at Google, hosted a session explaining how to optimise and debug mobile applications with DevTools.

On Wednesday Deep Learning London were joined by Dr. Boumediene Hamzim, a researcher at the Department of Mathematics of Imperial College London, for a talk that delved into machine learning, learning theory and Artificial Neural Networks. The talk explored how we live in an age of data and why it is important to make sense of it using certain frameworks and Artificial Neural Networks to illustrate the thought process.

The Limited WIP Society paid close attention The Theory of Constraints as well as taking a look at the ‘Evaporating Clouds’ at a the first of three talks on Thursday. They considered real life examples, visualising both sides of the conflict and tried to find a better overall solution than just the obvious compromises. As this was a hands-on session, we were unable to film, but you can find out about the next meetup for the Limited WIP Society here.

Women in Data returned to host the second of Thursday’s meetups. Elizabeth Keogh introduced Cynefin, a framework for making sense of the world and its problems. Liz highlighted its uses, like how it can help developers with the use of libraries to avoiding the pitfalls of disorder. Catherine Breslin then covered the basics of speech recognition, and how we use machine learning to model both acoustics of speech and language.

To complete the week, Mark Harwood delivered an In The Brain talk on the open source search and analytics platform, ElasticSearch. Mark, a software engineer at ElasticSearch, demonstrated how anomaly detection algorithms can spot credit card fraud, revealed the UK’s most unexpected hotspot for possessing weapons and how to find movies that urgently need removing from your ‘family friendly’ category!

The Week in Blog

Russ Miles

We talked to Russ Miles about microservices, antifragility, and which books you should be reading and Matias Piipari, CTO of Papers, talked about mobile platforms and app development.

Next Week in Brief

Monday: In The Brain of Luke Hohmann; In The Brain of Shashikant Jagtap; In The Brain of Adam Gundry

Tuesday: Performance and Predictability with the London Java Community; In The Brain of Russ Miles

Wednesday: The graphs of gaming and recruitment with the Neo4J user group; Angular forms and Geospatial Data with Mean Stack

Thursday: Creating Type Providers with the F#unctional Londoners; Talk the walk with Codebar; LMAX Exchange architecture with the London Java Community