Weekipedia: this week & next @skillsmatter

It’s been a rare quieter week at Skills Matter this week. So far May has seen the launch of the annual Progressive Java Tutorials and Progressive NOSQL Tutorials (follow both links for all the videos), and coming at the end of the month is the Progressive .NET utorials (featuring Don Syme on F#, dontcha know) — so it’s been good this week to have time to breathe.  Though that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s quiet.  So what’s at Skills Matter next week?

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!

This week and next week @skillsmatter (Feb 20-24)

You lucky people; it’s time for another weekly round up at Skills Matter.  What happened this week?  What videos can we watch?  And what is in store for you next week?

The ice and snow are gone, and I think it’s only fair to give credit where credit’s due: our experts.  This week we had in residence Alberto Brandolini delivering Eric Evans’ DDD Immersion Workshop, and “Python for Rookies” author Russel Winder giving his Python workshop.  Both were a huge hit with their workshop delegates — and Alberto will be returning to Skills Matter on April 23, with Russel Winder hot on his heels on May 15.

Allan Kelly joined us on Monday for an interactive session on Dialogue Sheets, a new tool for retrospectives — because this was an hands-on event, I don’t have a video to share with you from the talk.  However, we are having a launch party for Allan Kelly’s new book!  Join us with Allan on March 21 at Skills Matter and hear about Business Patterns for Software Development, and get Allan to sign your copy of this book.

Also on Monday night was “Agilekev” Kevin Ryan, giving a talk on Kanban for Agile Portfolio Management. Go watch the skillscast video of this talk here: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-scrum/kanban-agile-portfolio-management/js-3637

Tuesday brought St Valentine’s Day to London and to Skills Matter.  We shared the love Tuesday night with Alberto Brandolini‘s In the Brain talk Drive your DBA Crazy in 3 easy steps — go watch the skillscast video here: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/design-architecture/drive-your-dba-crazy/js-3637 — it’s already proving very popular viewing on Twitter.

By mid-week at Skills Matter we had Damjan Vujnovic delivering a Javascript Coding Kata on Wednesday evening.  Unfortunately, this is another event with nothing to show you on video!  But you’re not completely out of luck, Damjan comes to Skills Matter on April 30 to deliver Gojko Adzic’s Test Driven Development Workshop as well as his own Advanced JavaScript Workshop on May 17.  If you ask very nicely, we’ll even ask Damjan for another In the Brain talk when he’s next at Skills Matter.

Thursday night is the last night of the week for our In the Brain talks and User Groups, and this week it was the turn of Londroid: the London Android User Group.  Londroid brought us two talks this month: Robert Taylor on Robobinding: a data-binding framework, and Duncan Cragg on Object Network -mapping the web.

Next Week:

Free talk: London Cassandra User Group – Cassandra as an email storage system and CQL Then & Now (Feb 20)

>Cassandra London kicks off 2012 with a talk on implementing Cassandra as an email storage system and what’s new in CQL.  Rustam Aliyev share his experiences of implementing Cassandra as an email storage system at Elastic Inbox, and Courtney Robinson — a regular member of the London Cassandra User Group — gives an update on what’s new with CQL.
Feb 20: sign up here.

Expert Training: Udi Dahan’s Enterprise Development with NServiceBus (Feb 20-23)

Delivered by NServiceBus core developer Andreas Ohlund, Udi Dahan’s “Enterprise Development with NServiceBus” course teaches you all the ins-and-outs of NServiceBus – the most popular, open-source service bus for .NET – now updated for NServiceBus 3.0. Used in production since 2006, NServiceBus is now used in hundreds of companies in finance, healthcare, retail, SaaS, web 2.0, and more. From basic one-way messaging, through publish/subscribe; providing solutions from transactions to cross-machine scale out; this hands-on course will show you how simple distributed systems development can be.

Book your place and find out more here: http://skillsmatter.com/course/open-source-dot-net/udi-dahan-nservicebus-workshop/js-3637

Free talk: Groovy Grails User Group – Deploying Grails Applications (Feb 20)

This month’s meeting for the Groovy Grails User Group will be all about deploying Grails applications. Several community members will describe how they go about ensuring up-time during upgrades, using a Platform-as-a-Service (CloudBees), and more.
Feb 20: sign up here.

Free talk:In The Brain of Andreas Ohlund: Putting your events on a diet (Feb 20)

A common problem when designing service oriented architectures is that events going across services tend to be very large in terms of properties they carry. This has the negative effect of making development tougher, testing harder and deployment a risky operation.  In this talk, NServiceBus and Enterprise Software Expert Andreas Ohlund will analyse the checkout process of an online retailer to identify some of the misconceptions that lead to fat events. Finally we’ll look at techniques that will help you keep your events small and fit for the purpose thus mitigating the problems above.
Feb 20: sign up here.

Free talk: London Ruby User Group Lightning Talks (Feb 21)

As is now traditional, we devote the February London Ruby User Group meeting to lightning talks. We have James Coglan giving a talk on Websockets, a talk on capistrano extensions, Richard Livsey on removing authentication from your models and Harry Marr on Custom documentation generators.
Feb 21: sign up here.

Free talk:London Java Community: Zero Downtime of JavaEE applications and Home Automation with Java and Arduino (Feb 21)

As well as LJC ligtning talks will be Fabiane Nardon on achieving zero downtime in a JavaEE application is not easy, showing several tools, tips and tricks to get there, and Yara Senger & Vinicius Senger showing how you can use Java EE and open-source hardware, like Arduino, to automatize your house. Using jHome, a complete Java EE 6 API for home automation, you can control lamps, wall sockets, electric gates and doors using Web App and Twitter.
Feb 21: sign up here.

Free talk: Neo4J User Group:Neo4j in a .NET world (Feb 22)

This month, Tatham Oddie will be coming from Australia to present at the Neo4j User Group on Neo4j with .NET, and will cover the Neo4j client we have built for .NET, hosting it all in Azure and why our queries were 200ms slower in the cloud, and how we fixed it.

Tatham will present a case study, explaining  -what our project is, -why we chose a graph db, -how we modelled it to start with, -how our first attempts at modelling were wrong and what we’re doing now.

Join us at this great Neo4J meetup and get a chance to win a ticket to the Progressive NoSQL Tutorials to boot! Follow #prognosql on twitter on the day of the event, to find out more!
Feb 22: sign up here.

Expert Training: Martine Devos’ Certified ScrumMaster and Estimation Class (Feb 23-24)

Martine Devos’ two day ScrumMaster and Estimation class will teach you the fundamental principles of Scrum, qualifying you as a Certified ScrumMaster. Leading a Scrum team is radically different to traditional project management. Rather than plan, instruct, and direct, the leader of a Scrum team (called a ScrumMaster) facilitates, coaches and leads.

In this intensive and highly interactive workshop, you will learn to deal with the obstacles that confront Scrum teams. You will also put theory into practise through a variety of exercises and take-aways to use with co-workers. Upon successful completion of the course, you will be enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster. This includes a two-year Scrum Alliance membership, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information is available.

This date sold out! But find out more here: http://skillsmatter.com/course/agile-scrum/martine-devos-scrum-master/js-3637

That’s more than enough for one week!  As always, make sure you follow @skillsmatter and @jameschesters on Twitter in to join the discussion, and be the first to hear when the Skillscast videos are published.  We also have some special Twitter raffles next week, so keep your eyes peeled for a chance to win a place on some great events.  See you at Skills Matter next week.

An end to 2011 @skillsmatter

It’s a brand new year at Skills Matter — and having had such a busy end of 2011 this blog has been neglected. Slightly.  The good news is, there were some big events with videos you’re bound to want to watch. And share. And Tweet about.

 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!

Weekipedia: next week at #skillsmatter

  July is here and while the summer sun may be nowhere to be seen recently, Skills Matter is the hottest spot this side of Havana. Among the superstars coming to town next week is the infamous Robert C. Martin — known affectionately in the Agile world as “Uncle Bob”. Uncle Bob Martin will be delivering two expert training courses; his Software Craftmanship Clean Code workshop as well as his TDD and Refactoring course — as an added bonus, Uncle Bob is also giving an “In the Brain” seminar on the Last Programming Language. This seminar has been so popular we have had to close even the waiting list — but as with all our talks, it will be recorded and the Skillscast video available on the Skills Matter website the next day.

What else? Well, since you ask, we also have Scrum expert Mike Vizdos delivering the ever-popular Scrum Master certification, and the editor-in-chief of JSFCentral and “JavaServer Faces in Action” author Kito Mann giving a free talk on Polyglot Java Server Faces (a must for anyone with an interest in JSF and Java, Scala, Groovy or Ruby) as well as expert training in acclaimed JSF2 in Action.

It’s also a good week for Ruby users, since the London Ruby User Group (LRUG) hit Skills Matter on Monday night, to discuss using ruby to build high-profile applications for large organizations. Ruby developers may also be interested in joining us for Paul Ardeleanu’s two day workshop, giving an introduction to iOS development — Paul regularly speaks at the iPhone user group meetups at London’s iPhone store, so will be a familar face to many in the iOS community.

Just when you think Skills Matter must surely burst at the seams with all this going on, we are hosting CDI Europe’s “Apps for Good” Dragon’s Den event, where teams of Apps for Good students will present their final app ideas to a panel of high profile industry professionals. Apps for Good work with young people, helping them to create mobile and web apps that make their world better, focusing on solving real life issues that matter to them and their community. At Skills Matter, we can’t speak highly enough of the work Apps for Good do — and encourage everyone to get involved.

One of the country’s biggest and busiest user groups — the London Java Community — joins us at Skills Matter on Thursday night, with talks on the blazingly hot topic JVM Cloud Platforms — including WSO2 Stratos and Cloud Founry. And finally, not to be outdone, with our newest NoSQL user groups, the Hadoop User Group UK, will be getting into some Hadoop discussions.

With all the great stuff we have going on, it’s a wonder sometimes we ever make it home at all. Find out more below and sign up for the expert training and free events we have coming up this week.

Expert training: Michael Vizdos’ ScrumMaster Certification
2 days: Starts Monday, July 11th.
Book your place now

Expert training: Uncle Bob Martin’s Clean Code: Agile Software Craftsmanship
3 days: Starts Monday, July 11th.
Book your place now

FREE EVENT:London Ruby User Group: Ruby Gems
For July’s LRUG we have an unintentional theme of using ruby to build high-profile applications for large organizations.
June 11th: Sign up for free here: http://skillsmatter.com/event/ajax-ria/ruby-gems/

FREE EVENT:London Ajax User Group: Beyond Node.js
This month for the London Ajax User Group, we will have talks on Middleware for Node.js and Server-side JS, by Dylan Schiemann and Building real life applications with Node.js, by Darren Waddell.
July 12th: Sign up for free here: http://skillsmatter.com/event/ajax-ria/advanced-javascript-topics

FREE EVENT:Apps for Good: Dragons Den
Skills Matter is very proud to host the 3rd Apps for Good Dragons Den event, organised by Educational charity CDI Europe. This evening promises to be stimulating evening in the style of “Dragons’ Den” where teams of Apps for Good students will present their final app ideas to a panel of high profile industry professionals.
June 12th: Sign up for free here: http://dragonsden2011.eventbrite.com/

Expert training: Kito Mann’s JSF2 in Action
3 days: Starts Wednesday, July 13th.
Book your place now

FREE EVENT:
In The Brain of Kito Mann: Polyglot JavaServer Faces
In this talk, Kito Mann — editor-in-chief of JSFCentral and author of the popular book JavaServer Faces in Action — will look at different techniques for using other languages with JSF. We’ll look at built-in Groovy support in Mojarra, using Groovy as a DSL for JSF views with Gracelets, JRuby integration with Spring, and examine writing JSF applications with Scala.
June 11th: Sign up for free here: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/java-jee/polyglot-javaserver-faces-1911/js-2246/

FREE EVENT:
In The Brain of Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin), The Last Programming Language
In this talk, Uncle Bob addresses the question “Have we explored the language space”?. And if that’s the case, should we stop exploring that space, and simply pick “The Last Programming Language”?
June 13th: This talk is now full — but go here to watch the Skillscast video after the event: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/java-jee/bobs-last-language/js-2246
Expert training: Paul Ardeleanu’s Introduction to iOS Development
2 days: Starts Thursday, July 14th.

Book your place now
Expert training: Uncle Bob’s Test Driven Development and Refactoring
2 days: Starts Thursday, July 14th.
Book your place now

FREE EVENT:
London Java Community: JVM Cloud Platforms
July’s London Java Community (LJC) meeting will be on JVM Cloud Platforms, with talks coming from Paul Fremantle on WSO2 Stratos Cloud Platform, and Peter Leadbrook on Cloud Foundry.
June 14th: Sign up for free here: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/java-jee/polyglot-javaserver-faces-1911/js-2246/

FREE EVENT:Hadoop User Group UK: Hadoop Discussions
This month, the Hadoop User Group will have a discussion based session. This is your chance to discuss your experience and any issues you may have encountered.
June 14th: Sign up for free here: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/july-hadoop-discussions/js-2246/

Polyglot Java Server Faces #skillsmatter

It’s no secret that languages other than Java are gaining popularity on the Java Virtual Machine.

We often hear about how hot new languages — Groovy, Ruby, or Scala — can dramatically speed up development, and reduce boilerplate code.  What isn’t always clear is how to apply these languages to JavaServer Faces applications.

Help is at hand.  On July 13, at Skills Matter will be playing host to Kito Mann — editor-in-chief of JSFCentral and the popular author of JavaServer Faces in Action.  Kito will be delivering his JSF2 in Action course, but also giving the Skills Matter community a free “In the Brain” talk.

In this expert seminar, Kito Mann will take a close look at the different techniques for using other languages with JSF.  He will look at the built-in Groovy support in Mojarra, examine using Groovy as a DSL for JSF views with Gracelets, scrutinies JRuby integration with Spring, and pay close attention to writing JSF applications with Scala

There’s something for everyone: Groovy, Scala, Java, Ruby — and the rare opportunity to come to Skills Matter and ask your questions on JSF directly to the editor-in-chief of JSFCentral.

Get more info and sign up for this talk here: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/java-jee/polyglot-javaserver-faces-1911/js-432