Rob-Harrop

Friday Round-Up: 7th – 11th of October

It’s been busy busy busy here at Skills Matter, we’ve kicked off our season of conferences with a Haskell shaped bang! Not only did we have the Haskell eXchange 2013 on Wednesday but also 3 fantastic ‘In The Brain’ sessions with the brilliant Rob Harrop, Peter Ledbrook and Robert Annett. All talks received fantastic turn outs even though the bitter cold now seems to be upon us in London! Here at Skills Matter we’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to this week’s events.

This week in Skillscasts

In The Brain of Rob Harrop: In this talk Rob demonstrated how to apply decades-old techniques from formal methods as the ideal tools for agile modelling. Rob presented a mathematical state model using the Z modelling language and a concurrency model using CSP.

In The Brain of Peter Ledbrook: Peter gave a fantastic talk on Open Source – thinking about the important questions that should be answered if you are to gain the benefits of open source and avoid any disappointment (do we yet understand how open source works? How is it funded? Is it a sustainable model? And how should we as developers approach open source?). Peter also spoke about how open source software cannot be treated as simply having no financial cost and that investment reaps rewards.

In The Brain of Robert Annett: Robert discussed and explored some of the issues of upgrading; maintaining or replacing many Java and .NET based systems that haven’t been touched in over a decade. He also provided some pointers on solving common problems.

Haskell eXchange 2013

The Haskell eXchange 2013

The Haskell conference on Wednesday went swimmingly. We had 7 enlightening talks from the great Simon Peyton Jones, Neil Mitchell, Adam Bergmark, Andres Loh, Gracjan Polak, Bas van Dij and Simon Marlow. If you missed the event don’t worry, we were live blogging throughout the day so you can catch up on the hour by hour events. Also all of the Skillscasts (film/slides/code) are now available on our website!

We’d like to say a gigantic thank you to all of our speakers and all of the delegates who contributed and attended, we couldn’t have done it without you. Why not secure your place for Haskell 2014? If this year is anything to go by it’s not to be missed! As an added bonus, the first 25 tickets for the 2014 eXchange are only £75!

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This Week at Skills Matter – In Pictures

Rob Harrop's In The Brain talk at Skills Matter

Check out the pictures from this weeks events on our Facebook page or our Google+ page.

Next week at Skills Matter
Monday: London Ruby User Group October meet-up
Tuesday: In The Brain of Martin Thompson
Wednesday: London Ajax User Group October meet-up, the Pentaho London User Group October meet-up & In The Brain of Andy Singleton
Thursday: London Java Community October meet-up & the Functional Londoners Group October meet-up

This Week at Skills Matter: 7th – 11th October

Here’s what’s coming up at Skills Matter this week!

Monday:

Rob Harrop will be giving a talk titled ‘Model like you mean it’ where he will robharropdemonstrate how to apply decades-old techniques from formal methods as the ideal tools for agile modelling. Using the STOMP messaging system as a use case, Rob will present a mathematical state model using the Z modelling language and a concurrency model using CSP. 

Tuesday:

On Tuesday Peter Ledbrook will be giving an insightful talk on ‘Open Source and You’. Open Source has been around for a long time, with perhaps it’s first formal appearance in the guise of the GNU project in 1983. 30 years later, do we yet understand how open source works? How is it funded? Is it a sustainable model? And how should we as developers approach open source?peter-ledbrook-x-large

These are important questions to answer if we are to gain the benefits of open source and avoid disappointment. With Peter Ledbrook you will learn that open source software cannot be treated as simply having no financial cost and that investment reaps rewards. Peter will also discuss how to get communities more active and engaged.

Thursday:

Our final In The Brain of the week will be from Robert Annett talking about ‘Modern Legacy Systems’. “Legacy System” conjures up images of a vast mainframe (with whirring tapes and flashing diodes) running COBOL programs in a basement. However, many current computing stacks are quite old andRobert Annett have many legacy implementations. Although Java/JVM is still at the cutting edge of innovation it’s a language and ecosystem that’s been around since 1995 (18 years) and C#/.NET is not much younger at 13 years old.
There are many Java and .NET based systems that haven’t been touched in over a decade, Robert will explore some of the issues of upgrading, maintaining or replacing them and provides some pointers on solving common problems.

As always, these evening events are free to attend. Simply visit the meeting page to register!

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Only 2 days left to grab your ticket for Haskell eXchange 2013!

Haskell exchange
The second edition of the Haskell eXchange returns to Skills Matter HQ on October 9th. This dedicated Haskell conference will pull together enthusiasts, developers, and thought leaders across the Haskell ecosystem. To keynote the conference we’re excited to announce that we’ve got Simon Peyton Jones! Alongside Simon we’ve secured talks from Simon Marlow, Neil Mitchell, and Andres Loh.

The day will be scattered with opportunities to meet others in the community, discuss new tools and hacks, and listen to the core committers of this Functional language. The Haskell eXchange will also feature a park bench discussion, allowing you to get a slew of opinions to your questions in person. Don’t miss out and book your tickets right here!

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?

April 30: In The Brain of Allan Kelly: The What and Why of AgileAllan 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 NewmanSam 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, London Java CommunityTest, 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.

May 1: In The Brain of Dmitry Buzdin: State of the Web. Sign up now.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.

In The Brain of Brian Sletten: Testing REST with BDDThe 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

Spring, Java and JEE: New Year courses

Happy New Year from Skills Matter and Amazon!

2010 is just around the corner.   Now is the perfect time to gain new skills and sharpen your competitive edge as an enterprise architect or developer, to become more productive on your current projects or to find greener pastures

To make the training opportunity a little more tempting, we are offering our community a Two-for-One Special if you book any of the following courses at least one month in advance.

In addition, if you book any of these courses before December 31, you will receive an Amazon Gift Certificate worth £100! As soon as the payment for your course has cleared, we will email your gift certificate. So get your skates on and start learning and earning!

How to claim: Simply enter promo code SM1339-623095-AMZ when you book your seat online and you will be entitled to a £100 Amazon gift certificate.

Terms:

  • The Gift Certificate will be assigned to the email address given for each delegate booked and will be sent once full payment of all course fees has been received.
  • The offer cannot be applied retrospectively to existing bookings.
  • The offer is only applicable if a valid promotion code is used when booking online.
  • Our standard terms and conditions of sale apply.
  • This offer is valid for the following courses: