Watch all the videos from DDD eXchange 2012 at Skills Matter here

Another DDD eXchange has come and gone at Skills Matter, and our warm thanks go to the godfather of DDD, Eric Evans, for his help in putting together a fantastic event and sponsorship from Domain Language.

If you weren’t there, do you know what you missed?  Let me tell you!  Of course, you missed Eric Evans — our host, compere, and keynote speaker, you missed Greg Young, you missed Dan Haywood, and you missed  Alberto Brandolini.  You missed the excitement of two park bench panel discussions, hosted by Zi Makki.  You missed Cyrille Martraire, you missed Paul Rayner, and did I mention Eric Evans?

You can watch all the videos below:
Eric Evans: Opening & Welcome
Greg Young on Functional Programming with DDD
Dan Haywood on Restful Objects – A Hypermedia API For Domain Object Models
Alberto Brandolini on Why do all my DDD applications look the same?
Zi Makki hosts Park Bench Panel Discussion # 1
Cyrille Martraire on Applying DDD in a legacy application
Paul Rayner on Domain Scenarios to Drive Modelling Whirlpool
Eric Evans on Case Study Involving Strategic Design And Established Formalisms
Zi Makki hosts Park Bench Panel Discussion #2

We are also very excited to announce Skills Matter will continue our partnerhsip with Eric Evans for the fifth annual DDD eXchange! Coming June 14, 2013 — the first 50 tickets are on sale now for just £50.

Our summer of Architecture continues — check out the free events at Skills Matter from our DDD experts, including Eric Evans, Udi Dahan, Greg Young, Andreas Ohlund, Simon Brown and Alberto Brandolini. Read about it here, or check out our full programme of DDD & Architecture events here

Summer of Architecture 2012 @skillsmatter

The sun is out and here at Skills Matter HQ we’re watching out eagerly for the ice cream man — but even more exciting than an ice cream with a flake in it is the big names in Domain Driven Design, CQRS and Software Architecture that we have coming to join us over the coming weeks and months.

We’ve lined up a steady flow of architecture rock stars for the summer, including headliners Udi Dahan, Greg Young and Eric Evans, supported by experts Simon Brown, Andreas Ohlund and Alberto Brandolini to provide an exciting range of talks, discussions and practical workshops on all things architecture.

The only thing we’re missing is you — we’d love to see you soon!

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

Weekipedia — this week and next @skillsmatter 26 August

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 Brain 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.

.NET and Functional Programming at #skillsmatter

There are some fantastic and thrilling developments within .net and Functional Programming. And this newsletter is here to bring you the low-down on the many courses, conferences, SkillsCasts and User Groups we’ve assembled for you coming up over the next few weeks. We are hosting two conferences Progressive .Net Tutorials and Progressive F# Tutorials. We have a cornucopia of courses by Sebastien Lambla, Udi Dahan, David Laribee, Greg Young, Sebastien again, this time leading a course authored by Ayende Rahien, and Phil Trelford and Tomas Petricek. There are In The Brains from Miles Sabin, Robert Pickering and a Q&A session with Udi Dahan, plus meet-ups of the F#unctional Londoners and London .Net User Group.

For those not familiar with the format, the Progressive Tutorials comprise a collection of 4-hour hands-on Workshops which provide a deep dive into the inner workings of the specified technologies. We include a liberal dash of Agile and Software Craftsmanship-based to keep things growing. Expect in-depth, hands-on tutorials run by real experts who are there to be quizzed, questioned and interrogated until you know as much they do, or thereabouts!

PROGRESSIVE .NET TUTORIALS – 5th-7th SEPT 2011

We’re very excited to be hosting the Progressive .Net Tutorials, which will feature the leading experts in .Net and related topics. Led by Ian Cooper, the Tutorials will take place here Skills Matter eXchange on the 5th and 7th September, 2011.

Running over three days, with two tutorials per track per day, these 12 magnificent tutorials will feature experts like Sebastien Lambla, Dylan Beattie, Simon Brown, Ian Robinson, Gaspar Nagy, Christian Hassa, Steven Robbins, Jon Skeet, Mark Rendle, Adam Granicz, Paul Stack and Damjan Vujnovic and promises to be a wonderful three days of learning.

Check out our Progressive .Net Tutorials page for speaker updates and programme developments. And use Twitter tag #prognet11 for event updates and discussions related to this exciting event.  Tickets are now on sale at a fantastic price of £425 but they are going fast so you need to get in there quickly.

PROGRESSIVE F# TUTORIALS – 3rd-4th NOV 2011

We’re very excited to be hosting the Progressive F# Tutorials, which will feature the leading experts in F#, Functional Programming and related topics. Led by Phil Trelford, the Tutorials will take place here Skills Matter eXchange on the 3rd and 4th November, 2011.

Running over two days, with two tutorials per track per day, these 8 magnificent tutorials will feature experts of the magnitiude of Robert Pickering, Mark Needham, Tomas Petrycek, Zack Bray, Chris Marinos and Dave Thomas and promises to be a wonderful two days of learning.  Check out our Progressive F# Tutorials page for speaker updates and programme developments. And use Twitter tag #progf11 for event updates and discussions related to this exciting event.  Tickets are now on sale at a fantastic Early Bird price of £225, but that runs out on 24th August so you need to get in there quickly.

If you can’t make it, follow events in Almost-Real-Time, as our much-feted team of SkillsCasters get the SkillsCasts up online before the speaker can return to their seat to contemplate a job well done.

Aside from conferences and tutorials, we also have a bustling list of some exciting courses, workshops and tutorials lined-up for the next few months:

Udi Dahan’s Advanced Distributed Systems Design with SOA – Sept 12-16

This very intensive 5-day workshop will help you take the pain out of designing large-scale distributed systems. New technologies make it easier to comply with todayís communications and security standards, but they won’t magically provide you with a robust and scalable system. Join Udi for a course packed with the wisdom of companies like SUN, Amazon and eBay. Tried-and-true theories and fallacies will be shown, helping you to avoid costly mistakes. Communications patterns like publish/subscribe and correlated one-way request/response will be demonstrated, in conjunction with advanced object-oriented state management practices for long-running workflows. If you enjoy deep architectural discussion, join! To find out more, please go here

David Laribee’s Leading Lean/Agile Teams – Sept 14-15

Successful product teams need a generalist who can help teams come together and perform – a leader who can bring a holistic toolkit to the whole team, customer and programmer alike. In this two day workshop, attendees will be introduced to a series of collaborative practices that ensure user-centred products, lightweight, useful processes and technical excellence. This course is appropriate for developers, technical leads, architects and coaches. Find out more here

Udi Dahan’s Enterprise Development with NserviceBus – Sept 21-23

This course teaches you all the ins-and-outs of NServiceBus – the most popular, open-source service bus for .NET. 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.  This course will be led by Andreas Ohlund.  To find out more, and to book, please go here.

Ayende Rahien’s NHibernate 3.0 Workshop – Sept 27-30

In this 4-day NHibernate 3.0 workshop, authored by Ayende Rahien and Sebastien Lambla, you will learn how to use this O/R mapping tool efficiently in your applications to save time and effort on communicating with database storage. During the course we build a practical application together, that demonstrates all important data management patterns in Nhibernate.

Learn how to: Configure NHibernate for your applications; Manage sessions and transactions; Map objects and collections to database structures; Build large scale and performant applications; Utilize best practices and patterns; Avoid common pitfalls and mistakes; and Create efficient NHibernate applications.  Get more info and book your seat  while you still can — go here.

Greg Young’s CQRS, Domain Events, Event Sourcing and how to apply DDD – Oct 3-5

This 3-day CQRS course covers Domain Events, Event Sourcing and how to apply DDD. Join to learn all about system building and architectures with Domain Driven Design. The largest problem many run into with Domain Driven Design is in getting the abstract concepts implemented in a concrete way. Many of the stereotypical architectures people use actually make it impossible to apply DDD. Greg’s course will help you avoid this. To find out more, please go here

Tomas Petricek & Phil Trelford’s Functional Programming in .NET – Oct 10-11

Tomas Petricek’s and Phil Trelford’s two-day Functional Programming in .NET course explains concepts that you need to write modern applications for .NET using F#, C# with LINQ as well as current and upcoming .NET technologies that arise from functional programming ideas.

Learning several simple functional concepts will help you understand these technologies and use them effectively. This means that the course will make you a better programmer even if you’re not going to immediately start using F#. This course is based on experience of developing commercial applications in F# and will discuss good ways of introducing F# to your daily work. Find out more here

Phil Trelford is also the programme lead for the Progressive F# Tutorials.

Sebastien Lambla’s Building REST Architectures on .NET Course – Oct 16-18 – London

In this 3-day Building REST Architectures on .NET course, you will learn about Representational State Transfer, the architecture of the web, and how you can implement such an architecture for your own solution, not only for your web sites, but also for your services. Through the use of OpenRasta, youíll gain practical experience in designing and developing a real application end-to-end. To find out more, please go here

The Skills Matter User Group Programme is most representative of Skills Matter’s commitment to the developer community. Anywhere up to 40 User Groups call the Skills Matter their home. Featured here are just two – the F#unctional Londoners and London .NET User Group.

F#unctional Londoners UK User Group

F#unctional Londoners aims to bring together Londoners with an interest in functional programming with F#.
Topics include:

– Essentials of functional programming and F#

– Assessing what kind of projects F# is well suited for – or not

– Using F# alongside other languages and libraries

– Asynchronous and parallel programming

– Data visualisation

– Scientific programming

– Numerical methods and optimisation

– Financial modelling

Here are a few choice SkillsCasts from recent F#unctional Londoners events:

• Gian Ntzik: F# in the Cloud
• Andrew Kennedy: Units of Measure in F#
• Kit Eason: Evangelising F# within your organisation
• Don Syme: A Taste of F# Today

Sign up now for the next F#unctional Londoners UG meeting on 16th August 2011, which will feature Gary Short on  Applied F.  Find out more about the F#unctional Londoners.

London .NET User Group

The London .NET user group was established in 2002 to provide developers working with Microsoft’s .NET framework with access to the latest and best information. Join the multitude of .Net developers who attend the London .NET User Group here at Skills Matter.

Here are a selection of SkillsCasts of recent London .Net User Group talks:

• Andrew Davey: Restoring sanity to JavaScript development
• Gojko Adzic: Long Term Value of Acceptance Tests
• Adrian Longley: Browser Automation with Teeth

News of the next London .NET User Group will appear here.

The In The Brains programme is a constant work in progress. No sooner will we have sent this newsletter out that we will have another handful of great talks which would have fitted in perfectly.

Keep checking the website or follow #dotnetsm, #fsharpsm and #skillsmatter on Twitter for regular updates!

As well as our regular User Groups, we also have our experts generously giving up their time while they are at Skills Matter to deliver our free “In the Brain” seminars.  Who is coming in the near future, you ask?  Wel, there is…

In The Brain of Miles Sabin, Encoding unboxed union types in Scala, Aug 16

Talk: Encoding unboxed union types in Scala

Speaker: Miles Sabin

Date: Aug 16, 2011, 18:30-20:00

Get more details & sign up here.

In The Brain of Robert Pickering, The Combinator Approach to Programming Domain Specific Languages with F#, Aug 23

Talk: The Combinator Approach to Programming Domain Specific Languages with F#

Speaker: Robert Pickering

Date: Aug 23, 2011, 18:30-20:00

Get more details & sign up here.

In The Brain of Udi Dahan, Q & A with Udi Dahan, Sep 13

Talk: Q & A with Udi Dahan

Speaker: Udi Dahan

Date: Sep 13, 2011, 18:30-20:00

Get more details & sign up here.

One of the great things about our free talks is they are all recorded by our skillful SkillsCasters.  What makes them so great is that they can be enjoyed again and again on our website following the event.  Great events can be relived, missed events can be caught up with — by signing up and coming along on the night, or by watching the videos on the Skills Matter website and sharing them via the social media buttons, you support the Skills Matter commuity, and in your own way help Skills Matter to keep.running these events.

Here is a small selection of SkillsCasts to get you started!

• Gian Ntzik: F# in the Cloud
• Andrew Kennedy: Units of Measure in F#
• Kit Eason: Evangelising F# within your organisation
  
• Don Syme: A Taste of F# Today
• Andrew Davey: Restoring sanity to JavaScript development
• Gojko Adzic: Long Term Value of Acceptance Tests
• Adrian Longley: Browser Automation with Teeth

There are hundreds more on the Skills Matter web site, so dive in and learn, use what you’ve learned to innovate, and as with everything we do if you like what you see, and enjoy this blog, and you like what Skills Matter do, please share it with others!