London Developer Events Round Up - Monday 21st February 2011

Events coming up

I’m looking forward to another London Clojure coding dojo (now full), the last one was great fun and I will try and practice some more TDD/BDD in clojure this week. The format of the dojo has changed and makes it easier to get more involved. Rather than have two people at a time with everyone watching, everyone is now split into groups of four, having there own mini-dojo, with all groups working on the same project. There is a quick show-n-tell session at the end so the groups can show each other what they have done.

Whats happening in Java

It would seem that Oracle lawyers are worried about shipping JUnit with Netbeans and have advised the netbeans team to no longer ship JUnit with netbeans 7. If anyone knows what the problem is behind this then I am sure we’d be interested to hear. The netbeans team do have a very simple way of allowing you to add JUnit when you first run netbeans, so its not a big issue in my book (yet).

Interesting video of the week

There is an interesting TED talk on how architects have learnt to build complex structures by looking at nature. I think is an interesting talk that helps you understand the thought processes of architects and encourages you to think outside of the box. I hope you enjoy this talk at TEDSalon in London by Michael Pawlyn describes three habits of nature that could transform architecture and society: radical resource efficiency, closed loops, and drawing energy from the sun.

Summary of Last weeks events

Tuesday was another very successful social night for the LJC (and GDC,LSug,LCg,LtdWIPSoc). In case you missed the event, I did a quick write up of the night on the LJC blog.

Great fun was had at the London Scala coding dojo last week. As with the Clojure and Python dojos, the scala dojo has also switched to running the dojo as groups. So once all the pizza was eaten we chose a problem for the evening and split up into groups. The problem chosen was the Roman Numberals calculator and there were some interesting approaches - as can be seen on the LSug Assembla online git repository.

If you have write-ups of any events, please let the list know.

Thank you.
@jr0cket


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Kanban Elevator Pitch

My elevator pitch for kanban would be along the following lines..

“Kanban is a way to incrementally and continually improve your approach to meeting your goals, by understanding the situation clearly, identifying the real challenges and testing out your chosen options for resolving those challenges.”

As with everything Lean and Agile, this elevator pitch will most likely evolve and can be made more specific depending on different audiences, but I am fairly happy with this general pitch.

Thank you.
@jr0cket


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Summary of LJC February 2011 Social

I had a great time at the social event for the London Java community, which also had people visiting from the Graduate Developer, London Python, London Clojure, London Scala, Limited WIP society and Ubuntu-UK communities.

A write up of some of my experiences that fateful evening are on the London Java Community blog.

Thank you.
@jr0cket


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket
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Inkscape Essentials for Web Designers

Inkscape is an open source 2D drawing tool that helps you create graphic designs, from simple buttons and logos to full blown posters and web page designs. Inkscape is similar to Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw and gives you a vector based graphics tool that uses the W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.

Inkscape is easy to use, although learning the tricks that make designing a web site look great are more involved. Here is a book review for a new book about Inkscape.

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