London Developer Events Round Up - Monday 31st January 2011

Events coming up

The GDC are running our first “tooling up” event this year at University College London on the evening of 14th March. I will be discussing the differences between Subversion and Git (Mercurial, Bazaar) and helping graduates understand the choices they have and some of the implications of that choice.

Attendees have the opportunity to follow along as I show you how you can easily use free online repositories (Git, Subversion, Mercurial) for your projects to share your code with others.

I will also cover how version control fits in to and is affected by an agile software development approach. Hope to see you there and bring your laptop (or pair up on the night) if you want to follow along.

Next week is a great experience report from Bruce During and Robert Rees on how they and others have learnt Clojure, a functional programming language, using the deliberate practice technique of a coding dojo. Having been to many dojos, I can say that they are great fun (especially the Scala one) and a really effective way to learn. The sign-up page for this months Clojure coding dojo is also online now.

Tony Bruce is taking over SkillsMatter for a day packed with workshops of all types on the 17th May. Entry is free and there will be a wide range of practical sessions, covering topics from agile testing, continuous integration, open source software, exploratory testing and more. I will be running a workshop on continuous integration with Jenkins. If you want to get involved in running the workshops, volunteer to help out on the day, sponsor the event or just come along and see what’s happening, have a look at the event web page or get in touch with Tony Bruce.

The LJC are running our most popular event so far, Modern Java Concurrency. Unfortunately the venue cant support every one so perhaps if we are all nice to Ben Evans in the pub on the 15th and buy him lots of drinks he will consider running the talk again.

QUESTION 1: Are there any other popular subjects that you want the LJC or GDC to talk about?

I’ll be heading of to the Python coding dojo this Tuesday evening where plans are afoot to build a gaming engine for inter-coding dojo competitions. Something that we hope will bring the Python, Clojure and Scala closer (or possibly more healthy rivalry). The idea is that different dojo groups would write “bots” based on the rules of the gaming engine, sending there instructions over XMPP messaging. A Mojo Dojo Rumble!!

QUESTION 2: Are people interested in attending a Java coding dojo on a monthly basis? Do you want to practice your TDD and team-working skills in a language you already know :-)

Finally, the Cuke Up one day conference is currently accepting talk proposals for the event on 24th March at SkillsMatter. A very interesting day for covering tools and techniques to help ensure you are writing the right software and that software is testable. Aslak Hellesøy, the creator of the popular Cucumber BDD tool is leading the day and there should be a great mix of people and technology.

Summary of Last weeks events

The Clojure coding dojo was a great success. This time we did things a little different and broke up into four different teams all working on the same problem and coming up with some quite different solutions.

A simple dice roll kata was used as the problem and we spent about an hour coding, with each member of the team taking their turn at the keyboard. The team I was part of was a great mixture of new people and more experience Clojure developers, so lots of learning was had by all. All the Clojure code and tests are on the github repository.

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