LJC / GDC Events Round Up - Monday 14th February 2011

Here is a summary of the last weeks events at the London Java community, Graduate Developer community, DevTank, The London Lean Startup group and the Limited WIP Society.

Video of the week

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I recommend watching another animated video from The RSA.org called Language as a window on human nature. A humorous, interesting and timely video giving insight on the aspects of human nature that may be driving the events in Egypt at the moment. The video covers three main relationship types and the veiled language we sometimes use and why we use it.

Events coming up

Tuesday is social night for the LJC (including members from GDC,LSug,LCg,LtdWIPSoc), so I’m looking forward to meeting friends and making new ones. The porterhouse is a lovely pub with a great selection of beers and some really nice food. We have a large room at the back of the Porterhouse and there is a bit of a crystal maze to find it, so see the attached rough guide.

There is always a great mix of people at the social event, giving you an opportunity to talk about a wide range of topics from core java, how to get a job, functional programming with Scala/Clojure/Haskell, agile and lean practices. As an icebreaker and default theme we are talking about diversity in the IT world. If this is your first time at the social, we have greeters to help you meet people and feel welcome.

The GDC associates are also running a brainstorming session at the start of Tuesdays social to organise more events for the graduates on top of those already planned. If you want to have some direct input, then come along to the social at any time and see what we have come up with.

This Thursday is the London Scala user group coding dojo. This month we will be splitting into groups of 4 and working on a new problem. If you have not come the Scala dojo (or have been away for a while) its a good opportunity to join in. Free pizza and beer is kindly provided by Thoughtworks.

Since there are so many startups now in London, its not surprising that the Lean Startup group has become very popular. There is a great talk coming up by Benjamin Mitchell on March 1st. If you are involved in a startup or are thinking of setting up your own, this will be a very rewarding event. These talks fill up pretty quick, so if you are really interested then sign up soon.

My mugshot has been put up on the JAXLondon event site for my “Getting started with Clojure” talk. If you can prove to me you have viewed my bio, then I may buy you a pint at this weeks LJC social. Any constructive feedback is welcome.

Summary of Last weeks events

I ran a very enjoyable and educational kanban clinic last week and my thanks to everyone that came along. The evening was mainly spent around whiteboards and I divided the packed out room into three groups – beginners, intermediate and experienced. I walked through the basic kanban concepts with the beginners whilst the other two groups started to collaboratively design and enhance their own boards. I also presented my first iteration of “Subway as a Kanban”.

There was a great mixture of roles in the room, including devs / testers / pm’s / hr / recruitment / etc so there were lots of interesting questions and ideas floating around.

If you are interested in Kanban or are trying to improve the way you work, I have another session at the end of the month on how kanban can help change a “toxic cluture” in my talk titled Kanban Vs the MAFIA.

At DevTank last week there was a talk on how to engage with the (technical) media from Mike Butcher at TechCrunch. It seems journalists are flooded with information on a daily basis and it requires a lot of work to build up a good relationship and send them the right information in a timely way.

After eating from some very large pizza boxes and drinking some beer, thanks to sponsorship by Moo (who have some great business card designs), there was talk on Erlang. Erlang is another functional programming language that was developed by Ericsson and is still widely used in telecomms today. (who else is using Erlang..). The talk gave lots of useful info and tips on how (and why) to get started with Erlang…..

Unfortunately I was away and missed “Learning Clojure the dojo way”, so if anyone has a write up, I am sure we’d all be interested.

Thank you
@jr0cket

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