London Events Round Up - Monday 21st March 2011

Events coming up

Tonight there is a great sounding talk on applying Lean and Agile practices in your company by an equally great speaker, Alan Shalloway. I’m looking forward to this talk as it makes a nice change for someone else other than myself to be talking about these important ideas.

Cuke Up is an all day acceptance testing conference with the project leaders and influential people behind Behaviour Driven Development, Cucumber and SpecFlow. If you want to extend your TDD approach, this is a great place to find out more.

I am trying to get a monthly Java practical session started (hopefully by May) were we spend a couple of hours practising TDD and/or BDD, similar to the coding dojos of the Python, Scala and Clojure communities. The practical events would also look at interesting API’s (eg. new stuff in Java7), open source tools and libraries (too many to mention) and getting the most out of the tools we use (IDE’s, Continuous Integration servers, build tools, etc). I am talking with with Oracle, IBM and SkillsMatter about possibly holding and sponsoring the event, but if anyone else is interested in helping out that would be great.

There is another full house at our re-run of the modern Java concurrency event. Its good to know we have found something or members are very interested in. If you want us to do more on concurrency or other subjects, please let us know.

I am really looking forward to meeting Ed Yourdon of “Death March” fame at the end of March. Ed is coming to SkillsMatter to give a talk on what has changed in IT projects since he wrote the book and I am really looking forward to this talk. Sign up quick, this is going to be great!! “Death march” projects have been all to familiar phenomenon since the beginning of the IT industry and Ed Yourdon’s book discusses them in detail. Some aspects of death-march projects have gotten better and others have gotten worse, since the onset of the current “Great Recession.” Ed will discuss these changes, with emphasis on changes in development practices, as well as a commentary about peopleware and modern collaboration tools.

News

The ServerSide Java Symposium is probably the biggest news recently in Java land. Our very own well grounded developers Martijn Verberg and Ben Evens have been over in Las Vegas speaking. They were given a slot next to James Gosling, so I am sure there was no pressure :-)

For those unfortunate not to make the event, there is a big batch of videos to TheServerSide Java Symposium conference coverage page, with lots of news and other coverage available. There was some live blogging going on too.

In other news, there was an interesting article on creating neural networks using Netbeans, I am sure my genetic algorithms course was never this easy :-)

Do you know the design patterns that are used in our Java JDK? Have a trip over to Java Code Geeks to find out if your right!

And finally, did anyone see a bigger moon over the weekend. It was a super full moon on Saturday 19th.

Summary of Last weeks events

There was a cross LJC/GDC event last night at UCL giving an introduction to test driven development, one of the most significant design practices in industry today. I gave a short presentation on TDD practices and why they are valuable to delivering a good solution, discussing the idea of TDD as a design tool and only testing code as a consequence. The short presentation was followed by over an our of people working together on a set challenge, using the test first approach. It was great to see such a buzz of discussion going on and people pairing and grouping up, I had trouble getting most people to stop so we could clear the lecture theatre and go to the pub. Thanks to everyone that came along and hope to see you at the LJC Java dojo we are planning or at the TDD/BDD half day workshop I am running on the 17th May as part of the London Tester Gathering days.

On Monday 14th I ran a workshop on distributed versus centralised version control, comparing git / mercurial / bazaar with subversion. The workshop was mainly aimed at students and graduates and all the information is on the tooling up website. I am planning a more advance workshop which will cover more aspects of distributed version control systems (DVCS) and some insight on moving from subversion to Git / Mercurial.

Adrian, one of the members of the GDC had there first book review published on Slashdot.org, with the help of my Slashdot book review submission guide. Thanks to Packt Publishing for supplying the Solr 1.4 Enterprise search book.

There was another successful Scala coding dojo where I set a St Patrick day theme. The challenge was to create a series of maze rooms linked together by doors. Once you created three or more rooms you could place a pint of Guinness in one of the rooms for your leprechaun to find. Some of the code is available at the LSug Assembla.com online git repository.

I was lucky enough to make it to the functional programming Exchange at SkillsMatter last Friday. I had a great day and learnt a lot more about functional programming and am even more hooked on learning Haskell now, although it will have to wait until my JAX London talk on Clojure. There was a very entertaining and enlightening talk by Simon Penton-Jones on parallelism and all the amazing things they have been doing with Haskell. It seems Haskell is the really research bed of modern functional language development, with much of the work Simon is doing going into languages such as F#. There was a great presentation by Jonas Boner on the Akka framework, an effective and performant way to manage state in an immutable functional world. Jonas was talking about how writing correct concurrent, fault-tolerant and scalable applications is no longer a problem that is too hard when you use the right tools. David Pollak gave lots of info about all the improvements and additions in the Lift framework (a Ruby/Rails style web framework for Scala) as well as lots of future plans for Lift. David really knows his stuff and there were some very detailed banter between David and Simon. The Lift web framework embraces Scala’s functional side and provides transformations from web requests to responses, a transformation-based templating system, and Ajax support via functions. As an example of Lift, David wrote a session aware chat client with a single Scala class managing the shared state of the chat server. You’d be challenged to write something terser in Ruby.

If you have write-ups of any events, please let the list know or send them directly to me.

Thank you
@jr0cket

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