Some conferences are huge, some are very social, some are highly technical. DesignIt, BuildIt was the most creative and moving of experiences I’ve had in a long while. It has really inspired me to add so much more creativity to my coding projects.

There were some amazing speakers at this years DiBi, split into Developer and Design tracks. I took the opportunity to delve into the design track and learnt so much more than I can capture in one blog. So here is the first highlight from what I felt were the most passionate speakers.

@seb_ly - Hybridify yourself

Seb Lee-Delisle opened the day by making is all think about the possibilities when you combine creative design with technology.

JavaScript has really evolved to be a highly productive tool, when coupled with graphics tools like Processing and WebGL some amazing games and animations can be created really easily. For examples, take a peak at creativejs.com, creativecodeingprodcast.com and OpenProcessing.org.

With these kinds of tools at hand, there is no reason designers and coders shouldn’t code their own creative works. Althought there is still a big gap between these two disciplines, even at the DiBi conference there was The valley of incomprehension, with most people defining themselves as either designers or developers. Seb encourages us all to be a bit more of a creative coder!

coder + designer == creative coder

Seb also reminded us how easy it is to code something creative, with just one line of code on a commodore 64 emulator. Taking this further with code.seb.ly and 10 minutes of live creative coding in JavaScript, Seb created an eye-catching visuals that responded to mouse control and gravity.

Most coders get into it because they want to play games they create. Its much easier to create games than you think. When you get designers and coders working together it improves the communication and helps share skills. Designers discover much more when they learn to code. More importantly, working together helps share ideas; if designers and coders work together they can implement ideas in the easiest possible way.

Developers find the creative process hard, as many are too used to thinking literally. The more developers are part of the creative process, the more appreciation they will gain for it.

Developers should take the time to play with visuals more, start with small ideas and playing with tutorials to learn how to draw with code. By looking at the examples at communities like OpenProcessing it will help inspire coding towards more creative goals and help give software an experience that people have real affinity for.

In the next blog about DiBi12 I’ll cover Dan Ruben (Moo) and Cameron Moll. Both inspired in very different ways.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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Through my work with Atlassian I had the great fortune to visit their headquarters in Sydney this January, height of the summer in Austraila. Here is what happend.

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Talks at technical conferences can give a very detailed insight into new innovations, they be a great source of inspiration and motivation. Sometimes they even make you giggle.

At QCon London I got large doses of all of the above, thanks to Rich Hickey, Dan North (DWZ Trading), Colin Humpreys (Carrenza), Ade Oshineye (Google) and Patrick Debois (father of DevOps, working with Atlassian). Here is a summary of my experiences.

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Talks at technical conferences can give a very detailed insight into new innovations, they be a great source of inspiration and motivation. Sometimes they even make you giggle.

At QCon London I got large doses of all of the above, thanks to Rich Hickey, Dan North (DWZ Trading), Colin Humpreys (Carrenza), Ade Oshineye (Google) and Patrick Debois (father of DevOps, working with Atlassian).As I didnt make the training days this year, I was sad to miss out on the tutorials by Simon Brown, Russ Miles and Rachel Davies which all looked great.

My favourite talk was definitely the “Cloud… so much more than a tool“ by Patrick Debois. Not only was it an interesting experience report on the realities of using Cloudy technology to build a highly scalable video broadcasting service, it was also the best use of LolCats I have ever seen… ever…

@jr0cket: @patrickdebois has the best cat based slides ever - even better than @swardley which is saying something #qconlondon

Dan North was a cheeky a rascal as ever, actually making the audience think! At a conference! Oh, the humanity! Colin Humphrey from UK Atlassian partner Carrenza gave an overview of the fantastic build pipeline they create for their customers, along with insight into the business drivers of using such a build pipeline with respect to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions.

jr0cket Adoption of continuous delivery is becoming ubiquitous, companies asking @Carrenza to deliver this via Platform as a Service @hatofmonkeys #qconlondon

I had the pleasure of listening to Ade Oshineye sharing his experiences when developing Google Buzz & Google plus and how understanding how someone is going to use your code is very important when developing a public API, you cant just expect them to know everything you know.

Atlassian also realised the importance of the developer experience as it helps engage with the wider community of developers as well as our own teams, enabling them to start developing amazing plug-ins quickly. The last year has seen some real usability improvements to the Atlassian SDK and our Atlassian Developers website and with JIRA 5.0 we have a stable API that is guaranteed future proof for all future 5.x versions.

Everyone had great fun at the Atlassian party on the Wednesday night and very large Cenral Hall building was bursting at the seams.

Organising the Atlassian party was a nice little challenge as the hall was massive and I had very welcome help from our UK partners: Gareth Wilson (Adaptavist) and Matthew Buckland (Clearvision).

There was a great spread of food, although we did tease people a little by it coming out in stages! There was also a great selection of beers, not just bottled larger. There was everything from Newcastle Brown, John Smiths, Spitfire, a nice range of largers and even some wine at the request of Trisha Gee.

QCon London 2012 - Pictures from the Atlassian Party

Find out other great events and party’s Atlassian are involved with on our Events List.

Thank you
@jr0cket

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Distributed version control systems such as Git, Mercurial and Bazaar have grown in adoption over the last few years, mainly by the desire of the technical communities to share code in services such as GitHub and Bitbucket. This growing familiarity with DVCS has been seeping into the Enterprise and development teams in organisations large and small are starting to adopt these tools.

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The coldest night in London of 2012 so far was the warm up to a symphony of music by a collection of unstoppable Clojure hackers. As it was my first hackday with Overtone there was lots of new things to learn, from setting up the environment to a whole load of interesting music theory.

I also have Gnossiennes No.1 by Erik Satie on an endless loop in my head after having fun playing around with a piano synthesiser.

I cant really cant do justice to how much fun it is working with Overtone. Its like getting your hands on a Stylophone for the first time, just after seeing Rolf Haris demo it on TV! The only difference being you can make much better music with Overtone.

There is something just so ultimately geeky and fun in creating music using a functional programming language like Clojure.

I first tried Overtone at a London Clojurian coding dojo and with the help of the rest of the team we were quickly creating weird and wonderful sounds - although not quite in the same leaguge of

Thanks to some great documentation on the overtone github site it was pretty easy to set up my lubuntu laptop with an audio server, Overtone server and a nice lightweight clojure development environment (emacs, leiningen). I am afraid it will take me a bit longer to absorb music theory!

Setting up the audio for Overtone

In order to get sounds out of your overtone project on Linux, you need to add a few packages.

sudo apt-get install jack-tools ant openjdk-6-jdk fftw3 qjackctl

As you grow your overtone project you may want to switch to a linux kernel set up for real time processing, but to start with this is not necessary. If you do get more involved projects, its probably a good idea to also look at Ubuntu studio which provides a great selection of audio, video and graphics tools.

_Mac OSX already has a suitable sound server, so nothing extra is required. If you are using windows, overtone is supported also (not sure if you need to set anything up though).

Create a new overtone project

An overtone project is just like any other clojure project, with the overtone dependency added.

Create a new clojure project with your build management tool of choice: maven, cake or leiningen. I used leiningen as my tool of choice.

lein new tutorial

Add the Overtone dependencies to the project configuration file tutorial/project.clj

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(defproject tutorial "1.0"
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.3.0"]
                 [overtone "0.6.0"]])

With the overtone dependencies added to the project file, used leiningen to download the jars that make up overtone itself.

lein deps

Leiningen will download about 16 jar files for overtone 0.6.0 and places them in the project lib folder. This gives you all the libraries you need to start creating things in overtone, including an appropriate version of clojure.

Fire up your environment

Emacs not only has great support for the Clojure language, its a great way to try out your code by evaluating individual functions (s-expressions).

My preferred way to launch emacs is to change directory to the project top level and fire off emacs with the project file

emacs project.clj &

Using the dynamic environment of Clojure, the REPL, is a great time saver for trying out functions as well as running your project code. To fire up a repl inside emacs I use the new emacs 24 approach, running Meta-x (clojure-jack-in) to start up and connect to a repl using the underlying lein project file.

Meta-x (clojure-jack-in)

I have set up a keyboard shortcut of C-c C-j to make this even easier.

Starting Overtone

For my initial experiments I run an overtone server on my laptop, that way I can also play on the train home. You can also use an external overtone server called the SuperCollider (no not the LHC)

In the repl, I fired up the internal server (dont try to fire off both servers in the same repl, it crashed my repl)

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(use 'overtone.live) 
          _____                 __
         / __  /_  _____  _____/ /_____  ____  ___
        / / / / | / / _ \/ ___/ __/ __ \/ __ \/ _ \
       / /_/ /| |/ /  __/ /  / /_/ /_/ / / / /  __/
       \____/ |___/\___/_/   \__/\____/_/ /_/\___/

                          Programmable Music. v0.6

Hello jr0cket, may this be the start of a beautiful music hacking session...
nil
``` 

# Defining my first instrument

I soon discovered that it does take a little time to build your instruments.  Its like any good programming challenge, there are many ways to do things and there are always lots of surprises.  Reading the [getting started guide](https://github.com/overtone/overtone/wiki/Getting-Started) helped me with my first instrument.

(definst annoying-tone [] (saw 220))

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This is a simple and rather annoying tone that uses the saw function to create the sound. To play the sound I simply call its name:

(annoying-tone)
`

The easiest way to end your experiment in sound quickly is to use the (stop) function.

Quickly testing out your instruments with emacs

Many cool things were done at the hack day and it was great fun to play with the Ableon Novation Lauchpad. Its a midi controller that can be used to help you play your instruments and make it easier to turn overtone into a song maker.

I got as far as creating a few basic instruments and borrowing a few others, such as the one to create Jingle Bells!

Thanks to Phil Potter for having the energy to organise this event, Thoughtworks for supporting us with the venue and everyone there for making it a great day.

To have a whole day focused on overtone really helped me accomplish something and its going to be easier now to keep the learning going. All my experiments are now uploaded to my github account.

Hope you find the time to make music with Clojure and Overtone, you will love it.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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It a little soon to be choosing my favouite event of 2012 but MonkiGras London is going to be a hard act to follow.

Monkigras London had such a diverse range of topics, a great line up of speakers, great party games and a host who had so much passion and enthusiasm share. It certainly was the most thrilling of conferences to experience. Here are the parts that stood out the most.

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Thousands of developers flocked to Devoxx again this year and everyone I talked to really enjoyed the wide range of talk and the comfy chairs in the venue.

Its hard to do justice to the experience in a blog post, so here are highlights of my favourite Devoxx speakers

Dick Wall and the Java Posse

Have these guys reached legendary status yet? For a number of reasons I think they should - just for being out there and getting people motivated they deserve a medal (or just lots of free beer from Atlassian).

Dick Wall followed up with what seemed to be top attended session of the conference. He talked about slaying legends (ironic considering my last statement) and encouraging people to think for themselves - I know, radical stuff!

The diabolical developer also made an appearance with Trisha Gee and the Java Duchess crew speaking on how not to treat women in IT.

pawelwrzeszcz Trisha’s Ramblings: Why We Shouldn’t Target Women - really good summary of the discussion panel at @devoxx

Kevin Nilson and Stephen Chin pair presenting on JavaFX and HTML5

Its always a great learning experience when developers pair, so pairing to give a session always gives you that extra dimention. Watching these two present was fascinating and fun!

The guys gave honest and open comparison of JavaFX which most people thought was dead but seems alive and well and HTML - humour was about and no ego was on display.

Alex Miller @PureDanger

Alex did a great job druming up even more interest in Clojure and gave some facinting insights into the language. His first talk was aimed at getting people started with Clojure and I was great to see different ways of getting Clojure concepts across. I am doing a quick refactor of my Clojure talk for the LJC conference this weekend.

@devstonez Stream Execution with Clojure and Fork/Join slides - #clojure #fp #jvm #devoxx @puredanger

Unfortunatley we didnt get chance to pair up and do some Clojure coding together, too many great conversations got in the way.

Justin Septka - Atlassian

Justin gave a great talk on DVCS and understanding how to get the most out of Git in your own teams. Git is relatively new to most teams and using services like Bitbucket and Github can give developers a lot of power to manage their code effectively.

Lots of advice was given out on how to manage your repos and how to use pull requests to manage feature branching and other aspects of continuous deliver & deployment. Its worth checking out the video on Parleys if you want to know more.

Its great to see speakers getting feedback and there was a huge queue of people lined up to speak to Justin afterwards.

Thank you

Adaptavist guys fired up some Microsoft Kinect love on all the big tv’s outside the talk theatres. Dan Hardiker went above and beyond the call of duty and dressed up as a very large Java Duke for the afterparty. He seems is a good dancer when dressed up!

Thanks to Stephan and everyone else (too numerous to mention) that help put Devoxx together. I am really looking forward to the next one, whether that be in France or Brazil?

houdini68 Thanks to Stephan and to all the people who turned #devoxx into a success !!! One week in paradise ! See you next year !

odersky: Slides from my talk at #devoxx slidesha.re/rtcEJL

TomaszDziurko: I’ve just posted my relation from #Devoxx 2011 on my blog - bit.ly/sF79hm

planetsizebrain apparently a running joke at #devoxx 2011: Q: What’s the difference between Ant and Maven? A: The creator of Ant has apologized.”

jthoenes: Devoxx 2011 - I’ve been in Paradise » Johannes Thönes

devstonez: JavaCodeGeeks Devoxx 2011 Impressions

Thank you.
jr0cket

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CITCon is the most intense event I know on the subject continuous integration, continuous deployment / delivery and DevOps. Discussion raged on throughout the day although we manage to keep it to minor scuffles when talking about feature branching…

With so many ideas to process after the event, here are my top 7 to start with.

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JAX London is over for another year and many of the community developers I know are suffering withdrawal symptoms from such an intense few days. With two days of talks and a whole day of workshops my head is bursting with new ideas.

I met lots of interesting new people from all over the place, asked some challenging questions of some great speakers and community leaders, got some great books and a couple of JAX London tshirts for my collection

Going Mobile

Ted Neward gave me a great kick-start to Android development and pairing with the diabolical developer helped cement my understanding. He was not so diabolical after all, maybe its just an act !

Software development is rarely straight forward, but with a couple of downloads from the Android developer site and a USB cable from my Ubuntu laptop to my Samsung Galaxy II Android phone I was soon testing out my first app.

The android development tools are really easy to use and do all the build and deploy work for you. The only issue I got stuck on was having an android virtual device and real device (my phone) up and running at the same time. Using an Android virtual device (AVD) you can have your own test platform, its one way to see the latest Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android.

Java is dead! Java is the new COBOL!

Like every technology pronounced dead, the Java platform lives on and is stronger than ever. From the keynote by James Governor, analyst at RedMonk, the respect and value of the Java platform remains alive and well across the industry. It very valuable to get objective feedback from an analysts who understands how the world sees us.

A comment on twitter suggested Java is the new COBOL, which seemed to go against the positive outlook the industry has on Java. However when you consider that COBOL has a huge codebase and drives value to a vast amout of organisation in the world then that is a comparison I can appreciate. I am not sure that was the meaning of the original post though :)

Software Craftsmanship

Sandro Mancuso treated us to some valuable lessons on the reality of software development. I dont know of any teams which have avoided a degree of technical debt, the lucky ones having a well understood and decreasing level. If you value your career, job satisfaction and sanity then software craftsmen practices are invaluable.

Jason Gorman also pitched in with a reminder of all the project evidence that showed that quick and dirty is really “slow and dirty”. Without an appreciation for quality in your code, the quick and dirty approach will bite you in the arse much sooner than you thought!

Continuous deployment - a bridge too far?

If you want to see how effective your organisation really is, then attempting to move towards a continuous development approach will give you all the information you wanted - and a whole heap more that you didnt!

When something as simple to prevent as a full hard drive can cause your company share price to fall then you know there are lots of issues to manage when you create and deploy your own software. By visualising all these issues using wallboards and openly showing the issues within and across roles, you get the opportunity to improve the way you get things done. I learnt a great deal by giving a talk on this topic and am thankful for all the poignant questions I received from the audience.

See the Ultimate Wallboard submissions for over 80 ideas on how to visualise your work.

Networking

We are all busy people so the great think about JAX London is the opportunity to talk to some many people in one place, whilst they are way from project deadlines. Its a great opportunity to ask questions and learn unexpected things. Thanks to everyone I talked to, especially my colleagues in the London Java Community.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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