26th October saw the first user group meeting for Atlassian in London. Whilst there have been some amazing partner events in the past, its great to start building a closer connection to the community.

Over 60 people registered for our first meeting and it was a great turnout, from beginners to long standing customers with a variety of expertise.

Launch night - ideas mean tshirts

As it also happened to by the at the same time at the Atlassian launch there were extra goodies to give out. To help break the ice, anyone suggesting ideas for the community got a tshirt with the cool new Atlassian logo.

Whether it was the tshirts or just the enthusiasm of the crowd I dont know, but with in about 20 minutes we had enough ideas to last a years worth of monthly meetings…

I showed off a neat video that explains the basics of Atlassian OnDemand, showing how you can get our tools as a managed service. As there was a mixed level of experience, I also talked through how Atlassian take ideas through to reality.

Sharing experiences

As well as setting up the London AUG, Alan also presented his experience with the recently release Rapid board of Greenhopper. Alan has worked with teams that often have a big backlog and lots of epics (functionality that needs to be broken down). Using labels on JIRA tickets, a bit of simple JIRA Query Language (JQL) and the rapid board view he showed us how to manage our work effectively.

Whats next?

We hope to run the London Atlassian user group once a month to give every opportunity to share and ask questions face to face. We will also make use of the meetup mailing lists and discussion forums so people can talk outside the meetups.

If you want to keep in touch with this community, please sign up, its free !

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

November is going to be an amazing (and exhausting) time as I am speaking, running workshops and providing Atlassian sponsored fun at the following events:

Read More

Ubuntu 11.10 is released on Thursday and we are running an install party in the Central London. The party aims to help people try-out and work with the Ubuntu Linux distribution and anything mildly related.

The party will be held on 16th October, 12 noon till around 5pm and will include installing Ubuntu Linux, discussing everyone’s favourite applications and generally how to have more fun and still be productive.

Read More

At Atlassian we like to engage with people in the community and give them what they want - free stuff, great software and great events. Atlassian are therefore hosting a free community night at JAX London on Tuesday 1st November, with lots of free beer, t-shirts and special guest star Adam Bien.

Read More

Conference season is upon soon and if you haven’t signed up to at least one event this year you are missing out on a lot. A conference or similar large event is about more than just the sessions that happen, its a chance to learn and grow for everyone involved. There are great opportunities to meet new people and discuss innovative and challenging ideas, make connections and give your career development and motivation a massive boost.

Forget “New Years” resolutions. Lots of people I know who made the effort to go to a conference and really get engaged got a massive boost, both financially and in terms of being happy getting up in the morning!

Read More

I was lucky enough to be invited to the Java  7 launch party at the Oracle UK headquaters the other week. It was good to see so much community involvement with the launch which helped set aside some of the concerns raised regarding Oracles appreciation of the community around Java, after a bit of a uncertain times during the merger.

Read More

Here is a quick overview of the great technical events happening in London this week, 18th July 2011

Monday (tonight)

Agile testing - a developers perspective. A talk about agile testing at Atlassian (creators of JIRA, etc) from one of the graduate developers over from Sydney Australia. Its a chance to ask questions about how agile testing affects what you do as a developer.
LJC sign up | GDC sign up | Or just turn up

Tuesday

Developer sessions - London Java / Graduate developer and lots of other communities get together an share experiences and war stories over a pint or three. You dont have to drink, but its great if you can ask questions - or nod in appreciation to the things people tell you :-)
LJC sign up | GDC sign up

Wednesday & Thursday

On Wednesday, learn how to write good (idiomatic) Scala with the London Scala user group. Kevin Wright has a huge amount of knowledge about development with the Scala language and if you wanted to learn how to write some good stuff in the language then this event is for you. LSug sign up

On Thursday you can practice what you learnt at the Scala coding dojo at YouDevise. Take all the advice and discussion from Wednesday and apply them in code. At the dojo we spilt up into teams of 3-5 people, so everyone gets involved and is able to learn something. No previous Scala experience is required, enthusiasm (and Google) are all that is needed. LSug sign up

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

According to @UncleBobMartin the last programming language ever created was C, back in the days before I was just a twinkle in the milkmans eye. All the “new” languages such as Java, Scala, Clojure, C#, F#, etc are rehashes of existing ones.

Read More

Going to conferences is a great way for developers to get an intensive learning experience, whether that be to discover new development languages or gain a deeper understanding existing tools and practices. A great conference for Java developers is JAX London which includes sessions on a diverse range of topics including agile practices, architectural design, JVM languages (Clojure, Scala, JRuby) and Java application development.

This year JAX London are running an award program to ask the community who they think has demonstrated the most innovation in the Java ecosystem. The JAX awards are an opportunity for the community to voice what they feel is important to them and that feedback will help JAX provide sessions that the community values the most.

Read More

Events coming up

There is another fun and engaging Clojure Coding dojo on Tuesday and is as popular as ever as the event is full. It will be the last dojo before my “Getting started with Clojure” talk at JAX London, so am looking forward to learning some more things I can put into the talk.

Simon Maple and Zoey Slattery are also running the “OSGi: Lets get started” event on Tuesday. This will be a great way to understand OSGi and what it can do to help your Java development and deployment.

_Please see the list at the end of this email for a full schedule of up coming events.

News

Time is running out to contribute to the community testing of the Java SE 7 Developer Preview Release. The latest build is feature complete, stable and ready to roll – so download, test and report bugs. If you submit a bug report before April 4th, the Java product team will sing your praises on the Java SE 7 Honor Role, plus they will send you some Java swag. Bugs reported later on might not get fixed in time for the initial release, so if you want to be a contributor to Java SE 7 do it before the April deadline.

Firefox 4 was officially released last week and has already broken all the browser download records, with twice as many downloads as IE9 in the space of 24 hours. In less than a week there have been around 37 million – which you can see if you head over to the neat looking download stats page, a great example of data visualisation and interaction. Its good to see Europe beating North America at something, as we are still ahead in numbers of downloads. Inside of Europe, Gernany is well ahead of everyone else and has more than twice the downloads of the UK.

Ubuntu Full Circle magazine #47 is out and includes more programing in Python, LibreOffice and eBook Reader Software. There is also a special edition: The Perfect Server detailing how to build a an Ubuntu 9.10 server and configure lots of common server services, available in English and Italian. Even though its based on the older Ubuntu 9.10 server, all the steps are pretty much the same for the lasted 10.10 server version.

There are more videos available from The Server Side Symposium, including this short about Java 7 from two people you may recognise.

Summary of Last weeks events

At the Weekday testers event, there were over 40 testers online across several countries trying out different aspects of Firefox. Javascript processing is much improved and makes certain sites much quicker to load.  Flash support seems much better and watching flash videos seemed quicker to load and start than in Chrome. If you get the very latest build of chrome (or chromium on Ubuntu) then firefox was a few milliseconds slower, but the page rendering differences were hard to measure as they were so close.  I still use Firefox and Chromium together for my browsing, mainly so I can have different accounts on the same sites.

Cuke Up was a great day of behaviour driven development and acceptance testing with many of the project leaders and influential people speaking or chatting between talks. Highlights of the day for me include:

• Matt Wynne – Mortgage Driven Development 
• Dan North and Liz Keogh – Deliberate Discovery

• Aslak Hellesoy – Keynote and Cucumber update - It was great to hear that Cuke4Duke, the cucumber style acceptance testing framework will be getting a major upgrading to make it simpler to use.  Currently it runs via JRuby and a few other libraries, so the plan it to make it more Java like so you can use Cucumber.java.

• There is also active development in the management of all your scenario files with the development of the Relish tool, a web based tool to manage and navigate through your scenario files. You will also be able to work with your cucumber files via a website, allowing you to edit your scenarios and features, making it very easy for non-technical team members to work with cucumber.

To see some of the soundbites of the conference, look at the twitter tag #cukeup

Podcasts

• Applying Lean Software Development Principles Throughout the Organization
  Agile testers – Weeknight testing in London Cuke Up – BDD and acceptance testing conference
• LJC – Modern Java Concurrenty with Ben Evans,
• How to Do 100K TPS at Less than 1ms Latency with Mike Barker
• Hacker news

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

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