As always the dojo started with a feast of pizza and drinks courtesy of ThoughWorks, the perennial favorite it seems with developers (I use it at my Scala dojos for the same effect). A good turn out tonight meant the pizza went down quickly and we got onto the intros, with the monthly mystery question “If your names’ not Bruce, what would it be” nicely stolen from Monty Python.

Here are the details of what happend at the dojo this time around.

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

Cloud9 IDE is an ambitious project to create a really fast and feature complete development environment in the cloud, freeing you from the shackles of your desktop and allowing you to work anywhere in the world on any computer and still have your ideal setup at your fingertips.

Whilst the Atlassian ambassadors were in Amsterdam we caught up with Cloud9 CEO Ruben Daniels to get the word about this cloud based developer service straight from the source! Headquarters of Cloud9 are just around the corner from the Atlassian Amsterdam office, so we’ll be bumping into each other a lot…

As the number of developers creating web apps keeps on growing, along with a rise in popularity of JavaScript, JSON and AJAX technologies, its becomes more compelling to create code on the platform we are developing for. A desktop app is not always the best solution. As Ruben says:

If you have ever used Eclipse then you know its about 100Mb and its super slow to start up.

This may be one of the reasons some developers still turn to Emacs, Vi and Sublime Text to get things done. Imagine having something as powerful as an IDE but so lightweight it will run on your grandma’s computer! That to me is where I see Cloud9 heading.

The team behind Cloud9 (which Atlassian invested in last June) started Ajax.org with a goal to build the UI framework for an editor in the browser. After developing the ACE editor they decided to create something more from that the concept of Cloud9 IDE was born.

JavaScript and Node.js communities are already loving the freedom an online IDE gives them, with many of the important projects around Node.js using it as their development tool of choice. Many of the core developers of the Node.js project are using it for projects such as Socket.IO, Express and Connect.

Cloud9 IDE is not just for JavaScript developers

Anyone can use the service for writing and collaborating on code in any language. It’s integrated with popular social coding repositories such as Bitbucket and GitHub, allowing developers to easily share their work. All you need is a free account.

The ACE editor has become so popular that its now being used by GitHub to allow developers to edit their files live on the site without having to use a desktop app or a cumbersome plugin. This also gives developers a great comparison tool for looking at the changes from previous versions of their code (diffs).

The Cloud9 team are actively developing new features and enhancing their collaboration code to make it even better. There are also plans to extend the support for other environments, starting with Python, Ruby and PHP. This support will be comprehensive, including package managers and of course the developers favourite syntactic highlighting and auto-completion. Once that work is done they also have an eye on the static languages and big platforms such as Java the many other languages that thee JVM supports.

Cloud9 IDE is already a great resource for JavaScript developers and with the growth in popularity of the language it is no wonder they have over 45,000 users already signed up. With backing from Atlassian and their VC they have the money to invest in hiring additional talent.

As with all great companies, Cloud9 are using their own tool to develop the service itself. They are also busy creating a great set of tutorial videos to complement their internal wiki development, with help from the Confluence tool from Atlassian.

The future looks very bright for development in the cloud!

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

Being a tyrant can be very hard work. It is easy to exploite most people as the world is full of people who want to be part of something and make their lives more meaningful.

Its quite easy to take this drive and exploit it for your own benefit and it is amazing how much people will tolerate.

Ah, but there is the rub. People will tolerate a situation and maybe complain about it to each other but generally do nothing to make change happen. There is general high tolerance for my tyrannical actions only encourages me to do more to see how far I can push things. This is often fed by a few close individuals that I consider my loyal entourage. Eventually I can push too hard and a few people of character get together and do something about my reign.

But by the time this happens I am in deep doo-doo! I have already gone too far and as a tyrant by nature I cant back down so I must go on fighting to the end, or preferably find somewhere else to go while my loyal troupe fight it out for me :-)

Your friend,
Darth.

---

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

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

Clojure and Scala are two very exciting functional programming languages on the Java virtual machine (JVM) which provide many of the features than Java7 and Java8 have been working toward. There has already been a lot of activity around these functional languages in the UK, from financial services clients, media companies and developers who want to keep ahead of the game, all are getting involved with these languages now. Some of the top jobs are even mentioning these technologies by name.

With a long history of support for open source projects, it is no surprise that Atlassian support the development of Clojure and Scala by providing Confluence and JIRA to the project teams and wider community.

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

I find the lyrics of this classic Rolling Stones song to be very apt way to describe software development, especially when you take the agile approach to creating and delivering that software.

You cant always get what you want…
… but if you try sometimes, sometimes you get what you need

Read More