Author Archive
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
TechMeetup Aberdeen #5 17th March 2010
The next Aberdeen TechMeetup will be held on Wednesday 17th March, from 6:30 onwards, in the North Side Meston Building at Aberdeen Uni (map).
We’ll be using Bloop again to find like-minded people to talk to. You can post messages (called bubbles) about what you would like to talk about or what you’re looking for at the event and see what others are interested in talking about. Check out this fun intro for how it works how to use Bloop. Now with extra added desktop GUI 
Come along, sink a beer, eat some pizza and listen to what should be two very interesting talks.
Visualising Data.
The last 12 months have seen some very interesting movements in the online approach to data management and business intelligence. With startup companies like ‘GoodData’ securing 7m of funding and getting major players like Ben Horowitz (of Net Beans fame) and Marc Andreessen (co-author of Mosaic, the first browser to display images), there is no doubt that there is a rising enthusiasm for taking business intelligence to the cloud.
In addition, there is movement within our own Government to release data for public use. Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are participiating in the data.gov.uk initiative to release government data for re-use.
Pat McKay, Managing Director at Delta Software Solutions will talk about the rise of online business intelligence and what it could mean to the ordinary consumer, business and public bodies.
Coding Dojos
A Coding Dojo is a programming session based around a simple coding challenge. Programmers of different skill levels are invited to engage in Deliberate Practice as equals.
Joe will talk about the benefits this brings to developers as well as how to run a dojo at your own workplace
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
TechMeetup Aberdeen #3 – 20th January 2010
On 20th January yet another great night was had at TechMeetup Aberdeen, although the turnout was slightly smaller this month. We kicked off with the usual networking, fuelled by beer and pizza.
Fully Configurable Video Encoding
The evenings talks began with brilliant introduction to Fully Configurable Video Encoding, given by James Philp of RGU. James started by introducing video compression and giving some examples of why it’s needed. He then discussed market needs, such as internet TV and hardware encoding, and the potential solutions offered by a run-time configurable video codec. From there he went on to demonstrate the universal decoder that the team at RGU are working on and its uses/advantages etc.
The talk was well received with many questions being asked during the Q&A session that followed the talk. Issues of security, power on restricted devices and potential effects on standards were discussed.
Care and feeding of Techies
The second talk was given by local business owner Pete Henderson. Pete gave an informative and entertaining talk about the ups and downs of running a software business, and taking it from start-up to international company. Pete started out programming in RM-BASIC and HP/L offshore during the 80’s. In 1988 he started a product development company, then called Aardvark (check out the video for the reason why!), now Pisys. He gave a brief run-through of the company’s history, giving sound advice along the way on pitfalls to avoid, things to remember and how to manage different types of teams. Pete finished off by telling us where he envisioned Pisys going in the future and then taking some questions from the audience.
The videos for James’ and Pete’s talks are now available on Vimeo.
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Tech Meetup Aberdeen #1 – 21st October 2009
Last night (21st October) saw the inaugural TechMeetup in Aberdeen, which was a resounding success despite the weather. Around 30 people turned up to see what TechMeetup was all about, with a good mix of business folk and academics (but, unfortunately for Sam, no Blackberry developers).
Our benevolent sponsors this month were the Department of Computer Science at the University of Aberdeen, who provided both the facilities and the food & drink. The evening kicked off in the university’s Meston Hall with the usual beer, pizza and networking before moving through to the lecture hall for the talks.
First up was TechMeetup founder Sam Collins. Sam set the tone for the meetings by sharing the principles on which Tech Meetup was founded, encouraging informal over formal and fun over organisation.
Next up was Gavin MacLean of Open Planet Software who gave a great talk on OpenCL titled “Unleash your hidden supercomputer”. Gavin demonstrated that the hardware locked up in your graphics card could be harnessed to ease the burden on the CPU during complex, resource-consuming calculations. He ended with a demonstration that compared the speed of running with a single-thread of the CPU, dual-threads of the CPU and finally with the GPU.
Last but not least, James Littlejohn of MePath.com gave a really interesting talk on MePath, explaining how it uses the “wisdom of the crowd” to create a personalised lifestyle magazine based around any blog given to it. He also went into detail on the areas which allow MePath to stand out from the crowd itself, such as smart profiling to find similar bloggers and the Make feature that can help you find products based on your lifestyle.
All in all it was a great start to what is sure to become a mainstay of the Aberdeen tech scene.
A big thank you to Gavin and James for being the first to step up with talks, Dr Bruce Sharlau for organising the room, beer and pizza, Gordon Murrison and Marius Ciocanel for recording the event, Jim Emerson for helping to organise, John Eddie for getting the ball rolling in the first place and organising the organisers and finally to Sam for helping us get a TechMeetup in Aberdeen and getting us off to a great start.
Videos for Sam, Gavin and James‘ talks are now available on Vimeo. Both Gavin and James blogged about their talks.