Well that’s a bit of an exaggeration and in the event there was plenty of beer and pizza to go round. This, followed by two excellent talks once again made for a most enjoyable evening.

Pat McKay on Visualising Data

First up was Pat from Delta Studios to give us an entertaining overview of the concepts behind their FlexReports.com software. Pat’s argument is that although there is a lot of data on the internet it is difficult to obtain information. Delta Studios’ hope to change this with there new web-site which Pat describes as YouTube for data.

It being St. Patrick’s day and being a good Irishman, Pat illustrated his concept by combining two seemingly unrelated datasets, average monthly consumption of Guinness and average monthly admissions to A&E to demonstrate that Guinness might really not be that good for you (although the stats looked fixed and I personally remain to be convinced).

Pat’s team are currently looking for beta testers, so if you’re interested you should get in touch:

http://www.deltasoftwaresolutions.com/
pat@delta-studios.co.uk

Joe Wright on Coding Dojos

The idea behind a coding dojo is to improve your coding fu through deliberate practice. In Japanese martial arts, the idea of a kata is to improve your skill by repeating a set series of movements, either alone or as part of a pair. A code kata borrows this idea by taking a simple exercise such as representing a number as a roman numeral and repeating it, looking for a better solution each time. Joe explained how in a coding dojo a kata is solved by the whole group.

There are three fundamental rules which Joe follows in his dojos:
1. Test Driven Development will be used.
2. Everyone in the room should understand what is being done.
3. Coding is done in pairs, with perhaps one person writing the tests and the other writing the implementation.

Joe runs coding dojos for his work at JP Morgan where they have been taken up as a part of the staff training programme. He advocates them as a great way to share knowledge and to improve developers team-working skills.

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

Speaking this month:

• Juozas Kaziukėnas – on his project codenamed “Anansi” which aims to provide market information and statistics for businesses by using web spiders and data mining techniques.
• Abdel Saleh, co-founder of Said.fm will give us a demo and talk about some of the tech behind it.

See you all on Wednesday.

February 2010 is drawing to close so its time to get together for another TechMeetup Glasgow. If you’ve never attended a TechMeetup, no worries, you’re totally welcome. It doesn’t cost anything and you don’t need to sign up. Just bring yourself and your inquisitive mind – you’ll find kindred souls talking tech in between bites of pizza and swigs of beer.

As ever we’ll have two speakers lined up to show us tech in all its varied glory.

Speaking this month:

• Neil Scott from the http://visit-glasgow.info/ site, talks about building a local events portal, their turmoils with WordPress, their visual inspiration lessons learned from releasing early and their plans for future.
• Dave Sapien is a games developer from Me and the Giants, and will be talking about their latest apps for very young baby’s. Visual developmental aids for infants between 1 and 18 months old. Dave will go through the challenges in design, physical considerations, and underline technology used to create the seemingly simple apps.

So if you like the sound of it, come along. We’re in the usual place, the glorious Saltire Centre at Caledonian University, at the usual time: 7pm for beer & pizza. Talks start 8pm sharpish and we finish up by 10pm. I

A massive thanks to our sponsors Wellness & Health Innovation for providing the beer and pizza, and to Glasgow Caledonian University for providing the terrific space.

TechMeetup #9

Wednesday, 24th of Feb.

Kick-off at 7pm, finishing at 10pm.

Ground floor of the Saltire Building.

Glasgow Caledonian University

P.S. You can download a map to the Saltire Centre from here. We’re in building “10″.

Another very enjoyable evening was had last night at Aberdeen’s 4th Techmeetup with two very entertaining speakers, fuelled (at least in Alan’s case) by a healthy supply of beer and pizza.

Behaviour-Driven Development

The first talk of the evening, given by Alan Gardner, was on behaviour-driven development (or BDD). Proposed by Dan North in 2003, BDD takes test-driven development’s philosophy of fail, fix, refactor and applies it from the outside-in. Rather than starting at the model level and working outwards as test-driven development does, BDD creates tests directly from user requirement statements.

Alan finished his presentation by walking through a simple Cucumber/RSpec example.

Useful links:

http://behaviour-driven.org/

A talk by Joseph Wilks at SoR09

Pragmatic Programmer RSpec Book (still in beta)

The Alive Project

Dave Corsar was next up with his talk on the Alive project with which, through Aberdeen University, he is involved. The concepts behind this project are fairly abstract, but if I had to try I would say it is a robust and scalable framework for the provision of distributed services.

Dave illustrated this by providing a concrete example of a project being developed for CalicoJack. Here the requirement is for the system to choose the most appropriate method of communication with employees based on the urgency of the message, the current location of that employee and other pertinent considerations. Dave, used this example to describe how the three tier architecture of the framework could be applied to this problem.

Dave also mentioned briefly the use of the framework in a Thales project in the development of a system to aid the evacuation of the Netherlands in the event of a flood.

The video’s for the talk will be posted on Vimeo shortly.

To make it easier to find out who the people around you are and what they’re interested in we’ll be using Bloop. 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.

Come along, have a beer and some pizza and listen to what should be two very interesting talks.

Alan Gardner

Ask a bunch of software developers about Behaviour Driven Development and some will say, “It’s the natural successor to Test Driven Development!”, others will say, “It *IS* Test Driven Development, the difference is merely semantics!”, most will probably say, “What the fuzzy duck is Behaviour Driven Development?”

This talk aims to give a brief insight into BDD and will cover a (very) brief history of BDD, the goals and tenets of BDD and will hopefully have enough time towards the end for a quick example.

Dave Corsar

This talk will describe how the ALIVE-EU approach to developing dynamic and robust software based on a service-oriented architecture is being adopted by CalicoJack, a Dundee based communication management company. They are developing the back-end for a virtual communication device which attempts to ensure messages are sent to recipients via a channel appropriate to their current social context and the current availability of services which handle the sending a message, regardless of the message’s originating channel. This means the phone call from your mother-in-law doesn’t interrupt your meeting but becomes an SMS message instead, while the same phone call, had it been on your train journey home does arrive as a phone call. To achieve this, the ALIVE-EU framework harnesses knowledge technologies (ontologies), organisation theory, software agents, planning and Web services (including matchmaking) to provide complete working solutions of complex systems that are more like what we see in human societies. The ALIVE-EU framework is also being used to support simulations of crisis management and urban information services.

About two hours ago, I posted looking for some kind souls to host this techmeetup website. TechMeetup is run entirely by a group of amazing people who volunteer their time to do so, supported by a group of benevolent sponsors who don’t ever ask to stick ads on our foreheads and understand where we’re going. We’ve all put in a lot to help bring together a community of tech enthusiasts, lovers and haters, startups and more experienced companies – and today the result was never more obvious. The response to my request was incredible – I would openly like to say a hugely warm thank you to the tons of individuals and companies who reacted straight away and offered to help:

Brett Sheffield from Gladserv
Omar Ali from Flexiscale
Tom Griffiths from Hubdub and Fanduel
Rory Fitzpatrick
Paul MacDonald from IFDNRG
Daniel Winterstein from Winterwell Associates
Darcie Tanner Condie from Civic
Steven Moffat from TheBurgh
Janek Mann
Paolo Ciarrocca
Paul Ferrie

Now that you see the amazingness, I suggest we start to do more together – more specific meetups (I hear a Lean Startup meetup is a-brewing), hack groups, and design/development workshops. Nothing need be super serious, TechMeetup is thinking about organising a hack weekend soon just for fun. All the support is there for anyone who wants to set something up and improve our abilities and quality of the Scottish tech scene, let me know and I’ll happily help you connect to the right people or sponsors etc.

We’ll be taking Flexiscale up on their hosting offer, so a huge thanks to you guys for making it easy for us to keep our site hosted with you.

I wanted to do a quick shoutout for any kind souls willing to host www.techmeetup.co.uk or sponsor our hosting for another year. The site is very light and it really doesn’t cost much – heavy things like videos are hosted with Vimeo. The only requirement is that a few of us have access to it – to maintain, and also we’re doing a small redesign soon to make the site a bit more user friendly and it makes life easier if someone on our side has admin access.

Of course we’ll acknowledge the kind party who helps us out and we’ll give you a free t-shirt. It’ll be a second hand Seedcamp t-shirt. TechMeetup doesn’t have any.

Two lightning talks/demos – Hypernumbers [1] launching their first
public products + update on IDEA lab [2] with demos of a couple of
data mining & visualization projects.

See you all tomorrow

1. http://hypernumbers.com
2. http://idea.ed.ac.uk/IDEA/Welcome.html

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.