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February 18, 2010
Techmeetup Aberdeen #4 – 17th February 2010
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:
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.
February 15, 2010
TechMeetup Aberdeen #4 – 17th February 2010
Once again TechMeetup will be held in the North Side Meston Building at Aberdeen Uni (map) from 6:30 onwards.
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.
February 12, 2010
Thanks to an amazing community.
I thought I should take the time to say a big thank you. Partly because I’m grateful, but partly because it’s perhaps not entirely obvious what an amazing tech community we have around us.
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.
February 12, 2010
Kind soul wanted to host TechMeetup website
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.