Friday, March 19th, 2010
Aberdeen Techmeetup #5 17th March 2010
There were traumatic scenes of looting at Aberdeen’s 5th Techmeetup last Wednesday night as a group of geology students attending a university cheese and wine party spilt over into Techmeetup’s space in the foyer. Bravely standing their ground the Techmeetup attendees defended their pizza against the marauding geologists.
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.
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.
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
The Inaugural TechMeetup in Aberdeen
The time & location: Wed, 21th Oct, North Side Meston Building, Aberdeen Uni (map) 6:30 onwards. The Bobbin for more beer afterwards.
TechMeetup Aberdeen begins this month. Continuing on the great success of TechMeetup in Edinburgh and Glasgow TechMeetup will open in Aberdeen. Proudly supported by it’s benevolent sponser – Aberdeen University.
We start with two fantastic talks arranged: Gavin MacLean will talk about the hidden supercomputer in OpenCL and James Littlejohn will talk about how bloggers lives are intertwined. There will be pizza & beer too of course.
Gavin MacLean – Unleash your hidden supercomputer
Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) have evolved from single-purpose chips into flexible processors that offer levels of performance once reserved for room-sized supercomputers. OpenCL is a new open standard that opens up these incredible performance opportunities. Forget dual core or quad core we’re talking 240 cores available today.
James Littlejohn – Lifestyle linking the world
mepath’s mission is to figure out how all life is connected. This has started by figuring out how individual bloggers lives are connected in the area of sport. We use ‘wisdom of the crowd’ data aggregation techniques on data derived from using semantics web definitions. The sites architecture from crawl to feedreader, Core engine to UI will also be discussed, including the use of the OpenStack.
We are really excited to be bringing TechMeetup to Aberdeen and look forward to having some great talks and meeting some amazing people. This is the start of something great in Aberdeen, see you all there.