London Geek Nights - Recently Updated Pages

London Geek Nights Home

rrees — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 12:46:16 CDT

Where?

Geek Nights being held at the London offices of ThoughtWorks UK. How to get here.

These events are open to the public and you are welcome to come and attend any of them. Here's some information on registering for an event.

When?

Start Times

We start our events at 7pm and the talks usually start at 7:30pm

What?

Geek nights for 2011

Securing the Web with SSL (17th Feb)
Acunu: Fortifying the Big Data stack (28th Feb)
Dirigible Talk and PyCon 2011 Report (24th March)
Introduction to Lua (19th April)

Suggest a topic for a future geek night

Google Events Calendar

Geek Nights has a Google Calendar! Add it to your own to see when events are happening.

Geek Nights Event Calendar
To add this calendar to your Google Calendar you can use this iCal link.

Past Events

Get involved

London Geek Nights has a Wave! Join us there to discuss events.

Sign Up

Fill out this form if you want to receive email updates about Geek Nights.

We are currently running an experiment for event signup, you can sign up to our events via the following sites:

Lanyrd (Twitter Id)
Superdevs (OpenId)
Upcoming (Yahoo! Id)

Looking For More?

If you are interested in technology meetups then you might like to check out:

Google Open Source Jam Group
The London Java Meetup Group
Of a northern persuasion? Have a look at ThoughtWorks Manchester Geek Nights

Alternatively you can have a look at our Other Events page.

Dirigible Talk and Pycon Report

rrees — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 13:25:45 CST

7pm, 24th of March

Dirigible is the new spreadsheet on the cloud application from Resolver Systems. It provides a spreadsheet interface to distributed cloud computing. Here comes the science:

Dirigible lets you build your numerical models in a spreadsheet grid on a web page, putting Python code in each cell — so a cell can hold not just numbers or text, but objects, lists, or even references to functions. If you want to change the way the spreadsheet is recalculated — by writing your own Python functions to call from your formulae, by importing new Python modules (like Numpy or SciPy), or even by running the formulae multiple times until you reach a goal — there's a code editor right there in the page to let you do that.

Once you're happy with your spreadsheet, perhaps you want to access it from other web pages? All Dirigible spreadsheets have an associated AJAX URL, which you can use to access their data from your own sites, or to call them with parameters to write a back-end for your site with minimal coding
Dirigible sheets are recalculated on a grid of Python-based servers running on Amazon EC2. Imagine writing a model in one sheet to work out the price of a financial instrument, and then writing another sheet that uses 100 computers for a few seconds to price up a portfolio of hundreds of them.
Also PyCon will have just finished so we're encouraging all attendees to give us their conference reports on what was happening in Atlanta.

Signup

Acunu - Fortifying the Big Data stack

rrees — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 18:33:05 CST

28th Feb, 7pm

Signup

Synopsis

Over the last two decades, commodity hardware has changed
dramatically. In parallel, Big Data, NOSQL and other non-relational
stores are becoming mainstream. Yet these applications access hardware
via a legacy storage stack – FS, buffer cache, LVM, RAID – built for
the hardware and applications of the 80s. Acunu is rewriting the
storage stack for these applications and today's hardware, and at the
same time deploying some very new algorithms and techniques.

We'll give some background to Acunu, a bit about our algorithms, and
discuss how developers can make use of it, and why you should want if
you're dealing with enterprise deployments.

Introduction to Acunu

rrees — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 02:23:56 CST

An introduction to the cloud-based Cassandra service.

Signup

Superdevs

Securing the Web with SSL

rrees — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:12:58 CST

This event is being hosted in conjunction with the London OWASP group.

7pm, 17th February, 2010

Signup

Synopsis

SSL is the technology that secures the Internet, but it only works how you're expecting when used properly, and when configured properly. Also, SSL has traditionally added overhead to the process and as such may not be used in cases when it really should be - perhaps due to the perceived overhead, or perhaps due to the difficulty in deploying to an environment. What we're looking to discuss is the fundamentals:

what is the problem if we're not using SSL? We'll be looking to demo some of these (e.g. Firesheep)
if we are using SSL, can we have some on SSL and some not? What would that look like as an implementation?
what are the gotchas with SSL? Or, what are the issues that can lead to SSL not actually securing you?

2010

rrees — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 13:40:08 CST

Geek nights for 2010

Agreeing to Agree (09/02/2010)
Hydras and Hypermedia (11/02/2010)
Agile System Administration (02/03/2010)
Introducting OpenRasta (06/04/2010)
Neo4J (19/04/2010)
FluidDb: the social database (22/4/2010)
Taking your webapp offline with HTML5 (26/4/2010)
Agile Project Management (13/5/2010)
Take your webapp mobile with Android (8/6/2010)
HTML5: Why should I care? (1/7/2010)
The state of Devops and deployment in Java Web Development (8/7/2010)
Breaking the News (2nd September)
Real-time web: The Push-off (14th September 2010)
Agile Project Management: Artifacts (7th October)
Creating the Redcar Editor (14th October)
Adding Hypermedia to your webapp (22nd November)
Creating mobile websites (2nd December)

Creating Mobile websites

rrees — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 18:00:49 CST

Sessions

Bringing the Web to Mobile

Terence is going to talk about his experience of adapting traditional websites to mobile platforms.

Experience Report: Fabio Bertone

Many of my recent projects have involved the constantly spinning
mobile world. From mobile sites for Italian newspapers, to sport
iPhone Apps, to ebook readers, anything with a small screen is
interesting!

Topics:
- Why do you want to do a mobile site?
- How I do it
- How I would like to do it
- Pitfalls & Tricks (customers, testing, UI design)

Signup

You can sign up to the event at the following sites:

Speakers

Terence Eden

I’m a mobile enthusiast, Linux fiddler, trained actor, vegetarian, Doctor Who fan, bibliophile, and married to the woman of my dreams.
You can read his blog.

Fabio Bertone

Fabio will speak about his personal experience on the many challenges
(opportunities?) that define mobile sites development today.

He is CTO of the Digital Channels division of Reply (http://www.reply.eu).

He has worked as developer, tech lead and coach on so many projects he
feels like he should know Cobol.

He rambles on twitter as fabiobeta, and can be found with the same
nickname almost everywhere on the net.

Service Evolution with Hypermedia

rrees — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 07:07:50 CST

7pm, Monday, 22nd November

Signup: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/7026648
Via Lanyrd: http://lanyrd.com/2010/lgk-november-hypermedia/
Or via SuperDevs (OpenId): http://www.superdevs.com/events/509

Outline

Service Evolution Should not be Painful: The Role of Hypermedia
After one month of getting a service published, there are some changes
to be made: the human process reflected by your code needs an update,
and you soon realize all of your clients do, too. Your IT department
falls into disbelief every time an update is required. Within your
company, any change to a central system creates extra complexity and
high maintenance costs: the decoupling we have promised ourselves
during the past few years, and the architectural design of
our solution, does not seem to become a reality in the near future.

Although we currently achieve decoupling to a certain level, our costs
are still high. Is it fine to keep up with such maintenance costs?

In this session we will present some situations when the use of
hypermedia, standard media types, microformats and "must ignore"
semantics help us get out of evolution hell. How can simple executions
and goal-based engines that can map our business process help us in
practice?

Biography

Guilherme Silveira is head instructor at Caelum, a training and
consulting company. He is the creator of Restfulie, editorial chief
of InfoQ Brazil, technical editor for a brazilian magazine, co-founder
of the largest online portuguese speaking java user group.

After several years fighting against tight coupling, Guilherme came
across REST and finally understood how hypermedia could help us
avoiding the client-must-be-updated mess.

Currently writing and recording a Rest from Scratch series showing how
to create REST systems using hypermedia in its core in every language
Restfulie supports so far: ruby, java and .net.

Videos of Previous Events

rrees — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 17:55:56 CDT

Games Development

Web Development

Erlang

Introduction to Rabbit MQ/Rabbit MQ Internals
XMPP with eJabberd/Journey Angel for TfL demo
BBC Feeds demo with RabbitMQ and CouchDb

Java

Implementing a language on the JVM

.Net

Working with IronPython at Resolver Systems

Data

What to do when your data keeps growing and your hardware budget doesn't

Soft Skills

Cloud

Java in the Google Cloud

The Push-Off

rrees — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 17:54:49 CDT

7pm, 14th September 2010

Meinhard Benn and James Lewis will be squaring off for the ultimate Real-time Web push-off: wrasslin' Web Sockets versus 'xtreme XMPP.

James will be demonstrating his browser-based Skynet while Meinhard will be looking at Strophe.js.

Video links

Redcar

rrees — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 13:04:10 CDT

7pm, Thursday, 14th October

Sign up here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/7026644

Daniel Lucraft will be giving a talk about the Redcar editor that he's has created and is developing. Redcar works on Linux, OSX and Windows and allows people to use Textmate Bundles. The GUI is built with JRuby and SWT and distributed as a Gem so it represents an interesting mix of technologies and platforms.

Dan will be introducing the editor and then discussing some of the architecture of the application as well as providing an experience report on building and maintaining a cross-platform GUI.

Breaking the News

rrees — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 17:05:34 CDT

Thursday, 2nd September, 2010, 7pm

Mark Micallef, Test Manager of the BBC was responsible for the testing of the new BBC News website. The BBC has some of the broadest browser and platform requirements and a huge audience, representing some unique challenges.

Post-event

Mark's slides can be downloaded here or you can see them on SlideShare here.

Artifacts

rrees — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 11:45:18 CDT

7pm, Tuesday, 7th October, 2010

The London Agile Project Management groups is an informal gathering of project managers who hold structured discussions on topics of interest to the attendees on the subject of Agile Project Management.

People will have the chance to raise their own ideas, issues and problems but this time we have decided to make our starting point discussion about project artifacts.

RAID logs, card wall pictures, charts, spreadsheets, minutes, reporting tools. What do you use? What helps communicate with your stakeholders? What have you abandoned? What didn't work? How do you distinguish between value and waste? Do there need to be different versions for teams, external people? Have you tried completely transparent reporting or something totally left field?

Food and drink will be provided so we can focus on the talking.

Sign up here

The State of Devops

rrees — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 15:01:26 CDT

HTML5 - Why should I care

rrees — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 02:14:27 CDT

1st July, 2010, 7pm

Sign up at Upcoming

Bruce Lawson (Opera) and Remy Sharp will be explaining about the, very diverse, HTML5 standard and the aspects of the proposals that are going to change your web development.

This is your chance to ask what HTML5 is, what difference it is going to make and why it is going to matter to you.

Participating alongside the demos

If you want to code along to Bruce's demo, please have a text editor, Opera 10.60, Safari and Internet Explorer 8 or under

For Remy's demos please have Chrome 5 or Safari 5.

Post Event Links

From the demo

Demo page coded in the talk
Writing cross-browser, future-proof CSS 3
Patrick Lauke's fancy swap video playlist
Diagram: What HTML5 isn't

HTML5 resources

Introduction to HTML5 video
Accessible HTML5 Video with JavaScripted captions
Everything you need to know about HTML5 video and audio
Video for Everybody technique for degrading to Flash video for IE and other legacy browsers
Opera supports the WebM video format
HTML5 Forms demo
Web Storage: easier, more powerful client-side data storage
More dev.Opera HTML5 articles
HTML5 Doctor

Take your webapp offline with Android

rrees — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 08:09:02 CDT

8th June, 7pm
Sign up at Upcoming

Reto Meier will be going through an example of how you can use the Android mobile environment to provide an offline and mobile extension to your web application.

Post-event

Agreeing to Agree

rrees — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 06:10:40 CDT

9th February, 7pm
Upcoming link: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4904276

Pat Kua and Liv Wild will be hosting a workshop on the soft skills required to negotiate tricky situations and get to agreement. The first part of the event will be an introduction to communication models and then later we're hoping to have a Q&A followed by discussing real world problems and examples. Feel free to bring your tricky disagreements and see if they can help.

Speakers

Pat Kua: blog

Slides

Slides from the event with notes
The video of the talk

Agile Project Management

rrees — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 06:02:33 CDT

13th May, 7pm

We are going to try and hold a community building event for people involved in managing and delivering Agile projects. This follows on from Agreeing to Agree.

The session is going talk the form of an open dialogue, perhaps along the lines of a fishbowl, with no fixed topic. Feel free to bring along your own questions, experiences and rants. How do you organise and motivate Agile teams? Visualise problems and progress? Summarise issues and facilitate the team to fix their own issues? Are you trying to adopt Lean principles or Kanban? The floor is open.

Post-event

During the event we discussed trying to adopt Agile project management, whether you should record your velocity or not, effective ways to try and manage distributed teams and discussed whether Agile methods canlegitimatelyapplied to hardware based development with production schedule windows.

We also agreed that we should try to do more of these events and that we will initially try to organise a quarterly event. These will continue to be organised under the London Geek Night flag and announcements etc. will go out on the regular mailing list.

Reasoning about Enterprise Architecture

rrees — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 06:11:38 CDT

Why are there reoccurring themes of failure in Enterprise Architecture? Why do some technologies get reinvented? How come some ideas appear from nowhere and disappear just as quick while others take hold and form a reliable, almost invisible, part of the infrastructure? How many projects have been wrecked on the Siren's song of integrated and unified architecture?

James Lewis will be giving a talk aimed not just at identifying technologies but looking at what makes successful solutions work and others fail. How can you objectively judge whether a "hot" technology is going to solve your problems or only has a niche application? How do you balance commodity solutions with bespoke work? Where is the essence of your business and what is infrastructure?

Take your webapp offline with HTML5

alex.scordellis — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 01:40:40 CDT

7pm, 26th April
Sign up at Upcoming

A talk by Paul Kinlan (Developer Relations for Chrome at Google) about the offline and data storage features of HTML5.

Resources: