London Geek Nights - Recently Updated Pages

Neo4J

rrees — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:16:23 CST

A presentation on the graph database implementation Neo4J.

Agreeing to Agree

rrees — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:14:30 CST

Pat Kua and Liv Wild will be hosting a workshop on the soft skills required to negotiate tricky situations and get to agreement.

Feel free to bring your tricky disagreements and see if they can help.

London Geek Nights Home

rrees — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:07:18 CST

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 have moved our start times to 7pm to try and make it easier to get to the events.

What?

Geek Nights in 2009

ClueSwap (20/01/2009)
Don't get tied to the Rails (27/01/2009)
Geek Games Night (19/02/2009)
Creating a language on the JVM (10/03/09)
Startups that innovate (23/04/09)
Java in the Google Cloud (11/05/09)
Erlang in your Infrastructure (12/05/09)
Web Unconventions (02/06/09)
Seaside: the revenge of Smalltalk (06/07/09)
Clojure Dojo (20/07/2009)
Pairing 101 (08/09/2009)
Heroku (06/10/2009)
Huddle Your QA (27/10/2009)
Geek Nights: 2009 in review (19/11/2009)
RubyMine/JetBrains (04/12/2009)
Naked Objects (10/12/2009)
I can't work without...

Google Events Calendar

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

Geek Nights Event Calendar

Future

Distributed And Agile (2009)

Suggest a topic for a future geek night

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 using Upcoming to handle people who would like to come. If you have a Yahoo account please say you are going via the Upcoming page for the event you wish to attend.

If you are morally against Yahoo for some reason then please post to the thread of the Wiki page of the event.

We don't currently have any alternative ways to sign up to an event; sorry. Feel free to turn up and take your chances.

Looking For More?

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

Google Open Source Jam at Jaaaaaaam
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.

2010

rrees — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:06:22 CST

Confirmed Events

Neo4J/Graph databases
Agreeing to Agree: soft skills
Agile Sysadmins
Hydras and Hypermedia

Suggested Events

FluidDb

2009

rrees — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:50:08 CST

Events in 2009

Why do you use Wetpaint?

rrees — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:48:06 CST

Originally we were looking for a free wiki that had OpenId signup so that there was quite a minimal barrier to participating in the wiki. The OpenId feature was later canned and the ads were quite intrusive at the same time as the ad-free subscription cost being quite expensive.

I have had a look at using other wiki farms but for the people who have signed up there is nothing along the lines of the comments and the multiple author levels on Wetpaint. To a certain extent there is just a certain amount of inertia now. Until something compelling comes along we will probably continue to use Wetpaint.

RubyMine

rrees — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:47:18 CST

4th of December, 7pm

JetBrains are in town and we're seizing the opportunity to take a look a RubyMine 2.0 and the other new and upcoming JetBrains products and discuss them.

It's a bit last minute I know and the agenda is still evolving but come on, it's Friday, free beer and pizza and Jet Brains.

RubyMine
YouTrack

Geek Night Review of 2009

rrees — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:39:25 CST

Date: 19th November 2009

Sign up at Upcoming

What was the coolest, most interesting or important thing in software and computing in 2009?

London Geek Nights want you to tell us.

The format is a five minute lightning talk and it must relate to events, trends and themes that emerged in 2009. Apart from that the forum is open.

If you want to do a talk start a thread below and we'll update the page as the agenda emerges.

Talks

Garry Shutler: .Net rebellion against the angled bracket tax
Felix Leipold: Using Apache Lucene as a "queryable cache"
Robert Rees: How Heroku solved the deployment problem
Ian Robinson: Hydras and Hypermedia

Naked Objects

rrees — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:06:29 CST

10th of December, 7pm

Sign up at the Upcoming page

There are literally hundreds of Java web frameworks out there for building the presentation layer, and dozens or more taking care of infrastructure concerns such as persistence, messaging and web services. But what of the most important layer of all, the domain layer?

Naked Objects is a framework to help you develop the domain layer using the principles of domain-driven design. In the same way that Hibernate automatically persists your pojos to an RDBMS, Naked Objects takes your pojos and automatically creates an object-oriented user interface, running either client/server or on the web. Exposing the domain objects in this way rapidly develops the ubiquitous language, while supporting a model-driven design.

Come along and join in a discussion on how Naked Objects supports DDD. Likely discussion areas include: prototyping vs full-stack development, customizing or replacing the UI; supporting agile acceptance testing with FitNesse; integrating with RESTful or ESB-style architectures; extending supporting other programming models.

Huddle your QA

rrees — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:28:05 CDT

Event Cancelled!

We have had to cancel this event due to family illness. Apologies and we'll try to reschedule this next year.

Description

Pushpa Reddy and Dawn Carvell are going to take a look at the often dysfunctional relationship between QAs and Developers examining how they can (and must!) work together to create excellent software. There will be an experience report, a film and a presentation featuring facepaint.

For this Geek Night we would really like to get as many QAs, Developers and Team Leaders/Managers as possible to discuss how and why the relationship breaks down and how to rebuild and reinforce it.

Typical Geek Night Timetable

rrees — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:43:05 CDT

6.30pm People start arriving
7pm Pizza arrives
7.30pm Talk starts
8.30pm Talk usually complete, probably on Q&A
9pm After the "official" talk people usually want to chat to the speakers privately or informally
9.30pm Speakers adjourn to the pub with anyone else who wants to talk to them and the office gets tidied
10pm Office tidy and alarm set. Pub time for everyone!

Heroku

rrees — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:06:57 CDT

Date 06/10/2009

Sign up at Upcoming! Please sign up to help us plan food, drink and to avoid us having to kick you out.

Adam Wiggins of Heroku (a Cloud Computing service that charges as you scale) will be talking about the exciting mash of exciting technologies that power Heroku (Erlang, RabbitMQ, Postgres, Git) and about founding, creating and developing an ambitious tech startup.

Heroku is one of the most exciting startups out there at the moment because it makes the Cloud immediately available to Ruby developers everywhere. It also employs a host of really talented people who are experimenting with existing ideas of the way applications should be packaged and deployed.

Post-talk Links

Copy of the slides for the talk.

Adam's blog post on (non-)scaling of SQL databases.

Heroku's Router Mesh is written in Erlang and they use AMQP implemented by RabbitMQ. You can find out more about both on the page about one of our earlier events.

Heroku's features and services are listed here.

The video of the event, hosted by Skillsmatter.

Ideas for 2010

rrees — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:53:01 CDT

Agreeing to agree
MapReduce 101
Template Architecture
Non-relational data shootout

Pairing 101

alex.scordellis — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 06:57:36 CDT

This will be held on the 8th of September. Upcoming page here. The video and slides are available on the SkillsMatter website.

Sarah Taraporewalla and Christian Blunden will be leading this session and offering a mix of games, theory and shared experience as to why and how you should adopt pairing as a development practice.

Pairing isn't really a technique, it's a skill and as such some people are better than others but everyone can practice being a better pair. Pairing is not universally better than solo programming, it tends to be more time consuming but produces better quality code and spreads understanding of the codebase around a team. No more getting stuck if the "Message Bus Guy" isn't in the office.

Pairing 101 aims to introduce what kind of activities are good for pairing and which aren't. It will also try to explain how you can develop your skills and also explain how to be an absolutely atrocious pair.

Event Synopsis

In his book Outliers, Gladwell shares the story of a Korean airliner crash caused by issues in the cockpit. That example brings to mind the excitement and challenges of what would seem to be the simplest of XP practices: pair programming. Simple on the surface (2 people, 1 computer); challenging in reality, we will dig into the tricks and benefits of effectively pair programming. Join us for a fun, interactive session as we identify concerns teams face when starting to pair, explore the many benefits of pairing, and give you our best tips and techniques to make your pairing more effective!

As usual, please sign up on the Upcoming page.

Clojure Workshop

alex.scordellis — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 06:35:59 CDT

When: 20th of July

Upcoming.com page:http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2973636/

Clojure is the Lisp that (whisper it) is fun to program. It's built on top of the JVM and will feeling naggingly comfortable to all Java developers. It has a tiny core but a healthy library and API. It is dynamic language that is best written in a functional style but allows you to get out of jail when interacting with Java. It specialises in concurrent programming with a variety of synchronisation options that include automatic retries of transactions and controllable consistency of data.

This will be an introductory workshop where I hope that we'll all start to learn Clojure together. I'll present a quick introduction to what's interesting and different about Clojure, then we'll run a coding dojo to explore the language by implementing a simple program together.

I'm aiming this event primarily at those who've started dabbling with Clojure or are interested in getting started. You won't need any previous experience with Clojure or any Lisp to get involved, but more experienced hands will be very welcome to guide us through the learning experience.

As usual, please register on the upcoming.com page so we can make sure there's enough pizza.

The code we wrote is now on github, and I've created a London Clojurians Google Group.

Seaside and Smalltalk

fleipold — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:55:38 CDT

When: 06/07/2009. Upcoming page: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2803671/.

Seaside is a web application framework that is written in Smalltalk. Smalltalk has been hugely influential on the development of computer languages but realistically how many people have ever used it? Seaside is a practical application of Smalltalk to the web sphere. This Geek Night is going to cover how Smalltalk makes web development different and how Seaside is being put to use in the "Real World". Prepare to question how your favourite web platform works and discover object-orientated programming rather than class-orientated programming.

Our speakers will include: Lukas Renggli, who will be talking about Squeak and the world of Open Source Smalltalk; Michel Bany from Cincom who will be discussing how Seaside and Smalltalk has been used in companies like Allianz.

Expect live demos as an introduction to the interactivity of Smalltalk.

Lukas' slides are now available.

Java in the Google Cloud

rrees — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:39:53 CDT

11th of May, starts 6:30pm at Skillsmatter

Register at this link: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/ajax-ria/java-in-the-google-cloud

Ever since Google made App Engine available to the public the number one request has been for Java support. Finally Google have obliged and opened GAE/J (Google App Engine for Java or "Gay-Jay") to public beta. Unlike Amazon's cloud services GAE/J is based around a deployable application as the basic unit. You create your WAR, deploy it to Google's cloud infrastructure and Google publish it to the world and make it scale.

Tonight's Geek Night will be looking at a whole range of questions you might have about GAE/J. What does the cloud mean? What can it give me above deploying my own applications? Will Google own my data? How will I need to change my application to take advantage of GAE/J's features? How will it fit in with my existing applications? Can I use my favourite framework? Can I use all these hot new JVM languages and dynamic web frameworks?

That is whole lot of good questions and we've found the right people to answer them. Chris Read is a build and deployment specialist at ThoughtWorks who has been talking about Cloud technologies in general and has been working with a range of different Cloud services and software. Chris will give us the potted history of how we arrived at Cloud Computing when so many similar initiatives failed to take off. He will also outline what makes GAE/J different from other Cloud technologies.

Ola Bini is a core contributor to JRuby and was involved in the early partner testing of the GAE/J framework. He helped Google bring JRuby to the new platform and on the day of the launch published a series of blog posts explaining the challenges faced getting dynamic languages working on GAE/J and how to build and deploy your own JRuby on Rails application to the cloud. While getting your first Java application working on GAE/J will probably only take you ten minutes Ola will explain some of the differences you need to take into account between regular Java Web development and development on GAE/J. He will also look at how GAE/J and JRuby allows you combine the power of GAE with the pleasure of Ruby programming.

Of course the final element of any Geek Night is you, we need your questions (and your experiences with GAE/J if you have been one of the lucky 10,000 to get the early access account). So please join us for a night in the Java Cloud courtesy of Google App Engine.

Blog Posts

Starbucks doesn't use Two-Phase Commits Gregor Hophe
Paul Hammant

Initial Post
Alternative Ruby RIA clients with GAE/J

Clojure on GAE/J

Registering for London Geek Nights

fleipold — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:31:46 CDT

While registration for Geek Nights is intentionally loose (low process) there is a practical limit that the ThoughtWorks office space we use can only really take an audience of 40 people. Any more than this and people cannot see or hear the speakers or presentations.

Therefore we use Upcoming to manage our attendance. The Upcoming page is linked to from each event page in the wiki. Once the Upcoming guest list is full then we cannot accept any more visitors and you're out of luck.

As Upcoming requires a Yahoo Id we will also accept someone signing up to an event by saying so on a comment thread on the event page.

If we ever needed to chuck people out of an event we would use the Upcoming List and Wiki page to determine who had signed up and bounce everyone else.

Web Unconventions

rrees — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:41:40 CDT

This talk will be happening on the 2nd of June

Post-Event Links

Ian talked about Hypermedia and using it in practical circumstances of designing a message bus. You can get more information on REST and and Ian's ideas from his website.

Synopsis

Welcome to the new century where we all know how web applications are developed. You have your MVC web framework with your ORM on top of the relational database that is used as a datastore. You test it with Selenium and you swear at Javascript and IE.

But do we really know how to develop web applications or are we all in a cul-de-sac of web conventions. Is it really necessary to fire up a browser to test your application? Surely AJAX and Javascript is no more or less testable than anything else. Isn't it time we forced our clients to move to IE or up sticks to a new browser altogether?

MVC? Yesterday's news, now we have MVP or VROOM. Why write any Javascript when you can write a Javascript generator in your preferred development language. Or perhaps we can write the entire application in Javascript? Can we use Javascript to generate our CSS?

On the data front we now have document databases, graph databases, XML databases. Why do we try and store objects to the database when the web isn't made up of objects?

Why are CMS systems so complicated and so common? Surely we can just generate a website in the same way as we generate Controller code in Rails and its clones. Why the intermediary of the code in the first place?

To try and tackle some of our web conventions and propose some new "unconventions" we will be assembling a crack team of web architects and practioners. They will be proposing a new best practice or the repeal of an outdated one and then we'll throw open the questions to audience. Grill the panel, ask them what a "Transaction modelled in the Domain" means, after all they are meant to be experts.

Panellists

The panel will give a short talk on a web topic close to their heart. After that the panel will be open to any questions the audience have on web-related architecture and development.

Felix Leipold (Felix's Blog)
Dan North (Dan's Blog)
Alistair Jones (Alistair's HTML in Java project Hypirinha)
Ian Robinson (Ian's Blog)
Carlos Villeia (Carlos' Blog, Carlos on GitHub)

Erlang in your Infrastructure

rrees — Thu, 28 May 2009 08:22:21 CDT

When: 12th of May

Erlang has not gained a huge following as a programming language but it is being used to build scalable chunks of infrastructure. From messaging to queues to document databases, Erlang is increasingly providing the service backbone for applications written in a variety of languages on top of it. Even if you code in Java, Ruby, Javascript or C# you may be relying on Erlang to provide reliability, distributed services and huge lightweight concurrency.

The use of different languages to solve different problem spaces has also given rise to the need to create lightweight platform and language data exchange formats, the most famous of which is JSON but includes Apache Thrift and Protocol Buffers.

So whatever you program in you should known what Erlang can do for you.

Tonight's talks will include a talk by Alexis Richardson, Mike Bridgen and Matthias Radestock about RabbitMQ the AMQP implementation in Erlang. Oscar Hellstrom and Tamas Nagy will be talking about XMPP and ejabberd.

AMQP - what, why, how, and why not. Intro to AMQP and RabbitMQ video; an AMQP implementation in Erlang
RabbitMQ: it is made of Erlang! RabbitMQ Internals video
CouchDB and RabbitMQ use case. Slides from the BBC Feeds talk.
XMPP and Jabber. XMPP on Erlang talk video; presence and messaging on Ejabberd
Applied ejabberd, a demo of applications that using Erlang and Jabber. Video of the Journey Angel prototype application developed for TFL.

This Geek Night is being held in conjunction with the London Erlang User Group.