LJC Partner Events – brought to you by @RecWorks

Hey guys,

I hope you’re all are having a wonderful Monday, I have just retuned from a lovely sunny holiday in South Africa and really looking forward to some great events over the next few weeks.

Here’s what’s going on:

Monday 4th March - London Code Dojo 19

We’re a bunch of software developers that love to code, play, learn, improve and eat pizza! Every month we meet up in order to practice code katas, clean code, software craftsmanship, pair programming, Test-Driven Development and learn from each other for an hour or two. Food and drinks are provided.

RSVP for this London Code Dojo event: http://www.meetup.com/London-Code-Dojo/events/104397622/

 

Tuesday 5th March - Code & Coffee

Morning session (7am – 9am) on Tuesdays every fortnight on Starbucks in Oxford Street.

RSVP for this London Software Craftsman Community event: http://www.meetup.com/london-software-craftsmanship/events/104265242/

 

Wednesday 6th March - Easy Integration with Apache Camel and Fuse IDE

In this talk James Strachan will give an overview of the Apache Camel project and how it can be used to solve your integration problems. We will introduce the Enterprise Integration Patterns & show how Camel can implement them easily using Domain Specific Languages and use them to connect to any middleware, transports, protocols or services.

RSVP for this JBoss User Group event: http://www.meetup.com/JBoss-User-Group/events/102513792/

 

Thursday 7th March - QCon London – LJC User Group Meeting

With great help from the organisers of QCon we have been able to secure a speaker for a special LJC event held at QCon. We are lucky to have Arun Gupta speaking on Thursday 7th March at 18:30.

RSVP for this London Java Community event: http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/106458472/

 

Thursday 7th March - Talk Big Data with Darach Ennis and John Vlachoyiannis

The User Group on the 7th of March is sponsored by QCon London and will take place between 18:30-20:00 at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London. Darach Ennis will talk about ‘Conversational Big Data’ and John Vlachoyiannis’s talk subject is “LDB: The BigData In-Memory database built with Erlang, C and LISP”.

RSVP for this Erlang User Group event: http://www.meetup.com/erlangusergroup/events/106468222/

 

Saturday 9th/Sunday 10th March - Rewired State – WoW Hack Day

We are excited to have the opportunity to run a hack alongside the WOW – WOMEN OF THE WORLD FESTIVAL, at London’s Southbank Centre.

RSVP for this event: http://rewiredstate.org/hacks/wowhack

 

Saturday 16th March - Hack your Mind with Candy

Another chance to hack with the London Scala user group and the wider software development community. Read about the HackTheTower event in February to get a feel for the event.

RSVP for this London Scala User Group event: http://www.meetup.com/london-scala/events/106002042/

 

That’s everything for now – I will be back in two weeks to bring you some more partner events.

Looking forward to catching up with you all at the next event!

Sam

@SHRecWorks

 

New LJC Event: London Java Community: Meet a Project on Weds 20th Mar at 18:30 #ljcjug Organised by @RecWorks

The London Java Community’s next free event is – London Java Community: Meet a Project on Wednesday 20th March at 18:30 at UCL.

Please see link for details and to sign up - http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/105372892/

· Are you looking to join an existing open source project, but don’t know where to start?

· Are you interested in finding out more about open source software in general?

· Are you looking to start a personal project but don’t know what to base it on?

· Are you interested in trying out some new technologies and wondering how to use them in a personal project?

If the answer is yes, this event could be for you. This is part of the MaP series of events designed to connect open source software projects and potential contributors. It will be in a speed networking style, involving Project Ambassadors speaking to small groups of 3-6 developers. Giving a pitch of an open source or personal project, then answering questions before moving on to another group. The events are intended to answer potential contributors questions around the projects, focussed mainly around starting points.

There are a lot of developers in the industry, from students to experienced developers that are interested to get involved in something in addition to their day time position, but aren’t really sure where to start. There are also a great deal of interesting projects covering everything from popular open source frameworks to the Adopt a JSR program launched by the LJC. Many of these projects rely on support/enthusiasm from developers and are keen to get more enthusiastic people involved. Not to mention that most candidates that get involved in personal projects seem to escalate their careers, salaries, day rates and passion for the industry.

You will get a chance to meet project leads for 3-6 different projects and discuss the differences between them and their experience with open source development and their experiences in general.

Please see link for details and to sign up - http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/105372892/

 Organised by RecWorks:

New LJC Event: The London Developer Sessions on Tues 19th March 2013 at 18:30 #ljcjug Organised by @RecWorks

The London Java Community’s next free event is – The London Developer Sessions on Tuesday 19th March at 18:30.

Please see link for details and to sign up - http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/106690932/

This is our monthly social gathering, which incorporates members of The London Java Community and Graduate Developer Communities. This is an informal social evening most of the evening will be spent having ad-hoc informal discussions in small groups.

We are back to The Slug and Lettuce this month: 19/20 Hanover Street, London http://www.slugandlettuce.co.uk/hanover_street/. We have had some fantastic feedback from those who have attended the event at this venue before and will be holding this month’s event in the same great location. The venue has a nicely sized function room with its own private bar, there are some great offers on beer, there is free wi-fi and it’s easy to move around and chat to lots of people. Most importantly it is a friendly and relaxed environment where developers can get together to chat and network.

The event will kick off at 6:30 PM and usually goes on until around 11:30 with members coming and going at all times throughout the evening. We usually attract 50 – 70 members so it is a lively event in which members, both junior and senior, can connect in a relaxed atmosphere and set the development world to rights.

Barry or another RecWorks team member will be onsite so if anyone is looking for free recruitment advice it’s a great chance to come along for a chat.

Please see link for details and to sign up - http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/106690932/

 Organised by RecWorks:

New LJC Event: QCon London – LJC User Group Meeting on Thurs 7th Mar at 18:30 #ljcjug Organised by @RecWorks @qconlondon

The London Java Community’s next free event is – QCon London – LJC User Group Meeting on Thursday 7th March at 18:30.

Please see link for details and to sign up - http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/106458472/

 

With great help from the organisers of QCon we have been able to secure a speaker for a special LJC event held at QCon.

We are lucky to have Arun Gupta speaking on Thursday 7th March at 18:30.

The event will be held at The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre.

Arun Gupta will present: Java EE 7 Platform: Boosting Productivity and Embracing HTML5

The Java EE 7 platform focuses on Productivity and HTML5. JAX-RS 2 adds a new Client API to invoke the RESTful endpoints. JMS 2 is undergoing a complete overhaul to align with improvements in the Java language. Long awaited Batch Processing API and Concurrency API are also getting added to build applications using capabilities of the platform itself. Together these APIs will allow you to be more productive by simplifying enterprise development.

WebSocket attempts to solve the issues and limitations of HTTP for real-time communication. A new API is getting added to build WebSocket driven applications. Processing JSON structures is inherent in any HTML5 applications and a new API to parse and generate JSON is being added to the platform. JavaServer Faces is adding support reusable flows and HTML5 friendly markup. There are several other improvements coming in this latest version of the platform.

The Java EE 7 platform is scheduled to release in Q2 2013. Some of the implementations are already integrated in GlassFish. This talk will provide a code-intensive introduction to the updated Java EE 7 platform. Several live demos will be shown during the talk. Don’t miss out on this session to learn all about how to leverage the new and exciting standards in building your next enterprise application.

Please see link for details and to sign up - http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/106458472/

  Organised by RecWorks:

 

Four things you can do to maximise your Meet a Project event from Marc Barto

Marc Barto is an organiser of the popular Spring of Code Meetup, which is targeted at giving open source and social change projects a stage and a development team. Having attended two Meet a Project events he recently wrote a post which included the following advice to projects at upcoming events to maximise the effectiveness of the event:

- Printing:

At events, printing hand-outs about your project including all the useful details will be a very helpful follow-up to your short presentation.

- Mentors:

Obviously I don’t have to convince anyone here on the interest of getting a mentor attached to a project. We encourage all our project owners to look for at least one mentor. They don’t have to be based in London as they can support your project by Skype.

- Documentation:

Having a basic site, a wiki or at least at decent github page with the project specs will really help convincing people your project is serious. Whatever the stage of the project is, we encourage project owners to answer the “7 evil questions”, inspired from the Knight news challenge.

- Follow up

It is key to build on the momentum created during a matchmaking event. That’s why we always schedule a Tech meetup hosted by the project owners no later than a week after the social event.

They can then meet developers again for a more hands-on event, which can sometimes be a mini-Hackathon. Try to limit the attendance to a minimum to avoid distraction/crowd management. We usually advise project owners to pair up together to organise the event and divide the brainstorming/hacking time in half for each project.

You can see all the news from Spring of Code at their site: http://springofcode.org

New LJC Event: The London Developer Sessions on Tues 19th Feb 2013 at 18:30 #ljcjug Organised by @RecWorks

The London Java Community’s next free event is – The London Developer Sessions on Tuesday 19th February at 18:30.

Please see link for details and to sign up - http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/100216612/

This is our monthly social gathering, which incorporates members of The London Java Community and Graduate Developer Communities. This is an informal social evening most of the evening will be spent having ad-hoc informal discussions in small groups.

We are back to The Slug and Lettuce this month: 19/20 Hanover Street, London http://www.slugandlettuce.co.uk/hanover_street/. We have had some fantastic feedback from those who have attended the event at this venue before and will be holding this month’s event in the same great location. The venue has a nicely sized function room with its own private bar, there are some great offers on beer, there is free wi-fi and it’s easy to move around and chat to lots of people. Most importantly it is a friendly and relaxed environment where developers can get together to chat and network.

The event will kick off at 6:30 PM and usually goes on until around 11:30 with members coming and going at all times throughout the evening. We usually attract 50 – 70 members so it is a lively event in which members, both junior and senior, can connect in a relaxed atmosphere and set the development world to rights.

Barry or another RecWorks team member will be onsite so if anyone is looking for free recruitment advice it’s a great chance to come along for a chat.

Please see link for details and to sign up - http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/100216612/

 Organised by RecWorks:

Forthcoming LJC Event: Bring your Performance Problems Panel 7/2/13 at 18:30 #ljcjug Organised by @RecWorks

The London Java Community’s next free event is: Bring your Performance Problems Panel on Thursday 7th February at 18:30.

Please see link for details and to sign up - http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/101962842/

Bring your Performance Problems Panel

This event brings together some of London’s top performance experts and gives you the opportunity to ask them questions about topics of your choice. The questions could be about a variety of topics:
* Performance problems you’ve encountered when developing software.
* What methodologies should you use when diagnosing a problem?
* How to fit performance testing and tuning into your normal development methodology.
* Tools and software: anything from NoSQL databases and concurrent messaging frameworks to sun.misc.Unsafe.

In order to submit a question, just comment on this event or tweet a question with the hashtag #ljcperfpanel. The discussion should be suitable for any member to attend. The panel members are:

Peter Lawrey
Millenium Capital Partners

Innovative developer of high performance Java Systems for competitive advantage. Developer of the Java Chronicle library. 19 years experience designing, developing and supporting leading edge high performance systems. Peter’s blog has had over one million hits in the last 18 months and is a Dzone Most Valued Blogger.

Martijn Verburg
jClarity

Martijn is the CTO of jClarity – a Java/JVM performance tooling company for cloud and enterprise deployments. He focuses on demystifying performance jargon and likes to get people to firstly think about the methodology of approaching a problem.  ”Measure, don’t Guess”

Most of you will know him as the co-leader of the LJC where he leads the global effort for the Java User Group “Adopt a JSR” and “Adopt OpenJDK” programmes.

Martijn’s book “The Well-Grounded Java Developer” (with Ben Evans) was published by Manning in 2012.

His talks and presentations are in high demand by major conferences (JavaOne, Devoxx, OSCON, FOSDEM, QCon, etc). Often you’ll find him challenging the industry status quo in his alter ego “The Diabolical Developer”, which he’ll probably bring out on the panel .

Manik Surtani
Red Hat/JBoss

Manik Surtani is a core R&D engineer at JBoss, Red Hat’s middleware division. He is the founder of the Infinispan project, and Platform Architect of the JBoss Data Grid. He is also the spec lead of JSR 347 (Data Grids for the Java Platform), and represents Red Hat on the Expert Group of JSR 107 (Temporary caching for Java). His interests lie in cloud and distributed computing, big data and NoSQL, autonomous systems and highly available computing.

Jeremy Whiting

Red Hat/JBoss

Jeremy Whiting is a Senior Software Engineer working at Red Hat in the JBoss middleware division. Currently in the Performance team and previously on the JBoss Transactions team. He is a technical representative for Red Hat on the Java committee of the Standardised Performance Evaluation Corporation. Participating in the the development of standardised performance benchmarks and peer review of published results. Performance analysis and tuning of open source operating systems and JEE middleware is a great challenge which he relishes.

The panel will be moderated by Richard Warburton.

Please see link for details and to sign up - http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/101962842/

Organised by RecWorks

LJC Partner Events – brought to you by @RecWorks

Hey Guys, Sam here,

I can’t believe we are already through the first month of the year. Hope your year has started off as well as mine has. I’m looking forward to seeing some of you at tonight’s LJC event.

Now on with the partner events for the next few weeks…

Tuesday 29th January - LJC and Greenfoot

Presented by Michael Kölling (bio below).

This presentation will show you how to engage young programmers (teenagers from 14 years old upwards, and young adults) with programming in Java. We will show Greenfoot, an engaging, fun-to-use, educational Java environment and give plenty of tips about teaching and motivating kids to code…

RSVP for this London Java Community event: http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/97859402/

Wednesday 30th January - Heroku & Postgres – ask the experts

From 5pm onwards. Craig Kerstiens of Heroku is over from San Francisco to answer your questions on the Heroku platform and Heroku Postgres database.  Drop in to the “Look Mum No Hands” cafe and ask Craig any and all questions you have.  Heroku is a great platform for deploying Java, Scala & Clojure apps & services easily and this is a rare chance to pick up tips from the experts face to face.

RSVP for this London Salesforce Developers event: http://www.meetup.com/LondonSalesforceDevelopers/events/98708072/

Wednesday 30th January - Hands On Session – Extreme Start UP

Extreme Startup Our practices are there to help us. They enable us to continue to produce high quality code even when the business requires us to change direction or strategy. We practice these skills on small problems, and away from the pressure of production code. But what happens to our practices when we increase the pressure?…FULL – WAITING LIST AVAILABLE

RSVP for this London Software Craftsman Community event: http://www.meetup.com/london-software-craftsmanship/events/99520732/

Monday 4th February - London Code Dojo 17

We’re a bunch of software developers that love to code, play, learn, improve and eat pizza! Every month we meet up in order to practice code katas, clean code, software craftsmanship, pair programming, Test-Driven Development and learn from each other for an hour or two. Food and drinks are provided.

RSVP for this London Code Dojo event: http://www.meetup.com/London-Code-Dojo/events/94309022/

Monday 4th February - Spring of Code – Hub Westminster

Talk on “10 Sustainability Models Around Free and Open Source Software” by Sander van der Waal from the Open Knowledge Foundation

RSVP for this Spring of Code event: http://www.meetup.com/Spring-of-Code/events/98948432/

Monday 4th February - SOA Suite 11g Performance Tuning Webinar Series: Part 3 – Tuning and Scaling WebLogic

Oracle WebLogic Server Oracle provides a solid foundation for SOA based on the Java Platform Java EE 5. In this webinar our certified WebLogic Specialists consultant will look at WebLogic specific features that enable rapid diagnostics of performance problems.

Register here: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/207684631

Tuesday 5th February - Code & Coffee

Morning session (7am – 9am) on Tuesdays every fortnight on Starbucks in Oxford Street.

RSVP for this London Software Craftsman Community event: http://www.meetup.com/london-software-craftsmanship/events/89099502/

Thursday 7th February - stORM, ORM mapper and littleye performances

David M Chandler from Google will present his project ‘stORM’ which is an open source ORM for SQLite on Android. Followed by Kumar Rangarajan from Little Eye Labs will present their toolkit which acts as a CT scanner for your android app analyzing battery and memory issues.

RSVP for this London Android Group event: http://www.meetup.com/android/events/100037032/

Saturday 9th February - Hack the Tower – February 2013

A hackathon for technical communities around London to come together and build interesting apps and discover great technology.  Following on from the successful hackathon with the London Scala community, we are inviting all those interested in Java, Scala, Clojure, node.js, play framework, MongoDB, Neo4j, Heroku & Force.com and anything else to get together and get creative.

Sign up at the LSD site http://www.meetup.com/LondonSalesforceDevelopers/events/96133122/ or on LSug site http://www.meetup.com/london-scala/events/96136332/ or LJC on http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/100205572/

Monday 11th February - SOA Suite 11g Performance Tuning Webinar Series: Part 4 – Oracle Service Bus Performance

Oracle Service Bus 11g extends the performance and scalability of Oracle SOA Suite 11g. In this webinar we take a look under the hood of Oracle Service Bus and provide hints and tips for increasing performance of your services.

Register here: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/957988103 

Tuesday 12th February - Meet a Mentor – University College London - Graduate only event

Have you always wondered what you want to do when you graduate?

Are you worried about all the talk of grads finding it hard to find work and what it will mean for you?

Do you want to know the difference between working in a bank, a gaming company or a startup?

What technology should you specialise in? Java, Ruby or any of the other countless programming languages?

Now is the chance to find out. You may well have heard the buzz about the Meet a Mentor events – this is the next in a series of events open to all students. Also please get in touch if you are interested in becoming a mentor: email Anji at ac@recworks.co.uk

RSVP for this Graduate Developer Community event: http://www.meetup.com/grad-dc/events/100215772/

That’s everything for now – I will be back in two weeks to bring you some more partner events.

See you later guys!

Sam

@SHRecWorks

First ‘Meet a Project’ Event Round Up

(TL;DR)

- We at RecWorks organised the first Meet a Project event which happened last night

- It was a pilot that will hopefully develop into an ongoing program

- It was chaotic but a lot of fun

- There were six projects in attendance Briar, RHQ, D Development Tools, Adopt a JSR/Adopt OpenJDK, Open Media Network and Continuous Delivery pipeline

- It seemed to be a success, lots of good feedback but only time will tell if it actually worked

- We learned a lot, it went on for too long because we had too many projects

- We want to hear from you – did you enjoy it? do you wish you’d come? do you think it’s a good/bad/ugly idea?

- Would anyone like to sponsor if we do it again?

- Check out Spring of Code for more cool OSS events

Hi all,

Last night we had our first full Meet a Project event. Chaotic, but a lot of fun, I thought I would take the time to write a quick report to the whole group as it was something that many people have shown a casual interest in and asked about, in discussions at other events recently.

At RecWorks we have met so many developers that are truly passionate about what they do that we try to encourage anyone in the Java space to develop their talent (it certainly makes our job easier )… and with so many opportunities in London to do so, we aim to make those connections. We have been organising and hosting events as part of the GDC for graduates to meet mentors in a ‘speed dating’ style for a year now. The format has been very successful so we thought we would try something similar in this space. The general feeling we get from a lot of developers interested in OSS is that they don’t know where to start, unless they find a very strong ‘itch’ to scratch then many end up thinking about it, but never long enough to take the plunge and get involved.

Last night was very much a pilot, our attempt to connect OSS and personal projects with developers looking for other opportunities and students that were new to OSS. The goal was to make the barrier for entry a bit lower and give people a chance to either find a project or ask advice of those that have been through the same thing as them, if nothing else it was a chance to network with a lot of people that are in a similar situation.

What happened?

We had six project leaders, some coming as far as Germany to be involved in the event. They represented different projects; Briar, RHQ, D Development Tools, Adopt a JSR, Open Media Network and Continuous Delivery pipeline. Further details about the projects can be found in the comments here: http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/98543702/ The project leads will all be adding links to their projects to the comments section asap. We split the attendees into 6 groups, each project lead had a chance to present the projects and answer any questions the attendees had for 15-20 minutes before moving on to the next group.

Was it a success?

I think so… there was certainly some awesome feedback at the drinks afterwards, but we will only really see over the next few days how many attendees actually join mailing lists and get in touch with the project leads. From the conversations in the pub there was certainly a high amount of intent to do so, we will be extremely interested to see if this happens.

What did we learn as organisers?

There were too many projects, it was just a little too overwhelming for everyone, too much information to receive for the attendees and too many times to say the same thing for the project leads. If we repeat the event we feel that 3-4 would probably be an ideal amount of projects. We had three smallish rooms so there was a slight ‘crowded’ feeling but I think with less projects that wouldn’t be so much of a problem, trying to predict how many people will come is always tricky on Meetup groups we see anything from 50-120% attendance, to make it more tricky people tend to show at any time from 6-7 as coming from different locations/finish work at different times… in an ideal world I think it could work to have tables of varying experience levels, this is certainly something we’ll try in the future.

One thing that I did like about it was the chaotic feel, which was reminiscent of the first unconference that we organised, in which we weren’t sure who would come or quite how it would go until it was actually running.

What do YOU think?

It was a lot of fun, and depending on the feedback I get, I’m keen for us to organise another event and hopefully run this as an ongoing series so we can really make an impact on the amount of developers getting involved in Open Source development. I am keen to hear back from anyone in the LJC about this. Do you think it’s worth while cause? if you came along to the event, did you think it was brilliant… or awful? If you were disappointed you couldn’t get along, but would come again? Any way we could improve it etc. Any thoughts or opinions I’m interested to hear back either personally to bc@recworks.co.uk or reply to the LJC list.

Sponsors

We didn’t have a sponsor last night. If you would be interested in sponsoring these events or others in the future, please let me know.

Spring of Code

As a final mention, if you’re interested in oss as a project lead or potential committer and did or didn’t get along then please check out Spring of Code. They have an event on 4th February: http://springofcode.org/en_GB Marc and Richard were down last night, they’re great guys and run some awesome events in this space. Again any feedback on their events please share it with the group

Thanks guys,

Barry

Forthcoming LJC Event: LJC and Greenfoot 29/1/13 6:30pm #ljcjug Organised by @RecWorks

The London Java Community’s next free event is – LJC and Greenfoot on Tuesday 29th January 2013 at 18:30 at UCL.

Please see link for details and to sign up - http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/97859402/

Presented by Michael Kölling (bio below).

This presentation will show you how to engage young programmers (teenagers from 14 years old upwards, and young adults) with programming in Java. We will show Greenfoot, an engaging, fun-to-use, educational Java environment and give plenty of tips about teaching and motivating kids to code.

If you have kids yourself, or want to help out in your local school, or set up an after school programming club, or anything else that involves teaching beginners to program, then this presentation should contain plenty of tips, ideas and useful information for you.

We will cover technical aspects of coding with Greenfoot, including an introduction to writing computer games in 20 minutes, and plenty of teaching tips. The talk will consist mostly of live demo, including programming with gadgets, such as the Kinect.

Who should attend:

This talk is for anyone who wants to teach others (kids or adults) about object-oriented programming and Java.

Bio:

Michael Kölling is a Professor at the School of Computing, University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK. He holds a PhD in computer science from Sydney University, and has worked in Australia, Denmark and the UK. Michael’s research interests are in the areas of object-oriented systems, programming languages, software tools, computing education and HCI. He has published numerous papers on object-orientation and computing education topics and is the author and co-author of two Java textbooks. Michael is the lead developer of BlueJ and Greenfoot, two educational programming environments. He is a UK National Teaching Fellow, Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, Oracle Java Champion, and a Distinguished Educator of the ACM.

Please see link for details and to sign up - http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/97859402/