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Friday, July 04, 2008
VBUG Brighton: Understanding LINQ with Mike Taulty
Last night Madgex hosted an excellent VBUG Brighton session by Mike Taulty on LINQ.
Despite the sunny, warm evening we managed to pack 25 or so Microsoft technologies developers into our boardroom and listened intently whilst Mike talked and demo'd his way around LINQ, explaining some of the newer C#/VB9 language features as he went. Whilst not being the exact same slide deck, after a rummage around Mike's site I found a post about a similar sounding talk complete with presentation in PDF format.
I remain slightly dissapointed by the syntax for Linq to XML
var query = from c in data.DescendantsAndSelf("customer")
select (string)c.Attribute("id");
which as Mike said, involves a bit too much of hoping and praying (relying on no underlying changes, no strong typing etc).
However, I'm really encouraged by the idea of Linq to XSD which seems like a much better idea, tying the query to a schema rather than a document.
Fabrice has some sample code based on Linq to XML and Linq to XSD as follows, which goes to show the improvement using the XSD version
Here is a LINQ to XML query:
from item in purchaseOrder.Elements("Item")
select (double)item.Element("Price") * (int)item.Element("Quantity")
Here is the same query as above, but written using LINQ to XSD:
from item in purchaseOrder.Item
select item.Price * item.Quantity
which I think looks much more elegant and less clunky.
Despite the sunny, warm evening we managed to pack 25 or so Microsoft technologies developers into our boardroom and listened intently whilst Mike talked and demo'd his way around LINQ, explaining some of the newer C#/VB9 language features as he went. Whilst not being the exact same slide deck, after a rummage around Mike's site I found a post about a similar sounding talk complete with presentation in PDF format.
I remain slightly dissapointed by the syntax for Linq to XML
var query = from c in data.DescendantsAndSelf("customer")
select (string)c.Attribute("id");
which as Mike said, involves a bit too much of hoping and praying (relying on no underlying changes, no strong typing etc).
However, I'm really encouraged by the idea of Linq to XSD which seems like a much better idea, tying the query to a schema rather than a document.
Fabrice has some sample code based on Linq to XML and Linq to XSD as follows, which goes to show the improvement using the XSD version
Here is a LINQ to XML query:
from item in purchaseOrder.Elements("Item")
select (double)item.Element("Price") * (int)item.Element("Quantity")
Here is the same query as above, but written using LINQ to XSD:
from item in purchaseOrder.Item
select item.Price * item.Quantity
which I think looks much more elegant and less clunky.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Sussex Geek Dinner - Mike Hadlow
On Wednesday evening, after I left the Contemporary Photography : Lydia Yee talk at the Friends Meeting House I made my way along to the Black Horse for a Geek Dinner. The speaker was Mike Hadlow, who I worked with for a while at Madgex late last year.
He gave a talk about Inversion of Control, a talk that he'd given previously at DDD6 last November. He has posted some links over at his blog.
The audience was more technical than usual, and a few usual faces were missing, possibly put off by the content. However, some new faces were also there, probably attracted by a more technical talk. All in all, another good evening organised by Simon.
He gave a talk about Inversion of Control, a talk that he'd given previously at DDD6 last November. He has posted some links over at his blog.
The audience was more technical than usual, and a few usual faces were missing, possibly put off by the content. However, some new faces were also there, probably attracted by a more technical talk. All in all, another good evening organised by Simon.
Labels: Brighton, event, Geek Dinner
Monday, March 31, 2008
Girl Geek Dinner - Copywriting
Relly of PoppyCopy spoke at the most recent Brighton Girl Geek Dinner last week on the subject of "Personality, Pulling Power and Prizes: Why good copy is your new BFF". Copy-writing isn't something that makes up any element of my job, but is something that I felt was worth knowing about, for this blog, and for who knows what exciting future projects might come my way.
Relly produced some great takeaway material for us, which contains examples of different styles of writing, and includes a Webiblography of useful material. It mentions a few articles from copyblogger - the Copywriting 101:An Introduction to Copywriting one caught my eye. My key learning from Relly's talk was to be authentic in my writing, so to write like I'd talk I guess, without using vocabulary I wouldn't normally use.
Relly produced some great takeaway material for us, which contains examples of different styles of writing, and includes a Webiblography of useful material. It mentions a few articles from copyblogger - the Copywriting 101:An Introduction to Copywriting one caught my eye. My key learning from Relly's talk was to be authentic in my writing, so to write like I'd talk I guess, without using vocabulary I wouldn't normally use.
Labels: Brighton, event, girl geeks, photos
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Silverlight
On Monday evening I headed down to the Eagle to attend Josh's Silverlight Night. It wasn't really a presentation so much as a set of demos, around which a lot of questions and answers went on - especially from the Flash Brighton crowd. This was the first time I'd really spent any time learning about Silverlight, and I found the session really informative. I appreciate it isn't as mature a product as flash but I also don't really think it is targeting the same audience at this time - probably being best suited to video players and kiosk style applications. I really believe that the integration with other Microsoft toolsets, like the .NET languages, Visual Studio, Expression Blend, can only be a good thing allowing developers and designers to work together with a greater amount of ease. This is long overdue in my opinion.
It's great to get more Microsoft speakers down to Brighton - following on from Daniel Moth's attendance at VBUG a few weeks previously - and having spoken with Pete during the event I'm hopeful that he can help get more evenings like this arranged.
A few days after the presentation, I received an email from Microsoft informing me that the Mix:UK 07 videos were available. I'd heard great things about the conference and so followed the link and discovered that they'd all been encoded using Silverlight - so I guess I'll be installing it pretty soon. Amongst the sessions are a couple of interest re Silverlight - "Designing immersive experiences with Expression Blend, WPF and Silverlight" and "Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Parts 1 and 2)" which I'm hoping to find time to follow up on in the next month or so.
It's great to get more Microsoft speakers down to Brighton - following on from Daniel Moth's attendance at VBUG a few weeks previously - and having spoken with Pete during the event I'm hopeful that he can help get more evenings like this arranged.
A few days after the presentation, I received an email from Microsoft informing me that the Mix:UK 07 videos were available. I'd heard great things about the conference and so followed the link and discovered that they'd all been encoded using Silverlight - so I guess I'll be installing it pretty soon. Amongst the sessions are a couple of interest re Silverlight - "Designing immersive experiences with Expression Blend, WPF and Silverlight" and "Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Parts 1 and 2)" which I'm hoping to find time to follow up on in the next month or so.
Labels: .NET, Brighton, event, silverlight, sussexdigital
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
VBUG Brighton - Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5
This evening Madgex hosted the first of what I hope will be many VBUG events. After a really informative session in August on LINQ I had high hopes for this evening, and wasn't dissapointed. Daniel Moth gave a rapid, but informative, tour of Visual Studio 2008 and some of the new features of .Net framework 3.5
As with the last event the format was a talk for about an hour, then a break for pizza and beer before heading back for another half an hour or so.
Looking at my notes, again there is a jumble of keywords to go and find out more about. The multi targeting element of Visual Studio 2008 looks great with the ability to swap which framework you're working against simply by selecting from a list. In fact, it seems like the only downside to upgrading to VS2008 is that it will have to be an all or nothing approach for any project with more than one developer - the .sln file has a different format and is the only bit which won't be compatible with VS2005. The inclusion of the Expression Web seems sensible - I remember being impressed by that when I saw a demo earlier this year at WebDD - and I'm particularly keen to see the CSS and javascript intellisense. I'm also hoping the manage styles window will help me get to grips with the precedences of element vs IDs vs classes in CSS as well!
Some of the new language features seem like they're included to be time savers (like var and anonymus typing), which at the moment at least I can't see being of help to the developer coming along later to maintain the code. I can also imagine the lambda expressions taking a while to get used to.
All in all, another excellent evening, and again a pleasure to see our office space being used for another community event.
As with the last event the format was a talk for about an hour, then a break for pizza and beer before heading back for another half an hour or so.
Looking at my notes, again there is a jumble of keywords to go and find out more about. The multi targeting element of Visual Studio 2008 looks great with the ability to swap which framework you're working against simply by selecting from a list. In fact, it seems like the only downside to upgrading to VS2008 is that it will have to be an all or nothing approach for any project with more than one developer - the .sln file has a different format and is the only bit which won't be compatible with VS2005. The inclusion of the Expression Web seems sensible - I remember being impressed by that when I saw a demo earlier this year at WebDD - and I'm particularly keen to see the CSS and javascript intellisense. I'm also hoping the manage styles window will help me get to grips with the precedences of element vs IDs vs classes in CSS as well!
Some of the new language features seem like they're included to be time savers (like var and anonymus typing), which at the moment at least I can't see being of help to the developer coming along later to maintain the code. I can also imagine the lambda expressions taking a while to get used to.
All in all, another excellent evening, and again a pleasure to see our office space being used for another community event.
Labels: Brighton, event, sussexdigital, vbug
Thursday, November 01, 2007
A week of skillswaps
Booking is now underway for the week of Skillswap events which are being run during the Brighton Digital Festival. These events are "Informal training by the local community for the local community" and I've been to a couple before. The events are:
- Monday 19th November - Photography 101 with Jane Dallaway
- Tuesday 20th November - Master Screencasting with Ian Ozsvald
- Wednesday 21st November - Agile: Iterating the Reasons with Joh Hunt & Tom Hume
- Thursday 22nd November - The Art of Storytelling with Charlie Davies
- Friday 23rd November - Software Testing with Rosie Sherry
Labels: Brighton, event, skillswap, sussexdigital
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Barcamp Brighton - afterthoughts
So, having had a few days to think about, here are my thoughts about barcamp Brighton.
Having it the weekend after dConstruct was good because lots of people were already down in Brighton for dConstruct, and so people who might not have normally made the effort to get down to Brighton came along and everyone benefited. It probably added to the attractiveness of the proposition on this occasion. It also meant that people were already in a "learning" mode.
Having it the weekend after dConstruct was bad because lots of people (including me) were hungover after the after party and so some of them turned up pretty late on Saturday (I'm talking after lunch here). Also, some people only seemed to attend on Saturday as my impressions were that there were quite a few less people around on Sunday. I guess this is due to people having long distances to travel and so is understandable BUT means that people who would have been prepared to stay around all weekend potentially missed out (the tickets sold out in 21 minutes after all).
Overall, and after the success (and possibly due to the success) of this barcamp I don't think that the next barcamp Brighton needs to follow dConstruct to be a success - it may be a different crowd, but I have no doubts it would still be a rewarding experience and would have plenty of willing participants.
Having it the weekend after dConstruct was good because lots of people were already down in Brighton for dConstruct, and so people who might not have normally made the effort to get down to Brighton came along and everyone benefited. It probably added to the attractiveness of the proposition on this occasion. It also meant that people were already in a "learning" mode.
Having it the weekend after dConstruct was bad because lots of people (including me) were hungover after the after party and so some of them turned up pretty late on Saturday (I'm talking after lunch here). Also, some people only seemed to attend on Saturday as my impressions were that there were quite a few less people around on Sunday. I guess this is due to people having long distances to travel and so is understandable BUT means that people who would have been prepared to stay around all weekend potentially missed out (the tickets sold out in 21 minutes after all).
Overall, and after the success (and possibly due to the success) of this barcamp I don't think that the next barcamp Brighton needs to follow dConstruct to be a success - it may be a different crowd, but I have no doubts it would still be a rewarding experience and would have plenty of willing participants.
Labels: barcampbrighton, Brighton, event
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
BarCamp Brighton Day 2
Sunday arrived and having headed home to bed on Saturday evening I strolled into the office at around 9am to see what was happening. The first, and only, issue arose when Ian arrived and informed us that breakfast was half an hour late due to Pret's oven breaking down or something. We pushed the sessions back by 15 minutes and soon caught up again, so no real damage done.
There were a few more Madgex people around and so we shared out the door watch duties between us so that we could all try and see some sessions, oh, and play table football :-)
I managed to see 4 sessions in total:
These talks were quite a mixed bag and I found that the one I gained the most from was probably the discussion led by Sjors about multi lingual sites, something that I've recently become interested in. I found Norm's talk (i18n and l10n) dissapointing as it turned out to be heading towards a product demo (which failed) rather than a study into the concept. I still ended up with a lot of links and articles to follow and read.
After the closing talk, and the clean up session, we headed off to the Madgex Arms for a few pints before heading home to recover.
There were a few more Madgex people around and so we shared out the door watch duties between us so that we could all try and see some sessions, oh, and play table football :-)
I managed to see 4 sessions in total:
- Multi Lingual Sites - a discussion - led by Sjors Timmer
- i18n and l10n - Mark Norman Francis
- CSS tips - Vicky Lamburn
- Web testing with Selenium - Kerry Buckley
These talks were quite a mixed bag and I found that the one I gained the most from was probably the discussion led by Sjors about multi lingual sites, something that I've recently become interested in. I found Norm's talk (i18n and l10n) dissapointing as it turned out to be heading towards a product demo (which failed) rather than a study into the concept. I still ended up with a lot of links and articles to follow and read.
After the closing talk, and the clean up session, we headed off to the Madgex Arms for a few pints before heading home to recover.
Labels: barcampbrighton, Brighton, conference, event
Saturday, September 08, 2007
BarCamp Brighton Day 1
Ok, so starting off the day with a hangover was inevitable, but not ideal. I got to the office at around 9.30 and started helping out. We had a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it in before the attendees started to arrive, and in fact several arrived early. We hadn't even finishing putting name tags together and so I had to head downstairs armed only with a list (in the order that people registered in) and name badges for those people with first names beginning with A, B or T. I was hugely intimidated opening the door and facing a vast amount of people in the foyer. Still, I got them processed, and it wasn't long before reinforments in the guise of Alex and Gillian appeared to help out. Phew! I obviously wasn't the only one with a hangover as people continue to drift in up until around 2pm, meaning that one of us had to be on the door to let people in and out. At around 2ish, Glenn, Sally and I decided that we'd done enough of this, and that people could phone from now on as the next sets of sessions were about to start.
I managed to attend quite a few sessions during the afternoon and evening, and I have to say I really enjoyed them. The sessions I saw were:
- Social Media - the cats at Nixon McInnes
- Social network portability - James Littlejohn, Tantek Celik, Jeremy Keith and Glenn Jones
- The perfect cup of tea - John Sutherland
- hAvatar - Alper.nl
- How Clearleft work - James Box, Paul Annett and Andy Budd
The food sponsors have been incredibly generous, with lots of pret food for breakfast, a wonderful spread from The Cherry Tree Mediteranean Deli (which Ryan Carson decided to throw away after lunch rather than leave around for people to nibble on - what a waste of truly wonderful food) and loads of pizzas and beer. Not forgetting the generous amounts of fruit, chocolate, crisps and soft drinks too.
I've got a few talks I want to attend tomorrow, especially the Internationalisation and Localisation one - as this is relevant to my last project and a recent blog post so I'm hopeful that I can work my helping out duties around them.
Labels: barcampbrighton, Brighton, conference, event
dConstruct 07
Yesterday I attended my first dConstruct conference, and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. My day started when I met Nick to put the PCs together for the Madgex stand, and we managed to get ourselves all set up before the doors opened at 9am. Between the 18 strong Madgex crew we manned the stall during all the breaks throughout the day, whilst still managing to attend all the talks - a great balance. We were there mainly for recruitment purposes, and so we'll see in the next few weeks whether that has worked or not.
The conference started with Glenn doing the introductory talks, managing a couple of mentions of Madgex and of course barcampBrighton over the weekend. He handed straight over to Jared Spool who spoke very engagingly about "The dawning of the age of experience". His was the first talk to mention the iPod/iPhone - a theme that proved to be very popular throughout the day. He also mentioned to get chicken sexing into his talk, before ending with a spot of magic.
After a short break, we then heard Peter Merholz on "Experience is the product". He used a lot of real product examples, including tivo, wii and palm pilot - all of which I've had and loved (and despite what he said, Tivo was available in the UK but not for too long, but the service is still running well). He explained how important characterisation of a product is and how important getting the process right was - often designs work from the data first, through the logic and into the user interface, where for a truly successfully product the reverse is more often the case. He said that he wanted to do the talk without mentioned the iPod, but he failed, and used the iPhone as a reference point too.
Next up was "Waterfall bad, Washing Machine good" by Leisa Reichelt which was all about managing products to succeed, and minimising the risks. Her slides were sheer genius - photographs of post it notes. Very innovative, very pleasing. The first part of the talk was a bit dull - rehashing the waterfall methodology and explaining what it was and why it was flawed - something that has been accepted for a long time. The second part became more interesting trying to mesh together agile with user centred design to produce a crossover discipline getting the pros of both methods.
Lunch time next, and a quick trip to my most frequent lunch spot of Pompoko.
The post lunch lull, or graveyard shift, was manned admirably by Cameron Moll, and his talk on "Good vs Great design". He had some really interesting points and was engaging, but my best memory is the brother number 1 shaving hair off the back of brother number 2s head with Mum's razor. One key takeaway for me was the concept of blurring a page layout, and greyscaling it to see what still stands out afterwards. He also recommended the "How Designers Think" book - as a developer do I need to know this, will it just scare me?
Next up was "Building a sense of place" which was an on the couch session with Denise Wilton and George Oates using their experiences of B3ta and Flickr. They chatted around a lot of areas, how the sites started, where they been, where they're heading. Jim blogged the gist of the conversation, so I won't bother rehashing it. I was amazed by the concept of the Faces of Sydney project that George mentioned, and somewhat concerned by the fact that the male face has a hint of David Beckham about it.
After another short break, it was Matt Webb talking about "The Experience Stack". This was my least favourite talk, and in my opinion his A - Z concept prevented a joined up, continuous talk as we jumped from space to space. He also used way too many big words which after so many talks with so much information and so many ideas contending for space in my head just left me a bit dazed.
The final talk of the day was Tom Coates talking about Designing for a web of data. Tom was excellent, and came across as being a really passionate kind of guy. My favourite quote was when he explained twitter as being "Twitter is a way to generate error messages on the web". He explained how important giving services for your data was - 90% of twitter usage is via APIs. He had some great points about designing your product to "play well with others" before starting to talk about fire eagle which looks like it'll be a great service, especially for me with my nice new shiny nokia 6110 navigator.
Then just the wrap up, with the thank yous and the prize draws, and I won the star prize. which I believe to be a copy of CS3 suite. Yay!
After a very rapid deconstructing of our stand and kit, and dropping it all off at the office, we headed to the after party, and proceeded to fail to eat any food, but to manage to drink quite a bit of beer. All in all a great day, with some great speakers and some amazing inspiration. My list of things to follow up on is pretty long!
The conference started with Glenn doing the introductory talks, managing a couple of mentions of Madgex and of course barcampBrighton over the weekend. He handed straight over to Jared Spool who spoke very engagingly about "The dawning of the age of experience". His was the first talk to mention the iPod/iPhone - a theme that proved to be very popular throughout the day. He also mentioned to get chicken sexing into his talk, before ending with a spot of magic.
After a short break, we then heard Peter Merholz on "Experience is the product". He used a lot of real product examples, including tivo, wii and palm pilot - all of which I've had and loved (and despite what he said, Tivo was available in the UK but not for too long, but the service is still running well). He explained how important characterisation of a product is and how important getting the process right was - often designs work from the data first, through the logic and into the user interface, where for a truly successfully product the reverse is more often the case. He said that he wanted to do the talk without mentioned the iPod, but he failed, and used the iPhone as a reference point too.
Next up was "Waterfall bad, Washing Machine good" by Leisa Reichelt which was all about managing products to succeed, and minimising the risks. Her slides were sheer genius - photographs of post it notes. Very innovative, very pleasing. The first part of the talk was a bit dull - rehashing the waterfall methodology and explaining what it was and why it was flawed - something that has been accepted for a long time. The second part became more interesting trying to mesh together agile with user centred design to produce a crossover discipline getting the pros of both methods.
Lunch time next, and a quick trip to my most frequent lunch spot of Pompoko.
The post lunch lull, or graveyard shift, was manned admirably by Cameron Moll, and his talk on "Good vs Great design". He had some really interesting points and was engaging, but my best memory is the brother number 1 shaving hair off the back of brother number 2s head with Mum's razor. One key takeaway for me was the concept of blurring a page layout, and greyscaling it to see what still stands out afterwards. He also recommended the "How Designers Think" book - as a developer do I need to know this, will it just scare me?
Next up was "Building a sense of place" which was an on the couch session with Denise Wilton and George Oates using their experiences of B3ta and Flickr. They chatted around a lot of areas, how the sites started, where they been, where they're heading. Jim blogged the gist of the conversation, so I won't bother rehashing it. I was amazed by the concept of the Faces of Sydney project that George mentioned, and somewhat concerned by the fact that the male face has a hint of David Beckham about it.
After another short break, it was Matt Webb talking about "The Experience Stack". This was my least favourite talk, and in my opinion his A - Z concept prevented a joined up, continuous talk as we jumped from space to space. He also used way too many big words which after so many talks with so much information and so many ideas contending for space in my head just left me a bit dazed.
The final talk of the day was Tom Coates talking about Designing for a web of data. Tom was excellent, and came across as being a really passionate kind of guy. My favourite quote was when he explained twitter as being "Twitter is a way to generate error messages on the web". He explained how important giving services for your data was - 90% of twitter usage is via APIs. He had some great points about designing your product to "play well with others" before starting to talk about fire eagle which looks like it'll be a great service, especially for me with my nice new shiny nokia 6110 navigator.
Then just the wrap up, with the thank yous and the prize draws, and I won the star prize. which I believe to be a copy of CS3 suite. Yay!
After a very rapid deconstructing of our stand and kit, and dropping it all off at the office, we headed to the after party, and proceeded to fail to eat any food, but to manage to drink quite a bit of beer. All in all a great day, with some great speakers and some amazing inspiration. My list of things to follow up on is pretty long!
Labels: Brighton, conference, dConstruct, dConstruct07, event
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
VBUG: An evening with LINQ
Last night me, and some others from Madgex, headed off to a VBUG evening at the Clarendon Centre. Last nights speaker was Ian Cooper and he spoke about LINQ within C# 3.0. A subject I've heard about, but not seen much about. Ian presented highlights of 2 talks he has previously presented, one about LINQ in general and one about LINQ to SQL.
LINQ looks really interesting, and like it might be a really good addition to the toolkit to allow for quicker development of certain projects. It is a shame that LINQ to SQL currently only has SQL Server interfaces available, but hopefully other providers will come along before too long. I really like the idea of having the ability to change the physical database provider without having to write new database access code. I am, however, a database kind of girl, and enjoy writing SQL, so I'll still fight to have some SQL intervention sometimes - Ian said that LINQ won't always be performant, so some intervention will be needed at these points - maybe that is where I'll be able to make use of my SQL skills.
I've never been to any of the VBUG events before, but if the caliber of last nights is anything to go by I'll be heading along again soon. Especially if the pizza, beer and free book are usual.
LINQ looks really interesting, and like it might be a really good addition to the toolkit to allow for quicker development of certain projects. It is a shame that LINQ to SQL currently only has SQL Server interfaces available, but hopefully other providers will come along before too long. I really like the idea of having the ability to change the physical database provider without having to write new database access code. I am, however, a database kind of girl, and enjoy writing SQL, so I'll still fight to have some SQL intervention sometimes - Ian said that LINQ won't always be performant, so some intervention will be needed at these points - maybe that is where I'll be able to make use of my SQL skills.
I've never been to any of the VBUG events before, but if the caliber of last nights is anything to go by I'll be heading along again soon. Especially if the pizza, beer and free book are usual.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
A busy Tuesday in Brighton
Last night was a busy night in Brighton, with an overlap between Flash Brighton - Jeremy Keith - Ajax : Flash Killer and £5 App Meet.
Richard and I managed to see some of Jeremy's presentation (which was excellent) before heading off to the £5 app to hear Tom Hume talk about the history of Future Platforms.
Jeremy presented on Ajax and how it relates to Flash, and effectively how there is space for both of them - Ajax is good for pages, flash is good for applications. We were shown a set of different sites and asked "Are they Ajax or not?" - Jeremy pointed to the ratings section on Amazon as a great Ajax example - small, discreet and works really well. Then we had to grab a cab and move on - any chance of seeing the rest of the slides sometime Jeremy?
Tom gave an excellent presentation about "The gritty reality of founding a software company", discussing the history of FP, the highs and lows, the lessons learnt - check for mobile coverage before renting an office when you're a mobile application provider - and of course the Pith!
Two excellent events, with excellent local speakers.
Richard and I managed to see some of Jeremy's presentation (which was excellent) before heading off to the £5 app to hear Tom Hume talk about the history of Future Platforms.
Jeremy presented on Ajax and how it relates to Flash, and effectively how there is space for both of them - Ajax is good for pages, flash is good for applications. We were shown a set of different sites and asked "Are they Ajax or not?" - Jeremy pointed to the ratings section on Amazon as a great Ajax example - small, discreet and works really well. Then we had to grab a cab and move on - any chance of seeing the rest of the slides sometime Jeremy?
Tom gave an excellent presentation about "The gritty reality of founding a software company", discussing the history of FP, the highs and lows, the lessons learnt - check for mobile coverage before renting an office when you're a mobile application provider - and of course the Pith!
Two excellent events, with excellent local speakers.
Labels: Brighton, event, flash, sussexdigital, £5 app
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Brighton Girl Geek Dinner #5
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the latest Brighton Girl Geek Dinner. Denise Wilton presented on "Designing a web application with character" and whilst it was more fluffy and designy than I am, I still learnt and gained from the experience.
A lot of the talk was about defining the character of your application, and sticking to it. So, are you designing a social site where exclamation marks and less formal language is acceptable - if there is an error message is an "oops" page acceptable - or are you designing a banking site in which case a fuller explanation indicating which part of your transaction did or didn't happen rather than leaving you wondering what just happened. This got me thinking, every time I've worked on a web site, I, as the developer, have always written the error messages. Generally this is the only copy I ever write for a website, and yet in some instances it is the most important. Something for me to work on in the future.
As usual, the food at the Eagle was great, and there was a really good bunch of people there including some new faces. Richard won a copy of Jeremy's Dom Scripting as well.
A lot of the talk was about defining the character of your application, and sticking to it. So, are you designing a social site where exclamation marks and less formal language is acceptable - if there is an error message is an "oops" page acceptable - or are you designing a banking site in which case a fuller explanation indicating which part of your transaction did or didn't happen rather than leaving you wondering what just happened. This got me thinking, every time I've worked on a web site, I, as the developer, have always written the error messages. Generally this is the only copy I ever write for a website, and yet in some instances it is the most important. Something for me to work on in the future.
As usual, the food at the Eagle was great, and there was a really good bunch of people there including some new faces. Richard won a copy of Jeremy's Dom Scripting as well.
Labels: Brighton, event, Geek Dinner, girl geeks, photos, sussexdigital
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
£5 App
Last night was the 4th £5 app evening and the first one concentrating on a hardware project.
Lincoln Smith did an interesting presentation on how a hardware project can be built for a relatively small financial outlay - although not compared to the more usual £5 apps which have been minimum finance but lots of time expenditure. It was really useful to hear the history behind the project - how it came about, and also where he hopes it will go.
After a quick break, with chance to eat more of the lovely ginger cake, it was on with the pitches.
The first was Ian doing a reverse pitch - he wants a skills board - so when he needs to find a designer, or a python developer he knows exactly where to go.
The second was Ben and Danny talking about artmeddler (a working title) which sounded like quite a cool concept - basically a web site enabling an artist to upload their artwork in several different formats - so from the sketch, through to the finished work. The original aim is to enable feedback on when a piece of artwork is finished, so preventing the artist from over working it.
Then onto a few quick plugs - one from Vicky mentioning the jobs we've got going at Madgex, one from Danny for the Geek Wine Thing and the last for the Open Coffee at the University on Thursday (and then regularly afterwards)
Lincoln Smith did an interesting presentation on how a hardware project can be built for a relatively small financial outlay - although not compared to the more usual £5 apps which have been minimum finance but lots of time expenditure. It was really useful to hear the history behind the project - how it came about, and also where he hopes it will go.
After a quick break, with chance to eat more of the lovely ginger cake, it was on with the pitches.
The first was Ian doing a reverse pitch - he wants a skills board - so when he needs to find a designer, or a python developer he knows exactly where to go.
The second was Ben and Danny talking about artmeddler (a working title) which sounded like quite a cool concept - basically a web site enabling an artist to upload their artwork in several different formats - so from the sketch, through to the finished work. The original aim is to enable feedback on when a piece of artwork is finished, so preventing the artist from over working it.
Then onto a few quick plugs - one from Vicky mentioning the jobs we've got going at Madgex, one from Danny for the Geek Wine Thing and the last for the Open Coffee at the University on Thursday (and then regularly afterwards)
Labels: Brighton, event, photos, sussexdigital, £5 app
dConstruct 07
Richard attended the first dConstruct, we were out of the country for last years (although I was an avid podcast listener) and I'm really pleased to have a ticket for this years event. It was impressive to see the speed with which the tickets sold yesterday - I think it was in the region of 6 hours. That's pretty impressive and goes to show that the ClearLeft guys have really hit a sweet spot in the conference market.
Labels: Brighton, dConstruct, event, sussexdigital
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Flash Brighton - Aral Balkan - SWX - Rediscovering Fun!
Last night I put aside my (very old) flash prejudice and headed over to Aral's beautiful flat for his presentation to Flash Brighton on SWX. One of my reasons is because when Aral was first working on SWX, when it was still "the tangent" I bumped into Aral quite often and got snapshots of the development process - but that is all I got. I listened in to some of his OSFlash SWX presentation last week, but then got distracted by beer at the Victory and haven't had a change to listen to the rest. The other reason was to see the Nabaztag bunny that Aral gained at Hack Day - you can send the bunny a message from Aral's website.
Aral put on a really good presentation, explaining in words that non-flash developers could understand. His demo's mostly worked ;-) and the whole interface and method of working looked good and seemed to just make sense. Great job Aral!
I spoke to quite a few Flash developers and designers and they didn't seem too upset to have a .NET developer in their midst (although at least one of them needs to get out more as I had a comment that they'd never met a female developer before).
My only experience of flash, other than as a user, was many years ago, 2000 or 2001 and I wasn't impressed - I didn't work with it, I just observed others and the work they produced. It looked pretty but that was about it.
Having seen some flash yesterday and listened to Aral's talk I must admit to having seen flash in a new light. I don't think I'm going to be giving up my back end development preference any time soon, but neither am I going to run away from flash either. To be honest, I think my acceptance of flash has been progressing in the background for a while - Niqui gave a good presentation at the Girl Geek Dinners on accessibility.
So, a great evening, slightly outside of my comfort zone, but big thanks to Flash Brighton for putting on such a good session, and to everyone for being so accepting of a non-flash person.
Aral put on a really good presentation, explaining in words that non-flash developers could understand. His demo's mostly worked ;-) and the whole interface and method of working looked good and seemed to just make sense. Great job Aral!
I spoke to quite a few Flash developers and designers and they didn't seem too upset to have a .NET developer in their midst (although at least one of them needs to get out more as I had a comment that they'd never met a female developer before).
My only experience of flash, other than as a user, was many years ago, 2000 or 2001 and I wasn't impressed - I didn't work with it, I just observed others and the work they produced. It looked pretty but that was about it.
Having seen some flash yesterday and listened to Aral's talk I must admit to having seen flash in a new light. I don't think I'm going to be giving up my back end development preference any time soon, but neither am I going to run away from flash either. To be honest, I think my acceptance of flash has been progressing in the background for a while - Niqui gave a good presentation at the Girl Geek Dinners on accessibility.
So, a great evening, slightly outside of my comfort zone, but big thanks to Flash Brighton for putting on such a good session, and to everyone for being so accepting of a non-flash person.
Labels: Brighton, event, flash, sussexdigital
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
£5 App Evening
Another enjoyable £5 App evening last night at the Regency Town House. The format of this evening was slightly different to the previous 2 with a presentation from Dan Glegg on Tails in the first half, and then after our refreshment break 3 pitches from Neil, Stuart and Danny.
Dan did a good presentation about his bug tracking software, explaining what his focus was and what lessons he'd learnt on the way. He released the application as a beta to a few people, and ended up with 100 or so users using it and providing valuable feedback (which was tracked in tails itelf). Some of the beta users came up with some non software uses for tails such as recipes and text reviews which just goes to show how inventive people can be. It sounds like the project was built to meet his own needs, and so the use cases etc are all well thought out, after all, bug tracking is obviously a process that most developers have a need for. Some interesting questions were asked of Dan, including who is his competition and what will he do if it succeeds - questions which are relevant to all of the £5 app presentations I've seen to date. Yesterday Dan announced that tails is ready to ship, with pricing packages all ready to implement. Good Luck Dan!
After a quick break (during which time Dan demo'd tails to anyone who wished to see and whilst ginger cake was munched) it was time for the pitches.
First up was Neil talking about art-hole. This is his idea of a community/social network site targetted towards the large number of artists that live and work in Brighton. The open house website doesn't represent artist's work as well as he'd like - only allowing one image per house, not even one image per artist, and so he's interested in using as many existing sites and APIs to produce a useful community to showcase art.
Next up was Stuart talking about a media finding tool which would run across the internet allowing photographers/videographers to search for their own work which had been copied and was being used without consent. This sounded like an immense amount of work to me but maybe I missed something obvious.
The final pitch was Danny's retro-pitch. Danny came up with an idea a few weeks ago, and has implemented in that time. It is basically a service which strips the comments and whitespace out of CSS files thus reducing bandwidth required. Andy pointed out that there were others offering this service as well with some added functionality. As Danny pointed out this has been released as open source and so if people want to use and change it they can do.
After a successful evening, a lot of us headed down to the Farm for a pint and a chance to do more chatting. Another great evening Ian and John. Thanks!
Dan did a good presentation about his bug tracking software, explaining what his focus was and what lessons he'd learnt on the way. He released the application as a beta to a few people, and ended up with 100 or so users using it and providing valuable feedback (which was tracked in tails itelf). Some of the beta users came up with some non software uses for tails such as recipes and text reviews which just goes to show how inventive people can be. It sounds like the project was built to meet his own needs, and so the use cases etc are all well thought out, after all, bug tracking is obviously a process that most developers have a need for. Some interesting questions were asked of Dan, including who is his competition and what will he do if it succeeds - questions which are relevant to all of the £5 app presentations I've seen to date. Yesterday Dan announced that tails is ready to ship, with pricing packages all ready to implement. Good Luck Dan!
After a quick break (during which time Dan demo'd tails to anyone who wished to see and whilst ginger cake was munched) it was time for the pitches.
First up was Neil talking about art-hole. This is his idea of a community/social network site targetted towards the large number of artists that live and work in Brighton. The open house website doesn't represent artist's work as well as he'd like - only allowing one image per house, not even one image per artist, and so he's interested in using as many existing sites and APIs to produce a useful community to showcase art.
Next up was Stuart talking about a media finding tool which would run across the internet allowing photographers/videographers to search for their own work which had been copied and was being used without consent. This sounded like an immense amount of work to me but maybe I missed something obvious.
The final pitch was Danny's retro-pitch. Danny came up with an idea a few weeks ago, and has implemented in that time. It is basically a service which strips the comments and whitespace out of CSS files thus reducing bandwidth required. Andy pointed out that there were others offering this service as well with some added functionality. As Danny pointed out this has been released as open source and so if people want to use and change it they can do.
After a successful evening, a lot of us headed down to the Farm for a pint and a chance to do more chatting. Another great evening Ian and John. Thanks!
Labels: Brighton, event, sussexdigital, £5 app
// posted by Jane @ 6:48 PM 
Comments:
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Sussex Geek Dinner
The secret army of Ninja coders you didn't know you had
Jun 6, 2007 by Jane Dallaway
Last night I headed off to the Black Horse to hear Dan Glegg talk about "The secret army of Ninja coders you didn't know you had", or alternatively the concept of using easy to develop frameworks which come with easy to use, easy to write and easy to distribute plugins to speed up delivery times allowing small development companies to produce decent sized products.
A good turn out again, and some new people to meet, resulting in a really enjoyable evening.
This hReview brought to you by the hReview Creator.
As usual more photos available at flickr.
Labels: Brighton, event, Geek Dinner, sussexdigital
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Brighton Girl Geek Dinner
A change in format for this month's Girl Geek Dinner - a fishbowl format discussion on what is a girl geek.
I was a little aprehensive about this event, and wasn't sure what to expect but I have to say it was immensely enjoyable and worked really well. I'm not sure we got an answer to the question but we went on some interesting journeys touching on whether we even like the phrase "girl geek", what is a geek (someone who bites the head of chickens), why more women aren't going into IT, what stops women going to conferences etc
I also won a prize, a copy of Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting with an introduction by Brighton's own Andy Budd. It looks like a good collection of topics by some knowledgable people.
All in all another great Girl Geek Dinner.
I was a little aprehensive about this event, and wasn't sure what to expect but I have to say it was immensely enjoyable and worked really well. I'm not sure we got an answer to the question but we went on some interesting journeys touching on whether we even like the phrase "girl geek", what is a geek (someone who bites the head of chickens), why more women aren't going into IT, what stops women going to conferences etc
I also won a prize, a copy of Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting with an introduction by Brighton's own Andy Budd. It looks like a good collection of topics by some knowledgable people.
All in all another great Girl Geek Dinner.
Labels: Brighton, event, Geek Dinner, sussexdigital
Friday, May 11, 2007
2nd £5 App meeting
I attended another interesting £5 App Meet on Tuesday. This time concentrating on social start-ups.
As with last time there was free beer...
and this time there was cake too...
First up was Alan Newman speaking about effeffelle an fantasy football management game. It gave an interesting history into how this came about, where it is now, and what the plans are for its future.
Next up was Raj Anand talking about kwiqq, a social network builder. Lots more talk about networking (both in person and by frequent posts to BNM).
The jobs board was also launched and filled up with things people can do to help, or requests for help.
I acted as photographer again, this time using my new camera and it behaved well producing a decent record of the evening.
As with last time there was free beer...
and this time there was cake too...
First up was Alan Newman speaking about effeffelle an fantasy football management game. It gave an interesting history into how this came about, where it is now, and what the plans are for its future.
Next up was Raj Anand talking about kwiqq, a social network builder. Lots more talk about networking (both in person and by frequent posts to BNM).
The jobs board was also launched and filled up with things people can do to help, or requests for help.
I acted as photographer again, this time using my new camera and it behaved well producing a decent record of the evening.
Labels: Brighton, event, sussexdigital, £5 app
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Brighton Girl Geek Dinner
Another excellent Geek Girl Dinner last night. Aleks Krotoski presented enthusiastically and engagingly on The Social Life of Virtual Worlds.
I wasn't sure what to expect prior to attending this talk, I'm not a virtual world user, I've never used Second Life, World of Warcraft or any of the others. I think part of the reason for this is just not knowing what to expect, and a concern that I would end up spending yet more time staring at a computer screen!
Aleks's presentation was very good, explaining the social aspects to virtual games, how relationships work, and most importantly how important it is to be consistent with your behaviour to
I wasn't sure what to expect prior to attending this talk, I'm not a virtual world user, I've never used Second Life, World of Warcraft or any of the others. I think part of the reason for this is just not knowing what to expect, and a concern that I would end up spending yet more time staring at a computer screen!
Aleks's presentation was very good, explaining the social aspects to virtual games, how relationships work, and most importantly how important it is to be consistent with your behaviour to