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

Danny approached me a while ago about doing a photography talk, and so I've got a couple of weeks to prepare. My plans are to do a Tips for digital photographers session initially, and I'd really like to then move on to a critiquing session where the attendees (and me!) put forward photos to be reviewed by the other attendees. This is an excellent way to learn, and I'm far from being an expert and want to learn too.

Labels: Brighton, event, skillswap, sussexdigital

// posted by Jane @ 7:29 PM   

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Almost 4 years since I attended my last (and first) SkillSwap I had the good fortune to grab a space at last night's Introduction to Rails presented by Dominic Mitchell. This was held at Lighthouse in one of the studios and was a really great venue - although we did have to fight our way through the Day of the Figurines launch party to get downstairs.



The evening started off with a 30 to 40 minute talk on Rails and Ruby, what is good, what is less good, what it does best and of course the history. We then had some hands-on practical tasks, and so we split into groups and worked in groups of 2 or 3 to follow Dom's easy-to-follow instruction sheets.

Stage One: Creation of a model
Stage Two: Creation of a database table
Stage Three: Get rails to create the database
Stage Four: Create the scaffold to get the "quick and dirty" interface working

This followed on really well for me from the excellent Ruby on Rails for .Net developers I attended at WebDD as it covered a similar introduction, but with play time too.

All in all an excellent evening, and again leaving me with the intention to devote some playtime to Ruby and Rails. It would be great to be able to have a follow up event to this one (or I guess I could keep an eye out for Brighton Ruby meetings), as I know that Dom didn't get through all of his slides and examples - I'd love to know what else he had in store for us...

Labels: Brighton, event, skillswap, sussexdigital

// posted by Jane @ 8:52 AM   

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Last night I attended my first Skillswap event. These are free events where the emphasis is on learning a new skill, and presented by a local expert. It was presented by Matt Zandstra (author of Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours) and was all about PHP, Objects and Patterns. Matt also delved into some of the new features that PHP5 will provide when it's released towards the end of this year.

I must admit that Design Patterns are something that have been on the fringe of my knowledge for a long time, but that I've just never got around to learning more about, so it is good to now have a bit more of an idea. There were a couple of book recommendations mentioned during the night - Design patterns : elements of reusable object-oriented software and A Little Java, a Few Patterns which I may have to take a closer look at.

Labels: Brighton, Development, php, skillswap

// posted by Jane @ 10:22 PM   

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