Code Dojo - November 30th

Hey guys,

I've been away for a lot of this month and I haven't had any offers to present so I thought we could have another attempt at a code dojo. So I'll bring some kata's along and you guys bring yourselves, your laptops and your sense of teamwork. We might even be lucky enough to get few interstate attendees what with it being YOW week and all.

Also I guess this will be our last meeting for the year so I guess we should maybe go grab some dinner afterwards as well? Venue TBA. There will be no pizza served at this event, but we'll still have the beers ;)

Meeting Wednesday October 26th

Ya didn't think I'd forgot did ya?

Well I didn't, this month we have Birger Halfmeier to give us a talk about the new generation of mini ORMs on the rise.

Birgers talk will be "an investigation into how MicroORMs can save you time, prevent errors and make things simpler than completely hand coding your DAL. [He] will look at some of the common annoyances of ADO.NET and how MicroORMs have tried to solve them."

There may be a second more in depth talk on the same topic as well but I'm still trying to finalise that.

As usual beers and pizza c/o our mates at ThoughtWorks.

September Meeting

UPDATE: Now with extra opinion fodder! Dave Burela has agreed to my request to do a lighting talk on the new Windows 8 developments which I'm sure will spark some good conversation!

This month is our first meeting at ThoughtWorks offices on the corner of Collins and Elizabeth St in the city, we will be starting at 6pm and I think the doors downstairs will be locked after that time so you will have to give either I or Maha (Our new ThoughtWorks host) a call, the numbers will be posted on the door.

For the evening proceedings we have Simon Segal talking about task based UI's:

The user interface can sometimes be an afterthought for many developers and building applications
that fit the business needs should require that our user experience is crafted in a way that explicitly solves
business problems. Task based interfaces give us a great opportunity to address the commands in your domain
and with architectural patterns such as CQS, MVC and event sourcing we can explore the rich opportunities that exist in capturing crucial business context that can often be left behind. We will look at when it pays to think explicitly
and when it’s important to leave the CRUD based user interface behind regardless of whether it will technically work.


I would also like to do a little bit of a retrospective on the group. So please come along prepared to contribute! What have we done so far? What did we like? What didn't we like. Where do we want to take it in the future? And how can we achieve that.

And of course I'm sure we will adjourn to some fine upstanding establishment for some further refreshment and civilized debate afterwards.

Please RSVP on the poll to the right so Maha can get the Pizza and Drinks order right.

Changes Afoot

So some changes are afoot in the group. Andrew is having trouble finding the time to organise and host the events so I have stepped up to do the organisation for now.

Unfortunately this means we can no longer continue to use Salmat's facilities, but I would like to thank Salmat for their support up until now.

Thankfully ThoughtWorks have stepped up and are going to be providing us with a venue at their offices on Collins st as well as pizza and drink! I would like to thank both Mustafa Sezgin for acting as our ThoughtWorks host and Chris Bushell for helping me put all the pieces together.

There will be a short break in transmission as I am unable to organise or attend our next scheduled meeting on the 31st of August due to being out of the country, but we will resume our regular schedule of the last Wednesday of every month from September onwards.

Stay Tuned for details.

Cheers

Jim
@pjimmy

July Meeting - IoC

This month we are going to have a presentation from Nick Josevski with a summary of the Readify IoC Dev Day he attended back in June that was presented by Nicholas Blumhardt around Australia.

Nick is a senior software developer at a large marketing and advertising company, having previously worked as a consultant at Oakton on a variety of projects in varying business domains. Nick is on twitter as @NickJosevski and blogs at http://blog.nick.josevski.com

Nick’s presentation will focus around the use of Autofac and will try to cover some of the more advanced features the IoC container provides, such as lifetime management, modules with encapsulated configuration and AutoMockingContainer with NSubstitute. Depending on time and audience, could lead to a deep dive session investigating the Autofac source and/or AutofacContrib source.

Please RSVP using the poll on the right so we can organise pizza and beer.

June Meeting Update

I realised I hadn't posted the links from John's talk on Continuous Delivery last at last months meeting. Once again thanks to John for coming along and talking about his experiences. And finally here is the link to the slides.

http://www.slideshare.net/johnb/envato-dev-ops-altnet-melbourne

Enjoy.

June Meeting - Continuous Delivery

This month we are going to have a presentation from John Barton on Continuous Development and Delivery at Envato.

John is the Development Manager at Envato and was previously a .NET developer at companies such as MyCareer.com.au. He then moved on to the world of Ruby on Rails, and is now a team lead and sometimes coder. He also does the occasional bit of open source stuff over at https://github.com/joho and can be found on twitter as @johnbarton

John will talk about deploying continuously (multiple times a day) to a Ruby on Rails web app with a high traffic load  (>3 million dynamic requests a day). With this in mind John will discuss what it is about Envato, the tech team, and the ruby on rails ecosystem that lets them do continuous delivery with a minimum of hassle.

This should be a really interesting talk on what is currently generating a lot of discussion in the software development community and a topic which has also sparked the DevOps movement. So drag yourselves out on a cold Melbourne winters evening for some pizza and beers, but do go and RSVP first over on the poll to let us know if you'll be coming along.

May Meeting - Functional Programming (Take II)

Since I had to cancel the April meeting (apologies once again), we can simply continue with the functional programming themed evening as planned from last month. (see below).

So please go and RSVP over on the poll so we can get an idea of numbers. >>>>

See you there.

April Meeting - Functional Programming (canceled)

Regretfully April's meeting is going to have to be canceled as I am unwell and unable to make it to open the room. :(

April Meeting - Functional Programming

April is Functional Programming Awareness Month. Don't believe me? Nor would I. However we're going to make it the theme for the April Alt.NET meeting. So the idea will be to stick to the topic of functional programming but make to the evening a mixture of Lightning Talks, general discussion or even working through a problem if there is time.

To start with we will have a bit of an introductory discussion on functional programming. Then we will move onto some talks by Tarn (@tarnacious), talking about Erlang, and Andrew (@adbrowne), talking about Scala.

So if think you have something to add to the evening (like being able to explain monads in 5 minutes) or are simply interested learning more about functional programming, come along for some learning, pizza and beers. And please don't forget to RSVP over there -->

March Meeting - Wrap up

Thanks once again to Jim for his presentation on NServiceBus and SOA.

Below is the final slide from the presentation with links to various resources.

•Udi Dahan's ADSD course - http://www.udidahan.com/training/#Advanced_Distributed_System_Design

•NServiceBus Website (Documentation & Community Sections are great) –http://www.nservicebus.com/

•Distributed Podcast - http://distributedpodcast.com/

•NServiceBus Mailing List - http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/nservicebus/

•Other Mailing Lists –

–http://groups.google.com/group/dddcqrs?pli=1

–http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/

–http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/domaindrivendesign/messages

The source code used in the presentation (CrazyJimsSOA) can be found over on github

March Meeting - Winning with NServiceBus: Making your systems run on Tiger Blood (TM)

This month we will have Jim Pelletier Mystic Jim (@pjimmy) giving a talk on NServiceBus and SOA.

Jim will be giving us a two part talk, with the first focusing on the NServiceBus framework, it's API and the messaging patterns it enables. While the second part will provide a look at how to architect SOA style systems that can be deployed as a collection of autonomous services. You will be surprised at how far towards solving some of the most common problems in enterprise and LOB development this approach can take us.

This promises to be an interesting evening, so please go and RSVP on the voting panel on the right so that we can get an idea of numbers. And don't forget the new location for Melbourne Alt.NET. Look forward to seeing everyone there.

We're Back!!

Melbourne Alt.NET now has a new home thanks to Salmat. We are still city based and will have a good sized room, which should accommodate about 20-30 people, and includes a data projector.

The new location is:

Petronas Room
Level 13, 50 Franklin St.
Melbourne.

The next meeting will be held on Wednesday the 30th of March from 6-8pm, with details to follow. Please note, as with our previous location the street level doors automatically lock after hours. In this case that is after 6:30pm.

There will also be pizza and beer kindly provided (to assist with the discussions of course) :)

February Meeting - Alt.Net Beers

As I have already posted over on the ozaltdotnet group we currently don't have a room for our meetings. It's something I'm working on and hope to get a final answer on ASAP.

Until then we have decided to have a meetup in a pub over a few beers and something to eat. I've booked a table, which should accommodate about 20 I believe, at the Oxford Scholar Hotel on Swanston St. The aim is for anyone who has anything they would like to talk about or demonstrate on a laptop, to come along and present it to the group. A sort of informal Lightning Talks if you will. Otherwise, just come along and join in the discussion.

So far we have:
1. F#
2. Mercurial/TortoiseHg/Bitbucket

Hope to see you all there next week. Please RSVP over on the right.

Details:

Location: Oxford Scholar Hotel (427 Swanston Street, Melbourne) - Opposite RMIT
Date: Wednesday 23rd of Feb.
Time: 6pm - (pub says it's open 'til late)