You may be interested in an event being organised by DevCSI and Phosphorix entitled:
Pair Shaped: An exploration of the methodology, costs and benefits of pair programming
The event is being held on Tuesday 19th of January 2010 at The Innovation Centre, University of Exeter.
The event is for programmers AND those who have to work closely with developers. The workshop is FREE, however there are limited spaces, so please book early.
Developers may be interested in the following workshops (free to UK higher and further education):
OSS Watch will be holding two concurrent workshops on the theme of open development on December 7th in Oxford. One workshop will examine open development as a part of open innovation; the other will address building an open development community around a software project. Both workshops are free to UK higher and further education.
Individuals should register for the single workshop that interests them most. However, it should be possible to move between the two workshops on the day, so long as space allows. Links to further information, including registration, are given below.
Both workshops will be covered via live blogs, for those who cannot attend in person.
1. Open Source, Open Development, Open Innovation:
For more information and to register, please see: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2009-12-07_business/programme.xml
The central concept behind open innovation is that in a world of widely distributed knowledge, organisations cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research. Open innovation is a means by which companies can both collaborate on research and share outputs. Although originally defined by Chesbrough as being dependent on patented technologies made available under licence there is growing recognition that open source software provides an excellent means for sharing outputs in a controlled and managed way in order to facilitate further innovation.
This workshop will introduce open innovation as defined by Chesbrough and look at how it applies to software outputs from academic research institutions. We will look at how open innovation through open source and open development of software can result in more sustainable software outputs and increased opportunities for continued work. Finally, we will look at how these models allow for commercial or social exploitation of outputs whilst allowing the researcher to remain focused on research rather than business planning.
At the end of this workshop you will:
This workshop will be of interest to anyone conducting research that produces software outputs. Participants will either be engaged with non-academic partners or will be interested in engaging in an unobtrusive way. The primary audience for this workshop is:
2. Open Development: Building an Engaged Community
For more information and to register, please see: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2009-12-07_community/programme.xml
Open development thrives on a diverse community of participants who engage in the project and also attract others with new skills and resources. Such a diverse community also increases project sustainability as the project can survive the exit of participants. However an engaged community does not just form itself, rather it requires active and continuous encouragement, particularly from the core project team. This workshop will help you understand how open development works and provide you with a practical appreciation of the skills, practices and mechanisms that encourage an engaged community.
At the end of this workshop you will:
This workshop will be of interest to those involved in a development project and who wish to benefit from improved community engagement or wider participation through open development. For example you may wish to become sustainable past the current funding round or expand your user base into new areas. In particular we think the following will be most interested:
Cameron Neylon organised a Google Wave Hackday at Nature Publishing’s London Offices which was sponsored by DevCSI. The theme for the day was to build a Google Wave gadget to facilitate Scientists using Google Wave.
On the day there was only a small group of us at Nature, about nine developers from Nature, Cameron and a colleague from the STFC Dan Hagon and myself, however there were many more people participating during the day via Wave.
We set up camp in one of the Meeting rooms at Nature. For a venue Nature Publishing was great, we had a nice airy room, with a view over the cannel good wifi and power sockets, the only thing lacking was the coffee, however the was a Costa down stairs in the building and various Coke machines so caffeine wasn’t an issue.
Firstly before telling all about the Hackday a quick history lesson on Google Wave. Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool” according to Google, the term Wave it’s self was inspired by “Firefly” the Sci-fi television series by Joss Whedon. In Firefly a Wave is a form of electronic communication that was often video call or video message. The inspiration from Firefly not only gave the name Wave, but also the some of it’s error messages. “Everything’s shiny, Cap’n. Not to fret!”, “This wave is experiencing some slight turbulence, and may explode.”, and “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”
The actual hack day started with with a general discussion on Google Wave (technically the actual discussion for the hackday started before the event over a series of Google Waves) – what people had done before on it, whether they’d used it or not, what they wanted to achieve on the day. There was some good discussions that we had for the first hour or so of the day. This in it’s self was a valuable part finding out what people had done already with Wave and what people wanted to do.
From this discussion it emerged that there were some definite groups that people wanted to split up into, one was building a Wave robot from scratch, another was improving Dan Hagon’s Chemspider molecule gadget, Cameron was working on a demonstration to use Wave as a collaboration tool for drafting Scientific papers. There was also a RDF Robot, EBI reflect Robot and various others.
Throughout the remainder of the day, everyone worked in their groups or on their own, on their specific topics, writing code coming up with errors expressing those errors both verbally and via Wave so as to include the remote hackers. One of the main stumbling blocks of the day turned out to be that currently the only way to create a robot that can interact with Google Wave is to have it hosted on Google Appengine. Now don’t get me wrong Appengine is a great service for developers to upload applications for free on to the web. The problem comes in the fact that you can’t locally debug your Appengine code that your using for Wave as it needs to be in Appengine to talk to Wave as mentioned, also Appengine doesn’t always update it’s log files instantly so it could take a few minuets to discover a bug.
The general workflow went like this:
Which is fine, it’s just it took a little longer than you’d like to write code.
Now for me this is were the excitement of being at a Hackday really comes through. It turned out that the developers at Nature Publishing in London are Ruby developers and I myself have been learning Ruby so we instantly had a bond there, however not only that they are Ruby developers who have to use JRuby to interface to all of Natures Java Applications. Now stepping back a bit going back to Google Appengine. With Appengine you can upload Applications written in either Python or Java.
Now I and the other Ruby developers at the Hackday can code slightly in Python, but someone mentioned that there had been a project on Github to get a JRuby App running on Appengine. So we all independently downloaded the code and tried to build a Wave robot using JRuby and Appengine. However to cut a long story short we all failed. The code just wasn’t up to the task. So during lunch we teamed up and started working together to get a working JRuby implementation working on Appengine that could talk to Google Wave.
Speaking of lunch, as with all good Hackdays lunch was pizza from Firezza.com and instead of writing a paper list of what everyone wanted we started a Google Wave! Unfortunately the pizza restaurant although they allow you to order online, as of yet you can not do this via Wave.
The afternoon carried on with much code writing although everyone was feeling rather full after the mountains of pizza. Then late in the afternoon people who had got a Wave robot working were doing show and tells, explaining the resoning behind their ideas and how they achieved it.
As far as the Rubists were concerned getting a working Wave robot was the last thing on our todo lists. Throughout the afternoon and much coffee and Coke later we had finally got a working set of code to deploy a JRuby app onto Appengine. We would have also gotten a few Wave demos too, but unfortunately the rest of the group felt it was time to put the code down and go to the pub. Now any developer knows if you have to force a developer to stop coding and go to the pub, they must really be in the zone.
DevCSI is proud to announce that following on from the very successful developer happiness days event in February of this year – the dates for the next year’s Dev8D event have been announced as Wednesday 24th (11.30am) – Saturday 27th (4pm) of February 2010. The event will be held in London and we will be directly involved in the organisation of the event!
This year’s gathering will run from Wednesday to Saturday with each day designed to stand alone (so you can pick which specific days you want to come) but they also fit together to provide a complete ‘dev8D’ experience (so you can come along to the whole thing). Learning from successful events like Barcamp London 7, Saturday was included in the event to expand the potential audience.
Free accommodation will be provided at a boutique hostel but places are limited, rooms are basic and will be shared.
Last year’s Dev8D event produced some exciting prototypes as part of the event and the dev8D competition winner, a reading list prototype called list8D has since been funded as a JISC rapid innovation project. An early version of the list8D reading list software has been released recently for others to experiment with. Dev8D 2009 was mentioned in the Edgeless University Report produced by Demos as a good example of experimentation that can:
help uncover not only new educational tools but also new uses for educational materials, and can draw on the energy and ideas of new constituencies. (p 48)
The booking form for the event will be released soon and we look forward to seeing lots of people from this year as well as new people. In the planning of the event we have tried to listen to feedback from this year’s event and we hope next year’s Dev8D event will be even bigger and better. Hope to see you there!
BarCamp7 was an unconference – a conference with no speakers. Or, more accurately, a conference of all speakers.
The BarCamp format is simple: there is no agenda, no workshop schedule, no keynote speeches. In their place are empty post-it notes, a blank wall and up to 200 keen developers, designers and anyone else on the digital spectrum.
Everyone who attends is encouraged to deliver a 20-minute session on a subject they are passionate about – whether it’s CSS or Python, spotting scams or taking photographs – and the result is an unpredictable, glorious mess of creative energy.
Common sense dictates that the purpose of attending any conference is to learn from other people in your field. You see what they are working on, learn from their experiences and meet people who might be useful to your work. So at first glance it might seem a frivolous waste of a weekend to go to a conference with no agenda and no delegate list. Interesting, perhaps, but frivolous all the same.
However, BarCamps are carefully engineered chaos. The event’s success hinges on the promise that 200 almost-randomly selected geeks stuck together in a building for 48 hours will innovate exponentially. Because, by and large, the people who attend BarCamps love what they do. And because they love it they want to do it better, smarter, more productively. After all, that’s why they choose to spend their weekend at a BarCamp, exploring the intricacies of log parsing or discussing new mobile app mashups, instead of sitting on the sofa at home watching X Factor.
Google Street View + Virtual Reality Goggles; Open source ReST on .NET; Back from the dead – Cold Fusion & Open Source; Non-relational databases BoF; HTML emails 101 – How to design, develop and how to use them for good *and* evil; An intro to Open Rasta; New fonts for the web (@font-face); Rails for PHP exiles…
With nearly a hundred talks it would be impossible to give a synopsis of each one. Instead, here are summaries of just three talks. Not necessarily the best, and certainly not the most technical, but included to give a tiny glimpse of what can happen in a 20 minute BarCamp session.
‘The National Museum of Computing: what it is, where it is, why it needs your help’
Alison Wheeler from The National Museum of Computing started a lively discussion about archiving old computers.
The group discussed what a computer museum ought to be – is it merely a nostalgia trip, a chance to gaze at tapes and memory drums and marvel at how far technology has come in such a short space of time, or is it a resource for the historians of the future who are looking at the birth of computing and the internet?
Should we archive machines behind glass, or make them into playthings? Should we tell the stories of how they were used, or just document their timelines? Do we need the museum to be for people now, or build it as an constantly growing archive? Do worms and viruses have a valid place in the history of computers, or would that glorify crimes and cause negative consequences for the developers now?
By the time the 20 minute was up there were more questions than answers, but also a definitive sense that the stories of the machines are as important as the actual hardware.
‘iPhone download stats’
Two developers spoke about their experiences of developing a couple of successful iPhone apps – one providing updates from TheTrainLine.com, and another giving geographical alternatives for expensive 0870 numbers.
Success for an iPhone app means lots of downloads – and lots of downloads come from publicity. Support from Apple is important, and getting it to the front of the Apple app store can be a massive boost, but if you can find the hook for the press then don’t be afraid to contact big players such as the Guardian, Telegraph and Techcrunch.
Don’t be lured in by the promises of big bucks – there are so many apps now that you’re unlikely to recover your development costs, particularly if you’re creating free apps. The best use of an iPhone app is as a marketing tool. Another tip: the 3GS iPhone is too fast to use for testing! Use older models or the iTouch.
‘Stuff you shouldn’t tweet that I have’
Dom Hodge, aka ‘The Hodge’ gave a very entertaining account of some of the many ways he has been threatened with lawyers for writing on blogs and Twitter.
The basic pattern seems to be: get bad treatment from a company. Blog about it. Get threatening email/phone call from company. Blog about it. Get another, angrier email/phone call from company. Talk at a BarCamp about it. Despite the threats, never actually get sued.
The central message of the session: don’t be afraid to write what you think. As long as you tell the truth, you’ll be ok. Probably.
One of the fundamental premises behind BarCamp is that everyone is an expert on something. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily follow that everyone is dying to talk about a neat trick they learnt in Ruby, or a clever new API they built for PayPal.
Just as important as the technical sessions are the more light-hearted sessions, such as ‘Split fares – aka hack yourself a cheaper train ticket’ or even ‘Learn how to play Munchkin’ – particularly useful for the late-night gaming that take place overnight (for those with a sleeping bag and a sense of adventure, the ‘camp’ of BarCamp is literal.) And if playing boardgames until 4am doesn’t appeal, there’s always LAN parties or BarCamp favourite Werewolf – a strategic group game involving lynchmobs and murderers.
Playing Urban Terror with 15 other people or listening to a man talk about how he created a Lego sculpture of his family may feel like a break from a day of thinking about code. But it isn’t really a break – the brain will still be making connections and looking for patterns, constantly learning and developing new ideas.
It might just look like everyone’s having fun, and invariably they are, but crucially they’re also making friends and strengthening relationships. It all contributes to the playful, positive atmosphere of BarCamp – and the central message that happy, relaxed people are productive people.
BarCamp is a great leveller. There is no ‘us and them’, no speakers and listeners. Everyone participates, and everyone is heard. And because everyone is encouraged to give a talk, everyone knows how nerve-wracking it can be to stand up and position yourself as an expert – even if you truly are an expert, and even if you’re just speaking to ten people. This empathy and sense of equality creates an unusually friendly, receptive atmosphere to sessions; the kind of atmosphere that event organisers can usually only dream of.
Even the largest universities can be isolating places, and working in a contained development team on a specific project can make it difficult to see new possibilities and opportunities. The beauty of BarCamp is in the unexpected connections, the ideas that flourish when you cross-pollinate with people outside of your project, programming language or discipline.
This philosophy of unexpected connections was perfectly illustrated in a session telling the story of Ernie, the bored church organist. In the 1980s Ernie was a physicist who realised that with the right hardware and programming a BBC Micro could be set up to play the church organ. 20 years later Ernie had retired, and with time on his hands he finally tried out his experiment. The result: a hacked pipe organ that will automatically play a week’s worth of music. Unexpected, simple, brilliant.
