Month: November 2010

Community report: Melbourne Alt.net lightning talk 3–An agent of change

David Burela Community Report

Here is the third lightning talk at the August Melbourne Alt.Net lightning talk night.

Here are links to the 4 lightning talks at the August 2010 meeting

  1. Monotouch – Mark Trinder
  2. CouchDB – Andrew Browne
  3. My experience as an agent of change – Jimmy P
  4. Reactive Javascript – Tarn Barford

In this talk Jimmy P. (@pjimmy) gives a very frank and open retrospective of his experiences acting as an “agent of change”. It was good to hear him being so honest about how they started the project with great goals, “this time we will do things RIGHT”, “we will do everything Agile this time, we can’t fail”, but even with the best intentions things still went wrong.

Thanks a lot for this talk Jimmy.


http://www.vimeo.com/16585170

By David Burela

Community report: Melbourne Alt.net lightning talk 2–CouchDB

David Burela Community Report

The second lightning talk at the August Melbourne Alt.Net lightning talk night.

Here are links to the 4 lightning talks at the August 2010 meeting

  1. Monotouch – Mark Trinder
  2. CouchDB – Andrew Browne
  3. My experience as an agent of change – Jimmy P
  4. Reactive Javascript – Tarn Barford

In this talk Andrew Browne (@adbrowne) gives an overview of how to use CouchDB


http://www.vimeo.com/16583316

By David Burela

Azure free to trial for 30 days

David Burela Azure, Cloud Computing ,

If you currently have an MSDN account (paid for or a Bizspark account), then you should be taking advantage of the 750 free compute hours you get each month. Just look at your subscriber benefits.

However if you still haven’t been able to give Windows Azure a try, you are now able to get a 30 day free trial https://blogs.technet.com/b/webtech/archive/2010/11/24/it-s-back-30-days-windows-azure-platform-no-credit-card-required.aspx

By David Burela

Community report: Melbourne Alt.net lightning talk 1–Monotouch

David Burela Community Report , , ,

I’m going through my backlog of videos I did with my old camera. Here is the next series of them, lightning talks that were done at the Melbourne Alt.net

Here are links to the 4 lightning talks at the August 2010 meeting

  1. Monotouch – Mark Trinder
  2. CouchDB – Andrew Browne
  3. My experience as an agent of change – Jimmy P
  4. Reactive Javascript – Tarn Barford

In this talk Mark Trinder (@mtrinder) shows how you can program C# on an iPhone using Monotouch


http://www.vimeo.com/16581491

By David Burela

Community report: Code Camp Oz 2010–Liam McLennan on BDD

David Burela Community Report ,

Liam McLennan talks about ways that you can use StoryQ to assist in “Behaviour Driven Development”. Using StoryQ allows you to write tests to verify that your application contains the behaviours that are required, and outputs a nicely formatted page that can be viewed by “the business” to check that the app is doing what it should.

I got a new camera to record the presentations on, a Canon 550D with a shotgun microphone. I’m still learning how to use it, so the audio quality is greatly improved over my previous videos, but in this case I put the tripod on an angle, and didn’t focus completely correctly. Beginners mistakes


http://vimeo.com/17105869

More videos from day 2 of Code Camp 2010

By David Burela

Developer Blog Banter #3: Project post-mortem

David Burela Community Report, Developer Blog Banter

It is nearing the end of the year and many of you would be near the end of your projects. I thought this would be a good time to look back and reflect on one of the projects you completed this year. The best way for us to learn is to reflect on what we have done, and analyse what we could have done better. This leads us to the Developer Blog Banter topic for this round.

We start on new projects with good intentions, but how often do we reflect on what we have done to see if we got to where we had planned?
Take your current or recent project one and discuss it. What were your intentions at the beginning of the project (to do it “right” this time, 80% code coverage, get it out by a deadline, learn a new technology, etc.). What compromises did you end up having to take. And what would you change if you could do it all over again.

As usual, comment on this post when you join the Developer Blog Banter and I’ll add your response below

Participants

  1. David Tchepak – Lessons learned from an Agile project

By David Burela

Community report: Melbourne cloudcamp 2010 – OrionVM

David Burela Cloud Computing, Community Report , ,

The final lightning talk at the 2nd Melbourne Cloudcamp for 2010 was done by OrionVM and it was a very technical session. Here they discuss the actual technology that they used to create their cloud computing platform! OrionVM is Sydney based cloud computing provider, they have build their own infrastructure and technology from scratch, it is very interesting indeed.

The talk is great, they were asked 15 minutes before if they would like to do a lightning talk and quickly threw some slides together. Unfortunately they did their slides on a Linux machine with Open Office , so it didn’t want to play nice with Microsoft office, meaning they had to improvise.


http://www.vimeo.com/15912692

 

Here is my interview with them earlier in the year


http://www.vimeo.com/14902921

By David Burela

My community involvement in the last 2 years

David Burela Azure, Community Report, Microsoft tech, PDC, Silverlight, Windows Phone, WPF

PDC 2010 has come and gone. I thought it would be interesting to see what I have done in the last 2 years since PDC 2008. Looking back at my presentations and blog posts, I feel quite proud with the amount of involvement I’ve had with the community. Seeing everything laid out like that makes me realise just how much I enjoy participating in helping to share knowledge with the developer community.

There is so much that I’ve just forgotten about and left off the list, it is impossible to keep track of everything. You can look forward to lots more involvement in the next 2 years!

I’ve also got a running list of usergroup presentations I’ve done on my About page

Highlights

  • Did my first Azure usergroup presentation within 3 weeks of Azure being announced at PDC
  • Presented at Remix 2009 on Azure
  • Started the Australian Azure mailing list
  • Started an Azure community support site AzureQuestions.com (which has now been decommissioned)
  • Flew around Australia and attended 4 out of 6 Australian Cloudcamps. It was “unconferences” style with breakout discussions where I would answer all Azure related questions
  • Recorded all cloudcamp lighning talks and uploaded them, in an effort to increase cloud knowledge in the community (16 so far with more to come)
    http://www.vimeo.com/album/1469190
  • Trying to involve the .Net community at large with more cross posting (via the Developer Blog banter)
  • Trying to involve the community more with “Community reports” of things happening such as presentations, lightning talks or interviews with people / companies
  • Recorded community group presentations and uploaded them to help increase the visibility of local speakers and improve the visibility of local user groups
    http://www.vimeo.com/album/1469195
  • I still have 15 videos of sessions to process and upload
  • Got 2 new presenters to start their Melbourne presentation debuts
  • Presented at Codecamp 2009 on Azure & artificial life in the cloud

Cloud related activities (presentations & blog posts)

Other community involvement

By David Burela

Community report: Melbourne cloudcamp 2010 – Microsoft

David Burela Azure, Cloud Computing, Community Report , , ,

In this lightning talk, Graham Elliot (@grahamelliott) from Microsoft discusses ways you can cloudify your application.

It is a very useful guide on ways that different service models (IAAS, PAAS, SAAS) and how it will effect how you charge for you application. It is a must watch for any seriously considering creating an online application they plan to charge other people for.


http://www.vimeo.com/15911427

By David Burela