Julie Lerman visits Scotland.

Hello!

The Scottish Developers team have an exciting announcement, we have a special guest joining us for 2 events across east and west coasts: Julie Lerman.

We have partnered with Experis and are pleased to have them support Julie Lerman’s mini-tour of Scotland.  In her presentations in Glasgow and Edinburgh, she will be sharing her latest insights on EF core as well as architectural guidance around dealing with data in the context of modern web development on the .Net stack

About Julie

Julie Lerman is a Microsoft Regional Director, Microsoft MVP (since 2003), software coach and consultant. You can find Julie presenting at conferences around the world on Entity Framework, Domain Driven Design and whatever other technologies catch her eye. Julie blogs at thedatafarm.com/blog, is the author of the highly acclaimed “Programming Entity Framework” books, the MSDN Magazine Data Points column and popular videos on Pluralsight.com.

Glasgow: May 16th – @ Glasgow Caledonian University

Mapping DDD Domain Types with EF Core

Entity Framework half-heartedly supported DDD patterns. But the new-from-scratch EF Core has brought new hope for DDD practitioners to map your well-designed domain classes to a database, reducing the cases where a separate data model is needed. EF Core is very DDD friendly, even supporting things like fully encapsulated collections, backing fields and the return of support for value objects. In this hands we’ll review some well-designed aggregates and explore how far EF Core goes to act as the data model between your domain classes and your data store.
Sign up on meetup here

Edinburgh: May 21st –  @ Microsoft, Waverly Gate.

Building Cross-Platform Server-Side Data APIs

Front ends are cool but mostly useless without data. Sure, some of your data sources provide REST APIs so you can just write queries directly against them but that is so old school. Instead, you can build back end APIs that address the specific data needs of your web application and relieve front end devs from tangling with database schema, query syntax and other distractions. In this session you’ll learn the basics of creating a back end API as well as some smart architectural guidance to make moving data between your front end and your data store. We’ll start with an ASP.NET Core Web API, EF Core and a relational database, then look at a data API built with Azure Functions to support a Cosmos DB document database.

Sign up on meetup here

As you can imagine, we are really excited to have Julie visit us here in Scotland and give not one but two talks for the Scottish Developers group. Both events are free to attend thanks to our hosts and sponsors Experis.

We hope to see you all there!

The Scottish Developers Team.

DDD Scotland: Thank You!

We would just like another opportunity to thank everyone who made DDD Scotland a success: speakers, volunteers, sponsors and of course all of you who attended. We had > 250 attendees on the day, which considering the very rainy Scottish weather we had, is impressive!

We have had some lovely feedback and some things to work on for next year to make it even better. You can still give feedback on the event here and on specific talks here.

In the meantime, let’s remind ourselves of the day with these blogs from the community (if you have blogged but we haven’t included it, let us know and we will add it to the list!):

https://theliddler.site/2018/02/11/ddd-scotland-2018/ – @The_Liddler

https://gregorsuttie.com/2018/02/11/dddscotland-restrospective/ – @gregor_suttie

https://carolelogan.net/blog/developer-diary-ddd-scotland/ – @crgrieve

https://peat.me.uk/2018/02/16/ddd-scotland/ – @RTPeat

http://blog.craigtp.co.uk/post/ddd-scotland-2018-in-review – @craigtptech

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dddscotland-net-talent-blog-darren-dalrymple-1/ – @NetTalent

Some of our speakers have shared their slides online so we thought we would gather them all on one place for you (again, if we have missed any, let us know!):

PWAs- @jmaciver22

https://speakerdeck.com/jamesmaciver/progressive-web-apps-ddd-scotland-2018

https://github.com/jamesmaciver/dddscot-demo

Accessibility in Modern Web Apps- @stuartashworth9

http://www.stuartashworth.com/ddd/accessibility-in-modern-web-applications.pdf

http://www.stuartashworth.com/ddd-transcript/accessibility-in-modern-web-applications-transcript.pdf

Leveling up to become a tech lead

https://speakerdeck.com/tourismgeek/levelling-up-to-become-a-technical-lead

Teaching an old dog new tricks- @ismailmayat

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1p4UU6t0dn8J0dIsTqK1b5UyyAOSN_o_KSEnXN6HxD6c/edit#slide=id.g258d29308c_0_0

Adding a layer of chocolate(y) – @gep13

https://gitpitch.com/gep13/ChocolateyDemos/dddscot#/

Writing Simpler ASP .Net Core – @jchannon

https://github.com/jchannon/t1000

ReactJS and Friends- @paulaik

http://ddd18.paulaikman.co.uk/#/

APIs on the scale of decades- @garyfleming

https://github.com/garyfleming/apis-for-decades/releases/tag/v0.3

Interactive C# Development- @filip_woj

http://filipw.github.io/dddscotland-2018/#/

Thanks again to everyone for contributing on the day, looking forward to seeing you all at our upcoming Scottish Developers events, and of course DDD Scotland next year!

Carole, Andrew and Christos.

(The Scottish Developers Team)

Announcing the DDD Scotland Community Room

Not long to wait until DDD Scotland and we wanted to introduce you to our latest exciting addition, our DDD Scotland community room! This year we wanted to make DDD even more community focused and thought how better to do that than get people talking and giving new speakers the chance to get experience.

The other rooms will be fully booked with back to back talks, the community room will have a mix of sessions and also some unscheduled slots to allow collaboration.

This room will feature:

*Lightning talks are 15 minutes sessions for new speakers or new material from experienced speakers. A great way to test the waters with a friendly crowd!

*Panels

We have 2 panels of experts to discuss their experiences and take questions. These are “My journey as a software developer” and “What makes a graduate software developer employable”. We will keep the panellists secret for now but we think we have a great group that should make for interesting conversations.

Have a question for the “My journey as a software developer” panel? Leave them here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/8V26GKF

*Lean Coffee is an unplanned conversation where the participants suggest and vote for the topics. A great way to learn how others work in their organisation and get to know other developers.

*Mob Programming Taster

Joe will be giving us an introduction to Mob Programming, here is a description for his session:

“All the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and on the same computer” –Woody Zuill

Everyone working together on one machine, at the same time? That can’t possibly work. Or can it?

Come along to this session, and we’ll spend 45 minutes mobbing. You might find you like it.

*Unscheduled time– we are leaving some sessions unbooked in this room to allow for community conversations and collaboration. You never know, your next job, project or friendship might be made at DDD Scotland!

One of the main aims from Scottish Developers team is to grow our community of developers in Scotland and beyond so this is really exciting for us! We can’t wait til see you all there on the day.

—

Carole, Andrew and Christos

The Scottish Developers Team

Event: ‘Alexa open seeing eye’ with Jon Carlos

You may have heard recently, we are back and have a new team on board. We have been busy getting settled in and organising DDD Scotland but now the time has come for our first event!

Tuesday 5th December we will be joined by Jon Carlos from Screenmedia who will be sharing his expert knowledge on voice technologies.

Since co-founding award winning digital innovation practice Screenmedia 13 years ago, Jon has lead teams developing cutting edge solutions to keep his clients at the forefront of their fields. With over 18 years of commercial coding experience, he possesses vast technical knowledge of programming tools and services, and is a proactive and influential member of the open source coding community.

An active and curious developer, he can frequently be found experimenting with both hardware and software, translating his innovations into his work. His current focus is bringing machine learning, cognitive services, and natural language understanding to Screenmedia’s roster of global clients to support them in the transition to an AI first world.

In his talk ‘Alexa open seeing eye’,  Jon will be walking us through the creation of an Alexa skill, from planning intents and utterances through to connecting to a visual learning AI. Using C# end-to-end through .NET core and Xamarin, Jon will show how to connect Alexa to complex backend systems, including reading data from Azure and using some of its awesome shortcuts to train an AI. Not only will we have a working Alexa skill by the end of the talk, but we’ll also have trained a visual learning AI to recognise a couple of the Scottish Developers team.

Details:

18.15pm,  Tuesday 5th December.

Hamish Wood Building – Glasgow Caledonian University

Interested? Signup on our meetup page and come along to Glasgow Caledonian Uni on 5th December. We are very excited for our first meetup and look forward to seeing you all there!

Our new star signing!

With plans for our December presentation well underway and DDD Scotland scheduled for early 2018 we’ve decided to give our team a serious boost and are delighted to announce that Carole Logan is joining our team.

Carole is a senior web developer at Equator. Mainly working in the .Net stack after converting from Java, she has an interest in learning new technologies beyond websites such as IOT and voice. An enthusiastic member of the Umbraco community and current Umbraco MVP, Carole also runs the Glasgow Umbraco meetup as well as the Glasgow chapter of Ladies of Code.

Carole’s professional achievements and community contributions were recently recognized via a nomination and subsequent commendation in the Digital Professional of the Year Award, part of the Herald Scottish Digital Business Awards 2017 as well as being one of the winners of the We Are The City, Rising Stars in Technology Awards 2017.

When not coding you will find her long-distance running around Glasgow and baking.

Scott Hanselman confirmed!

We are delighted to announce that Scott Hanselman has agreed to speak at our event!

Come see what he has to say on Open Source, .NET Core, Microsoft, AMA and more at CodeClan, 37 Castle Terrace, Edinburgh, EH1 2EL at 6pm.

ScotlandIS have brought Scott to Scotland to keynote ScotSoft2017, taking place on 5th October 2017 at the EICC in Edinburgh.

We’re thrilled that they have taken this opportunity to support our community and provide a free, short user group meeting in Edinburgh the evening before. Places will be limited so keep an eye out for further details.

If you’re not lucky enough to secure a space why not book yourself a ticket to ScotSoft? Use the code ScottishDevs to receive a 25% discount on standard rates!

You’ll have the chance to hear from Scott, our very own Christos Matskas, Elton Stoneman of Docker, Mike Ritchie of 13Coders and loads more.  Find the full agenda here or call Karen or Heather on 01506 472200 for more information.

Stay tuned or follow us on Twitter for updates.

We’ll see you in October!

CodeCraftConf 2017 is back!

Scottish Developers are actively trying to track and publish interesting developer events around Scotland. I’m continually surprised to see how active our developer community is here, in the “true” North, so hopefully we’ll be publishing a lot more events as we are informed about them. We wish to work with you, our community, to publish and promote interesting events that you may wish to participate as a speaker, organiser, volunteer and attendee.

One of the most interesting events/conferences to take place in Glasgow is CodeCraftConf which is back for another year. I say interesting because unlike “traditional” conferences where you have speakers and tracks and attendees mostly attend talks and listen to others do all the talking, this conference encourages everyone to participate through the “guided conversations” format. It’s a highly engaging event where you get to share your experience and knowledge to the benefit of everyone attending a particular track/conversation.

I would highly recommend this to everyone who’s available on the 15th of Sept 2017. You can find all the details about the venue, times and speakers on the official site and I hope that you’ll take the opportunity to attend and maybe even guide one of the tracks next year.

Here’s to another great conference in Scotland and hopefully one of many more to follow…

Scottish Developers – A new team and a new vision

Hello everyone! Christos, Andrew and Jason here. We are very proud to announce that we will be the new team behind the Scottish Developers user group. A group with a long tradition of high quality events, excellent speakers and a vibrant community. Our predecessors (I only know Colin so apologies for all the omitted names) have done an excellent job creating a good community and providing continuity throughout the years.

We have big shoes to fill but we have the desire, drive and enthusiasm necessary to carry the torch and hopefully make our community bigger and better. I met some very prominent community members and inspiration speakers through this group. People such as: Scott Gu, Scott Hansleman, Gill Clereen etc. Too many in fact to name here.

Our vision is to make the group bigger and better. All three of us and hopefully you too, our community, wish for Scottish Developers to become a vibrant and exciting space where all technologies, frameworks and disciplines can be discussed. I know that traditionally Scottish Developers have been .NET heavy but I know that Scotland has a very diverse and vibrant ecosystem outside .NET. I’ve met a large number developers in the Java, Node space and some Erlang and Go. Our goal is that we should become more diverse and ideally language and framework agnostic – a bold statement coming from a Microsoft employee, but it’s a new world.

We have something exciting brewing for our first meeting in early October but we can’t announce anything until all the details are locked down and we have everything sorted. In the meantime, I would like to introduce you to your user group organisers and I would invite everyone to reach out with ideas, suggestions and requests that can help us achieve our goals, together

Christos Matskas

Christos Matskas is a software developer, blogger, speaker and all around geek. He currently works at Microsoft as an Azure Premier Field Engineer. Before joining Microsoft, he was a successful entrepreneur and has collaborated with companies such as MarkIT, Lockheed Martin and Barclays. He’s been building software for over 12 years and he’s a passionate Open Source advocate. He contributes regularly to numerous OSS projects and works closely with the community to make the software development space bigger and better.

Andrew De Rozario

Andrew is a freelance software developer who is currently based in central Scotland.  Before devoting himself to the lifelong commitment to learning and change that is software development, Andrew trained as a classical singer even performing the odd tune in venues across Britain and Germany. Educated through the generosity and openness of the development community Andrew has gone on to work across a variety of sectors from enterprise scale projects to fast-paced agency environments working on projects for companies such as Vodafone, SSE, Taylor Wimpey, Deutsche Bank as well as various public sector and Fin-Tech companies.  Andrew is passionate about most topics to do with the software development industry and enjoys talking, writing about technology, with the odd open source contribution thrown in for good measure.

Jason McCann

A logical thinker with a keen interest in modern technologies. Jason’s progression to software development stems from his passion for video gaming and problem solving. Since graduating from his studies in Video Games Software Development at university, he has worked as a Software Developer for organisations of varying size and has progressed from native Android applications to modern web-app software development. He is inspired by Elon Musk and other forward-thinking entrepreneurs and aspires to create software for the greater good. Presently, Jason works full-time within a large-scale facilities management organisation where he plays a pivotal role in the development of their flagship product.

An exciting new start

Thanks to Colin for trusting me with this role and thanks to Jason and Andrew to work with me on this project. We hope that you’ll give them a warm welcome and we look forward to working with all of you. Watch this space for announcements and upcoming events.

Event: Edinburgh, 1 May – Windows 8 for Application Developers

Calling all Scottish Developers!
Microsoft will be bringing Windows 8 to Edinburgh on May 1st – join the UK team for a day of developer-level, demo-driven sessions and see first-hand the opportunities for designing, developing and selling apps world-wide via the Windows Store.

Windows 8 offers unparalleled new opportunities for application developers to build and sell apps world-wide via the Windows Store. In this event, we’ll deliver developer-level, demo-driven sessions that give you an accelerated entry into what it means to design, develop and publish exciting, modern, polished, world-ready applications for next-generation devices running Windows 8.

Level of knowledge required:

1. A familiarity with .NET development and Visual Studio would be advantageous but not required.
2. We will talk about building Windows 8 applications with JavaScript and with .NET with an emphasis on the .NET technologies.

Agenda (subject to change):

0900 – 0930 Registration Opens
0930 – 1030 Windows 8 for Modern App Development
1030 – 1045 Break
1045 – 1130 Metro Design Language
1130 – 1145 Break
1145 – 1245 “Metro Style” Apps – The Power of the Device Part 1
1245 – 1330 Lunch
1330 – 1430 “Metro Style” Apps – The Power of the Device Part 2
1430 – 1445 Break
1445 – 1545 “Metro Style” Apps – The Power of the Cloud Part 1
1545 – 1600 Break
1600 – 1700 “Metro Style” Apps – The Power of the Cloud Part 2
1700 – 1730 Wrap Up and Close

Click here to register now.

Book Club – February 2011 – The Pragmatic Programmer

In February Scottish Developers starts its book club. It will alternate between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The first book on the agenda is The Pragmatic Programmer, from Journeyman to Master.

You can now get more details and sign up for The Pragmatic Programmer in Glasgow. In March the book will be RESTful Web Services in Edinburgh – Further details to follow.

We are aiming to keep the books fairly technology independent (focussing on higher level processes and practices) in order to appeal to a wider audience. If you have any suggestions for books you’d like to see in the future then please contact us at support@scottishdevelopers.com