Virtual Meetup: Feb 2021

Wednesday, February 3, 2021
6:30 PM to 8:30 PM GMT

Sign up here: https://www.meetup.com/Scottish-Developers/events/275643581/

In the first of our 2021 meetups we’ll have 2 great talks:

⭐ Future of HTML controls
⭐ A Piece of Cake – C# Powered Cross-platform Build Automation

Let’s get to know our speakers a bit more…

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Stephanie Stimac

Stephanie is a Program Manager for Developer Experiences on Microsoft Edge who comes from a background in web and user interface design as well as front-end development. She’s worked on developer tooling in the browser as well as the open source project, http://webhint.io and is currently responsible for Edge developer engagement through the Web We Want initiative.

“Future of HTML controls”

Native HTML Form Controls can be some of the most painful elements to style and customize. 25 years after the first HTML Standard introduced them and developers have resorted to building custom controls from scratch to achieve what they need to. I’ll discuss the history behind native form controls, where we’re at presently with styling them and take a look at the proposed solutions by standards groups and browser vendors to standardize controls and solve the pain points developers have been complaining about for years.

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Gary Ewan Park

Gary Ewan Park has over 10 years experience working as a developer on technologies such as ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WPF, SharePoint, Silverlight, and many others. Throughout his career, Gary has always looked to see how things can be automated, using the mantra that if you do the same thing more than twice, it is time for automation. In 2017 he was awarded a Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies. His day job has him working for Chocolatey Software, Inc.

In his spare time, Gary contributes to a number of Open Source projects including Chocolatey, Boxstarter, Cake, Cake-Contrib, GitVersion, and GitReleaseManager.

Gary is a founding member of the Aberdeen Developers .Net User Group, that holds monthly sessions on any topic related to the Microsoft .Net Technology Stack.

“A Piece of Cake – C# Powered Cross-platform Build Automation”

In this session we will start with a standard .NET Solution and incrementally add a build and orchestration script to compile the application, run unit tests, perform static analysis, package the application, and more, with the C# skills that you already have, using the Cake Build Automation System.

See you all there!

Sign up here: https://www.meetup.com/Scottish-Developers/events/275643581/

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)

DDD Scotland: Useful Information

It’s nearly time for DDD Scotland and we are really looking forward to seeing this event come to life!We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our sponsors and supporters, without all the funding and spreading the word of this event this wouldn’t be happening.

Here is the plan for the day, let us know if you have any questions.  Just get in touch via scottishdevs@gmail.com

Getting there

Our hosts at UWS have this useful guide on finding the campus:

https://www.uws.ac.uk/university-life/campuses/paisley-campus/travelling-to-paisley-campus/

If travelling from Glasgow there are trains often from Glasgow Central to Paisley Gilmour Street. Looks like there are these timings on Saturday morning: 8am, 8.05am, 8.25am, taking about 1-15 minutes… you may even bump in to some developer friends on the way to DDD!

There is limited parking space availability at the university and it’s first come first served.

On arrival

When you arrive, please make your way to the registration table and let us know you are here. There will be tea, coffee and breakfast snacks (thanks to Streamba) to help us wake up and get ready for a day of learning.

Throughout the day

We will be kicking off at 9.15am with introductions and announcements so please try to be on time to get all the news.

We have talks and panels scheduled all day with enough time between to get a drink, have a quick break and make your way to next talk. Check out the schedule here.

If you don’t fancy any of the scheduled talks for a given time slot, head over to our community room and check out what’s happening.

We will have room monitors and volunteers available throughout the day, let us know if we can help at all. Or even just say hello, we are really looking forward to meeting you all!

12:30 to 13: 30

We have been able to supply lunch and afternoon coffee thanks to our platinum partners Arnold Clark and Screenmedia. If you would like to head out to the local area, that’s fine too. Please try to be back for 13:30 so we can get started again for the afternoon sessions.

15:15 to 15:30

Time for a quick coffee break between sessions thanks to Endjin!

17:30

Join us for thank yous, prizes and goodbyes!

Prizes

We have been gifted some awesome prizes from generous companies: books, licences, tickets and devices! We will distribute some of these throughout the day but make sure you stay til the end of the day for the prize giving!

Spread the word

Remember to tweet, Instagram, Facebook, blog about us, it will let us get the word out and make the event even better in years to come. Use #dddScotland and tag us.

@scottishdevs

@dddscot

Facebook: Scottish Developers

LinkedIn: Scottish Developers

 

Thanks,

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!

DDD Scotland is back!

You read the title correctly, DDD is coming back to Scotland! This is a completely free event where you can both learn from and network with fellow developers.

This is an all-day event taking place on Saturday 10^th February 2018 between the hours of 8:30am and 5pm at the Brough Hall, UWS in Paisley (a fifteen-minute journey from Glasgow city centre).

You can expect several different tracks taking place throughout the day including one from a mixture of students and first-time speakers in line with our goals for broadening community participation.

Regardless if you are interested in simply attending or getting your name on the map by submitting your own talk for the other attendees to vote on we’ve got you covered.

This is a great opportunity for developers at all points in their career and we encourage you to participate if you are able and willing.

You can sign up and submit your talks at our website right now so don’t wait around, get the ball rolling! Submissions end on 7^th December at 5pm.

Voting will be open to the public on 8^th December and closed with the final count being tallied on 22^nd December at 5pm.

Expect the final agenda for both tracks to be published sometime on 22^nd December.

So what are you waiting for? Get  Saturday 10^th February in your diaries and we look forward to seeing you there!

Full details of this event are available at DDD Scotland website or alternatively follow the official DDD Scotland Twitter at @dddscot or us at @scottishdevs for further updates as soon as we have.

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…

One not to miss – .Net Conf Sept 19 – 21, 2017

Coming at one of the most significant periods in the evolution of the .Net Framework, .Net Conf is a free 3-day event with a series of presentations meant to inspire developers for their next project.

The sessions are live so attendees have the opportunity to ask questions live.

The event offers presentations on .NET Core and ASP.NET Core, C#, F#, Roslyn, Visual Studio, Xamarin, and much more.

It has some really big names such as

• Scott Hanselman
• Scott Hunter
• Jon Skeet

And many others from every major platform and aspect of .Net development.

 

So what’s the big deal?

Quarter 3 (which this event effectively rounds off) will see the launch of .Net Core 2 and .Net Standard 2.  Both are effectively game changers that should see a massive increase of both interest and adoption of the newer .Net platforms i.e. Net Core and Xamarin.  So there has never been a better time to take a look at the latest developments on your particular areas of interest.

.Net Core 2 – bringing back some old friends

With .Net Core being an effective rewrite of the framework it is no surprise that the first version had the foundational features included, but was missing many APIs that older applications relied on.  .Net Core 2 brings around 10000 APIs back into the mix which should increase the ease with which teams can start moving to using newer versions of the framework.

.Net Standard 2 – including the masses

.Net Standard has been a much better way of handling cross-platform compatibility for libraries than the old portable class library solution.  One limitation with v1 was that a library targeting .Net Standard would only be able to reference other .Net Standard libraries or portable class library thus omitting the vast majority of Nuget Packages.  V2 allows this via a compatibility shim and should allow around 70% of currently published Nuget packages to work with packages targeting .Net Standard.

You can read all about .Net Standard here

You can read more on the why .Net Standard 2.0 is so significant to .Net Core here.

Microsoft on a UK tour – All about Azure

It’s exciting to see that Microsoft is on the road again, this time around many UK cities to talk about Microsoft Azure. They will be visiting Edinburgh on August 30th and there’s a registration form that you need to use to secure a place.

You can find all about it at this blog post.

We hope that you will take advantage of this excellent and free event and maybe see some of you there.

CodeCraftConf 2016 – Attendees and Guides wanted

We’ve been asked to pass on a message from the organisers of CodeCraftConf

Hello Scottish Developers,
Following on from last year, we are running CodeCraftConf in Glasgow on Friday 16th September at Citizen M.

CodeCraftConf is a conference geared towards developers with the goal of exchanging ideas between attendees. To facilitate this the majority of the sessions will be GuidedConversations:

A GuidedConversation is a meeting where a facilitator comes up with a starting set of questions around a single topic. The group then discuss those questions with 8 minutes given for each question. This worked well last year, so this year we are having three guided conversation tracks and one workshop track.

Topics will include: Tech Leadership, Simplicity, Legacy Code, Modern QA and Cloud amongst others. Our Call for Guides is open if you fancy running a session.

All developers are welcome, we are deliberately not concentrating on Ruby internals or the latest C# features. Instead we will be asking questions that are relevant to all developers regardless of their current chosen language.

Thanks,
Joe.