February Meeting - Engineering at Google

This month, we are lucky enough to have @dhanji from Google talking about the development practices there.

In his own words:

 

The engineering discipline at Google can best be described as the Cowboy Methodology. This is a narration of my experience fighting that tide--trying something new, applying agile methods to a start-up like project inside an Internet giant of some 23k people. Can Agile ever really work outside the enterprise where requirements (though changing) are reasonably well-understood? In a consumer-facing start-up all bets are off--your very reason for existence changes day to day.

In this environment can we succeed? Have we already failed horribly and don't know it? Come hear our strange story and share your impressions.

And a bit about Dhanji:

 

Dhanji R. Prasanna, Software Engineer at Google

I have worked on Agile projects for several years (at ThoughtWorks and elsewhere) before joining Google as an engineer on Google Wave, working on the Search+indexing pipeline and then on performance and APIs. I have created and contribute to several open source projects including Guice, Sitebricks, MVEL, Maven, and others. My code runs in nearly every Java server at Google and I regularly consult on performance and design questions for various teams.

I am the author of "Dependency Injection" by Manning Publications, and a regular speaker on the Java software engineering circuit.

Please RSVP with the poll on the right, and see you there!

January Meeting - .NET BDD tools, Android Development

For the first meeting of the new year, we will have 2 short talks the opportunity for discussion. Without further ado, the talks are:

Richard Banks (@rbanks54): a comparison of native .NET BDD tools such as StoryQ and SpecFlow (and maybe StorEvil).

James Crisp (@jtcrisp): Starting Android development; the platform, app design and abstractions, the four lettered J word and its eye dee ees, the emulator and some code too.

It's going to be an informal meeting with plenty of chance to chat and ask questions.

As usual, please RSVP with the poll if you want food and beer :-)

November Meeting - Recorded for your pleasure

For those who couldn't make it on the night, we have the recording available from Livestream and embedded here for your ease:

Watch live streaming video from rbanks54 at livestream.com

Many thanks again to Udi for coming to speak with us.  Enjoy!

November - Udi Dahan

It’s the last meeting of the year for us, and Udi Dahan of NServiceBus fame who is in town for his mind-bending systems design course has kindly accepted an invitation to talk at our group this month.

RSVP via the poll as per usual, tell you friends about it, and we’ll see you on the night!

October – Homebrew Development for the iPhone and WP 7

So you want to have a bit of fun and write apps for mobile phones. Make a million dollars.  Retire to a beach on a tropical island and have drinks with little umbrellas in them.  For a while now the iPhone has been the obvious choice but a .Net developer maybe getting into Objective-C has always seemed a little too much effort?

Well, maybe it's not so hard. Craig Dunn is going to run us through application development for the iPhone using MonoTouch, and he should know something about it since he helped write the book! He’ll also likely have a few copies as giveaways on the night as well.

And then there’s the new and shiny Windows Phone 7 which is almost here and being talked up heavily at the moment.  For us .NET developers it makes an obvious choice as a target platform but is it worth bothering with?  What do we need for development on that platform? How do we get apps into the app store? How do we make sexeh gamez for it? And so on. For the answers to that we’ll have Luke Drumm.

This should make for an interesting night and might just get those creative juices flowing so you can go write apps to generate a little extra cash in the pocket, which you can then use to buy other gadgets to play with :-)  What more could you want?!

RSVP if you’re coming (as per usual), bring your friends and we’ll see you on the night!

September – TDD and OOO (Over-Enthusiastic OO)

Dave, Tchepak perhaps best unknown for being anonymous (thanks Richard :)), will demonstrate a style of TDD/BDD that can be used to help with problem decomposition and driving very loosely coupled OO designs. We'll tackle a simple example and over-enthusiastically apply OO principles like SRP to produce a ludicrously over-OO'd solution, with the aim of finding some techniques we can apply more pragmatically to more realistic problems.

P.S. Dave will be using NSubstitute so you’ll also see how to use that mocking framework in more detail.  It’s also assumed that you know what TDD is all about, even if you don’t practice it.

Let us know you’re coming via the poll on the site as per usual.

August Coding Dojo

Apologies for the late notice! Tech.Ed Australia got in the way for me.  Anyway, as discussed at the end of the last meeting, this month we’re doing another code dojo.

The last one was fantastic and had a great energy to it, so come along, bring your laptop (or pair up with someone when you get there), try something different and don’t miss out!

RSVP in the usual manner (i.e. via the poll on the site) and we’ll see you there.