December meeting: Design Patterns and Christmas outing

We are very pleased to announce that on the 10th of December (2nd Wednesday) we are meeting at the Victoria Hotel Pub in the room behind the bar and we will have Gary Short presenting us a talk on Design Patterns. Finally we are hosting a Premiership speaker with loads of presenting experience, charisma and software development history spanning over the decades.


Gary is a Technical Evangelist for Developper Express, writes his personal blog for few years now, and work blog. Gary is an avid speaker presenting at various conferences and developers gatherings all over the country and on international stage too. Please see his blog for an extensive list of talks and while you there, please have a look at the tags, to see how many things interest Gary.


After the talk, some Q&A session and some networking, we will all head off to Leeds Christmas Market, to have some wurst, sauerkraut and continental lager.

Drinks and snacks thanks to our sponsors are free.

We will also draw one free personal license for any of the products by JetBrains - our fantastic sponsor.

November Meeting

On second Wednesday (12th of November @ 7pm for 7:30pm) at Victoria Hotel Pub in Leeds City Center, we are meeting to see a presentation by Daniel Drozdzewski about the future of computing.

After the presentation we will have an open discussion about design in software projects with focus on Agile methodologies.

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Drinks and snacks thanks to our sponsors are free.

We will also draw one free personal license for any of the products by JetBrains - our new sponsor.

October Meeting: "Agile Narrative" by Nick McKenna, Wednesday, 8th, 7pm for 7:30pm

As usual, on the second Wednesday at Victoria Hotel Pub, we are meeting to hear talk by Nick McKenna which will be on Agile Narrative. Nick as a Certified Scrum Practitioner in his last job has been responsible for turning team to Agile and introducing all the processes that come with it. Nick was kind enough to share his experience with the XP Club goers and we are very happy to see him presenting. Apart from talking about zero bugs policies and other clever things, Nick will also happily engage in the conversation about karate and diving.

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Drinks and snacks thanks to our sponsors are free.

We will also draw one free personal license for any of the products by JetBrains - our new sponsor.

Next Meeting is a double bill: Code Quality and Scala + Lift

So here comes the agenda for our next meeting(usual time and place):

1. 'Code Quality Focus Exercise' based on the last meeting of the ThoughtWorks' GeekNight presented by myself. It is a quick and simple, yet powerful, group exercise, that brings quite a lot of visibility of what software quality is about and how it is context dependent. On the same day I will facilitate the same exercise at my workplace so after doing it at the club's meeting we should have interesting discussion comparing those two groups.


2. 'Scala + Lift in context of club's website revamp' presented by David Turner of William Hill. David is an experienced programmer, project manager, agile coach and generally man of many talents. As he is the only one so far taking the work on the club's website seriously, he will be the best presenter for this matter.

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As usual drinks and snacks thanks to our sponsors are free.

Also we will draw one free personal license for any of the products by JetBrains - our new sponsor.

See you there!

Scala, Lift and the future of club's webiste

Guys,

FIRSTLY: if you have attended our last meeting, or would like to join our new mailing list and take a part in a prize draw, please sing-up to the list or send me an email me at work. The prize drawn every month is a personal license to one of the product by JetBrains, as they are our new club sponsor.

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Now few details about Scala:
Here is the official Scala's website, where you will find documentation (nice PDFs by the language author - Martin Odersky), and the latest builds.
For the .NET community, here are two(1,2) links explaining ho to run/use Scala on the .NET platform
Then have a look at the Scala's web framework called Lift.

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The details of the source control server are still to follow.

Thank you!

Next meeting is all about XP Club's New Website

On Wednesday, 13th of August at our usual place we are going to discuss our new website communally developed by the club members. We are going to do it in a proper Agile way with the backlog of user stories, short iterations, product owner and so on.

Our development team (us) have decided to use Scala and its web framework called Lift.

Lift claims to be as easy as Ruby On Rails, yet offering better performance, easiest Ajax integration, ORM support, and security out of the box, so we are all excited about the future work in such environment.


Scala runs on both JVM and Microsoft's CLR, so we can accommodate more of developers out there.

On our next meeting we are going to decide on the set of requirements and potentially divide them into more manageable chunks/stories and we will also try to present the development environment based on Linux machine, using JVM and Eclipse.

Also we are going to try supposedly simple testing problem brought to our attention by one of the club members Ralph Williams and in general have a nice and relaxed networking social event.

XP Practices: Refactorig, branching and merging. Joys and Pains.

At our next meeting (on the 9th of July at 7pm, in Victoria Hotel Pub) we are going to have a moderated debate about various specific eXtreme Programming practices, like refactoring, branching, merging, and possibly more...

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If you have any views on those or you have no views at all but would like to hear, what IT practitioners think of those, please come along.

We'll do our best to provide you with a drink and a snack.