The Fleet Collective

Most of us will have heard of TechHub (and variations) and have an idea about what it is; it’s a place where you can rent a desk(s), use office facilities and because there will be other like-minded people about the atmosphere will hopefully inspiring and creative. There will also be the opportunity to network and potentially collaborate on projects and potentially reach larger clients that you would on your own.

Whilst TechHub is obviously concentrating on “tech” the Fleet Collective are actively looking for a wider range of individuals to take up residence or hire a desk for the day. It has been founded by a guy going by the name of Sooper Double D and a partner (I didn’t catch her name) who have drawn inspiration from a number of similar ventures in places such as the Netherlands (I didn’t take a note of the names – sorry). The Fleet Collective will be based in what looks like a fantastic old building, which is presently under renovation, right in the centre of Dundee.

I’ve lived near Dundee for just over a year now and can clearly see that it has a massive potential to have a fantastic tech community (maybe it does already and I’ve just not been out enough). Whilst the government and the council have focused on the games industry in recently years, mainly due to the presence and apparent success of Real-Time Worlds, I would hope that this is going to change to be a focus on Dundee as a technology community. The demise of Real-Time Worlds may end up being a blessing in disguise as there will no longer be one big company dominating the scene and all tech communities, from all industries (game, web, manufacturing, healthcare, finance) now have an opportunity to work together. Combine this with the Fleet Collectives aim of trying mix all types of creative focus (print, art, tech) I really think this is a fantastic opportunity and a great initiative.

For more information check out The Fleet Collective website (under construction), the Fleet Collective Facebook page and @fleetcollective on Twitter.

Browser Warfare

I’ve been working with browser technologies since I was at University, my final year project was a JavaScript intensive project (IMHO it was actually rubbish, but a good learning experience), and my first job was at Caplin Systems as a Software Engineer building APIs and web frameworks using JavaScript. During this time the runtime environment for all the JavaScript APIs and apps was of course the web browser, so I was very interested to hear what Chris Leckie’s talk on browser warfare would cover.

Chris spoke about browser fragmentation – how different browsers behave in different ways give the same code (HTML, JavaScript, CSS). The way each browser may render pages differently. From layout to even font rendering on Windows and Mac, each web browser really can be a different animal. Chris explained his opinion that it was up to us to try and make sure our apps and websites look the same in all browsers and that sometimes it can just be a matter of checking our own code first before blaming the browser.

And, of course, we covered the dreaded beast that is IE6.

What I really liked about Chris’ talk is that he wasn’t really there to answer all the questions. He gave his talk to encourage discussion and it definitely worked. The discussion session afterwards went on for quite some time covering why IE6 got into the situation it was, what we can do to encourage the death of IE6, whether it’s clients who specify the browsers their app or website must run or if it’s the dev or design companies and are any of the current crop of browsers going to increase the fragmentation.

After all that there was a chance to have a chat with others there and it certainly seems that web design, web development and manufacturing companies are represented at the event. I don’t know if any games companies were though?

Next

Dundee Web Standards seems to be going from strength to strength and next month a Microsoft Developer Evangelist will be giving a talk on IE10. Keep an eye on the @DundeeWebStands (pesky Twitters screen name limit) and the Dundee Web Standards Facebook page for the announcement.

The Highland Fling

It’s also worth mentioning that there is a full day tech event coming up in Edinburgh called The Highland Fling which has some really good speakers going to it.

No related posts.

The DDD Scotland schedule covered a number of interesting topics and I decided to jump between the tracks to try and get a bit of everything. I started off with From .NET to Rails by Colin Gemmell which is particularly interesting to me since just the other day I tackled my first Ruby on Rails application and even wrote up a small blog post on my findings. Colin’s enthusiasm is second to none and it was really interesting to hear that he finds himself to be more productive writing rails applications using Vim than he was building ASP.NET websites.

The second session I went to was Building seriously scalable websites with ASP.NET with and without Windows by Chris Hay. My reasoning behind attending this session was two-fold; I’ve met Chris briefly for a coffee around a month ago so wanted to make sure I caught up with him again and I’ve also been trying to build an IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service) product using a combination of Microsoft and non-MS components (Kwwika). I think my tweet about the session pretty much sums things up.

.@chrishayuk is nuts, knows his stuff, is a bit disorganised, uses cool tech & I have a lot more knowledge on scaling than I did 1 hour ago.

I actually knew that Chris had been still putting the presentation together late in to the night before and was even updating things 10 minutes before the session started so the tweet was a bit “tongue in cheek”. The main thing was that in everything that Chris did there was a glimpse of another new exciting technology combined with some proven ones; nodeJS, MonoDevelop, redis, nginx and HAProxy all got a mention along with CDNs, ASP.NET, IIS, Amazon EC2 and much more. He also covered techniques that can be used to speed up servers and page load times. Chris mentioned that he will be writing a book on the subjects he covered – where’s the pre-order link?

I then sat in on two Grok talks. The first was by Aaron Bassett of Level Up delivering 20 Django hints and tips in just 10 minutes. Wow! The second was a thought-provoking grok by Rob Lally (asked to come up with the talk only a few hours beforehand). Rob showed three ways of social interaction to try and achieve the same goal (I wished I had a video recorder) and then went on to discuss how we need to consider how we interact with others in order to achieve goals – with an emphasis on ensuring the goal, and the reason behind it, must be understood.

DDD Scotland also introduced an alternative track so I decided to give that a go next. Mark Rendle gave a talk on How to Manage Your Manager (future managers beware ). He explained that managers and developers can be two very different animals but for them to get on they each need to understand how the other works and understand the driving factors behind their decisions. He covered things like shadowing, how to convince your manager that better hardware and software (e.g. faster computers, a 2nd monitor, productivity tools like ReSharper) can improve your productivity and benefit them and general communication tips. I wish I’d known some of those tips about a year ago: for example, ask for a “respond by” date when sending an email and set appointments in your managers calendar as they really are calendar driven and without the calendar to prompt them they can easily forget (as I’ve found).

Then I attended a session on SpecFlow – functional testing made easy by Paul Stack. This covered what BDD was and Paul explained why he had moved away from TDD. He then focused on showing how SpecFlow made BDD, well, easy. Paul also demonstrated how WatiN can be used to write an acceptance framework for your application driven by specifications written in SpecFlow.

The final session I attended was another alternative track one called Ask the Speakers. This gave me the opportunity to raise my Are .NET developers scared of the tech community and cutting edge technologies? question that I posed and blogged about earlier that week. It really go things going and there were some great points echoing the comments made in my post.

The day ended with some a whole group of us grabbing some food where I was lucky enough to be surrounded by Paul Stack, Chris Canal and Gary Park where we unsurprisingly discussed Continuous Integration, MVC, SOLID, Paul’s phone being stolen last week, jobs, tech stuff and quite a lot of nonsense. Generally fun chat!

This was a really good community event which leaned heavily towards the Microsoft technology stack. With my recently blog post stirring up so much comment it was great to see an event like this and raises my hopes that .NET developers definitely do have a sense of community and we just need to get together to re-ignite the interest in Scotland. Microsoft also need to get involved and for the moment one big event a year probably isn’t enough. Scottish Developers and Aberdeen developers are definitely doing what they can, and Scottish Developers in particular have now set a high standard with DDD Scotland, but we need to increase the interest in .NET technologies by attending events that aren’t purely .NET focused and representing the .NET community.

More information
Here’s the schedule from the day and below that there are links to even more information such as other write-ups, slides and photos from DDD Scotland 2011:

• Craig Murphy’s pictures of the event
• Paul Stack’s event write-up
• Joe Wright’s event writeup
• Dark parts of mono – slides
• CQRS (Command and Query Responsibility Segregation) and Friends – slides
• Defensive Programming 101 – resources
• Unit Testing, TDD and the Walking Skeleton – slides
• Henrik Niemann’s pics from the event (and a couple of building shots?)

Related posts:

1. Are .NET developers scared of the tech community and cutting edge technologies?
2. The Real-Time Web: TechMeetup Aberdeen – 19/01/2011
3. Bing.com round table

My feeling is that there aren’t a lot of regular .NET events or general tech meetups involving .NET. This is for a number of reasons; bad feeling towards Microsoft, difficult access to Microsoft technologies due to cost and Microsoft’s undoubted focus on enterprise to name but a few. With the exception of Aberdeen techmeetup (due to all the Oil companies up there) the majority of developers at techmeetup events don’t seem to be using Microsoft technologies. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t the developers – my feeling is that they just don’t go to those sorts of things. Techmeetup Edinburgh, Refresh Edinburgh and Techmeetup Glasgow is full of non-MS guys.

The only .NET events and communities, accessible to me, that I know about are:

• Aberdeen .NET User Group, Scot ALT.NET (seems pretty inactive)
• Developer Developer Developer Scotland (held once a year – I’m going to it)
• A book club (just heard about this today)

Most of this can be found via the Scottish Developers site. If I’m honest I’m not all that bothered that there are .NET focused groups, it’s more that the .NET devs don’t seem to get involved in the existing communities.

Are tech communities driven by the startup up scene and this is why we don’t see developers who use .NET at these events? I bet 95% of all startups do not use Microsoft technologies. Why? Money Dashboard, an Edinburgh (or close-by), startup built things on the Microsoft technology stack. Are there any others?

Another annoyance I have is that a lot Microsoft devs don’t seem to want to try out new technologies. Is this because they work at financial services companies who are still using .NET 2.0, have some legacy VBScript systems to maintain and are still targeting IE6? Another way of looking at this is that Ruby, PHP and Python developers are commonly found at tech events, are always trying out new technologies and aren’t afraid to upgrade to get new features following a new release of something.

Am I wrong?

If I’m not wrong why is this the case and what are Microsoft doing about it? What are we doing about it?

Related posts:

1. DDD Scotland 2011 – Maybe .NET developers aren’t scared of the tech community
2. The Real-Time Web: TechMeetup Aberdeen – 19/01/2011
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I commute in to London most days from Hertford East. Over the past few weeks taking the train journey has been quite painful for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the heat on the train is really uncomfortable and secondly because the train goes through a beautifully scenic area between Hertford and Ware called Kings Mead which makes you wish were out walking through the nature reserve rather than in a hot stuffy carriage.

So, tonight I went for a run around Kings Mead and really enjoyed it. I took a couple of Qik videos, some photos of St. Leonards Church which was en-route, and I’ve even created a map of my run.

43 Feet Stone

The stone that is shown right at the start of the video says “43 Feet” on it. It did have some other writing on it but I couldn’t get close enough to read it. The other interesting point in this video is the penalty of FIVE POUNDS for violating any of the rules on the sign. The sign could maybe do with being updated.

Crossroads

St. Leonards Church, Hertford

Run around Hertford Map

View Run around Hertford 04-07-2009 in a larger map

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3. Sunday Lunch Review – The White Horse Hotel, Hertingfordbury

Me in the snow in Hertford

Jo took some great photos and a couple of videos of Hertford in the snow today.

See more photos in Jo’s Snow in Hertford Album

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1. Running in Hertford
2. Sunday Lunch Review – The White Horse Hotel, Hertingfordbury
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Venue & Atmosphere

The White Horse Hotel, Hertingfordbury
Hertingfordbury Road,
Hertingfordbury,
Hertfordshire SG14 2LB

The White Horse, Hertingfordbury

The White Horse Hotel photo by Steve Chilton 

Location
Website

Hertingfordbury is a village near Hertford. We walked from Hertford to Hertingfordbury along a designated foot and cycling path in around 40 minutes. It’s a woodland walk and is a nice way to get your appetite up for a Sunday lunch. 

For a Sunday afternoon the bar area was pretty quiet. It is credit crunch time so I guess that is to be expected. We sat in the bar area which was comfortable and warm. There’s an open fire place, which unfortunatley wasn’t on, but would certainly help create a nice atmosphere if it was. We did expect the place to be a little more “oldie worldie” and cosy. So, although the place is nice enough it’s not quite our cup of tea.

Our rating: 6

Service

The service was fine. The barman brought us our meal and was pleasant. The only gripe I have is that the White Horse do a 3 courses for £14.95 and we initially ordered a starter and a main but the kitchen closed as we were eating and we weren’t informed so wouldn’t have been able to order a dessert even if we had wanted one.

Our rating: 6

Presentation

The roast came out on two plates. The main plate contained a single yorkshire pudding, some roast potatoes and two good slices of beef. A side plate also came out with a selection of vegatables; carrots, courgettes and mange tout. The picture below shows the main plate but has been partially disturbed – I was hungry All in all the presentation was pretty good. The reason we’ve only given it a seven is that it was clear that the yorkshire pudding had dried out and the vegetables looked as if they were the last of the day and had been sitting for a while (sorry, no picture of the veg).

The White Horse, Sunday Beef Roast - partially devoured

Our rating: 7

Taste

We had a tomato soup for starters which was served with warm rolls. The soup was very tasty and had a nice kick to it. The main course wasn’t quite as good. The White Horse finish serving at 15:00 and we arrived at 14:40 to make our order. With this in mind I can only assume that they cook everything early on and keep things warm during serving times. So, the yorkshire pudding  had dried out quite a bit, the beef was slightly overcooked, the veg had gone a bit soft. We were very happy with the roast potatoes

Our rating: 6

Value

Since we didn’t get the 3 courses for £14.95 we were charged £12.95 each for the two courses.

Our rating: 5

Overall

We might go back again, once we’ve tried a few other places, but we would definitely arrive earlier on in the serving. Hertingfordbury is a nice place, The White Horse is a nice enough place but the Sunday lunch itself didn’t quite hit the mark.

Our rating: 6

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“National Express have teamed up with Metro Newspapers” blah, blah, blah. This is a new message that is announced at most stops to encourage passangers to take their papers with them and keep the train tidy. Never mind recycling. In all fairness the London station I get off at does have a “Newspaper recycling team” that are occasionally seen making their way through the trains to collect the discarded papers. The train station must have hundreds of trains through it a day and there is no way that this team will have time to collect all papers for recycling.

My solution to this problem would be to place newspaper bins or containers on each stations and encourange passangers to simply take their paper off the train with them and pop them in the newspaper bin on the platform. This is easier than having to take the paper to work or home with you and then recycling it. This would be a good idea for two reasons:

1) Most papers will end up in these paper containers and recycling teams can just collect from there at a given point in the day.

2) If you want a paper to read on the train you know exactly where you can get one from at each station.

I’m surprised that this isn’t in place as I think that the green and useful sides of this idea make it a winner. Maybe there’s something that I’ve not considered?

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1. Report problems to your council with Neighbourhood Fix It
2. Running in Hertford
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Neighbourhood Fix It must have a mapping of post codes to councils and automatically inform the council of any reports in their jurisdiction. The site has been developed by mySociety who aim to “give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives”. I think that Neighbourhood Fix It is a great piece of work and a great example.

Read more on the launch of Neighbourhood Fix It.

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