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
3. Want to try out the Kwwika API but don’t want to register?

Weather

I’ve been to Colonsay for a holiday twice now and both times we’ve had great weather. I’m beginning to think that the weather there must be as good as the other popular destinations for British tourists.

Where to stay

We stayed in chalets owned by Kevin Byrne who also offers other self-catering accommodation. They have all the basic essentials for you holiday but the main thing that you are paying for is the location – right next to the hotel (and bar). There are plenty of other places to stay, including B&Bs and self-catering, as it would appear that half the island own a second home to rent out to tourists.

Cycling

My girlfriend (Jo) and I hired bicycles whilst we were there from Archie MacConnell. The bicycles for hire aren’t all that bad but if you want to do some serious cycling then it’s probably a good idea to take your own across on the ferry. It was a great way to see the sights and get a bit of exercise and there are quite a few hills so you certainly get plenty of the latter. In addition to cycling we did a bit of walking and climbing up hills to get great views of the whole isle.

Food and Drink

The isle has a post office and shop, a cafe (which I’d avoid unless you want scowled at by the folk that work there) and a hotel – The Colonsay Hotel. The hotel has a bar and restaurant. The bar and restaurant staff are nice and friendly and the food is really good although it is quite expensive. I guess this is due to the cost of running such a nice place in a remote location. We went for a meal in the restaurant on a Monday night and the food and service were excellent.

The People

I’m not very well travelled but I’m quietly confident that Colonsay sees more friendly hand waving than any other place on the planet. You can’t go 100 metres without somebody waving at you and saying “hiya!”. It’s a very friendly place. Alot of the time you wave and smile as you pass on the single-track road but even walking about you always get a smile and a wave whenever you pass somebody else.

I certainly hope to go back again.

Related posts:

1. Holiday – Day 1: Bad design gives me an early start to the day