Thu, 21 Sep 2006
UK Subversion User Group Meeting - September 2006
Today I was fortunate enough to head down to the JP Morgan building in John
Winter street for, my first and, the second UK Subversion User
Group Meeting.
First up the audience, it was in the high twenties, which surprised me, and included a lot of people in suits; only a handful of us were casually dressed in jeans, untucked shirts or trainers. I didn't get to stay too long afterwards to chat, although my employer was gracious enough to allow a couple of hours in the middle of the day to attend and I didn't want to push my luck too far. The few people I did speak to seemed pretty friendly and knowledgeable though.
There were only two familiar faces, CL Kao, SVK author, brilliant perl developer and generally top guy (and ex-coworker) and Nik Clayton, who I've only briefly met in person a couple of times but I've seen him present and he knows his stuff. Both of them presented today and their style was very different to the first speaker.
The opening presentation was what I consider as more traditional, it had lots of information on each slide, a couple of minutes of presenting per click, and would be readable on it's own. It feels quite dry and stilted these days - it also covered a product that isn't useful to me, and to be honest felt very out of place. The relevance to subversion seemed a little stretched.
CL followed with his SVK talk (which I've seen three times now - it doesn't get boring) and he bought his trademark energy to the show. Lots of short, sharp slides, more of a story telling approach in his verbal presentation and some well placed humour helped his presentation go down well. And SVKs incremental commits look very cool. Nik was the last of the technical presentations and he wove a tail of setting up subversion so that it met his employers auditing teams directives. It was pithy, had the right amount of why as well as how and forced me to take a page of notes. He also gave me a quick peek at the SVN::Web timeline functionality, which is neat and may prompt me to install it for a little play.
The sessions were wrapped up with a few words from the sponsors, CollabNet and Clearvision, and the next meeting was announced for January; which I hope to get along to. It was very different to the usual user group meetings I attend and I did enjoy it.
Tangent: the meeting was held in the JP Morgan building I worked in about six years ago, nothing seems to have changed. My feet remembered the correct exit from Blackfriars station, the people hanging around outside smoking used the same spots as before and the area just felt the same. I realised I actually miss some of the big company feel. I'm just not sure it's enough to get me back there yet.
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Posted: 2006/09/21 22:05 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Javascript Developer Room at FOSDEM 2007?
If I was a bad man I'd suggest it might be time for a separate
Javascript developers room at FOSDEM
2007 (looks like the 24-25th February 2007). They had a couple of talks
on JS related subjects last year (Dojo and Selenium) and they seemed to go
well. dConstruct and the London Javascript nights have proved the interest
is there... And you'd have a bundle of the Mozilla people at the same
conference as potential speakers.
But that'd lead to chasing people, organising stuff and PAIN. Much pain.
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Posted: 2006/09/21 09:03 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Run Security Scans from Visio
I'm not a huge fan of Visio but
the ability to connect the MBSA to
individual hosts and trigger scans is very neat. I'm also assuming that you
can use the Visio scripting interface to mark machines that fail as a
different colour. Full details over at the Visio
Connector for MBSA article.
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Posted: 2006/09/21 08:38 | /security/tools | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Twenty Four Hour Office
Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers
essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your
office had better be nicer than the average programmer's home.
-- Philip Greenspun
Although the idea of working more hours is currently on the wane this remains one of my favourite quotes, it nicely summarises my start up experiences. One of the weird things about my current job is that it's the first technology company I've ever worked that actually closes its offices. All of my previous ones were happy to have people sat on site through the night and on weekends.
Not every one stayed around to work on actual work, some people would be learning some new tech without other distractions, some would be prototyping new ideas, tidying up existing work (we've all got that little list of 'on a quiet day I will do...') or trying to get ahead so they can skive on the next Friday. It also had the sneaky benefit of having some sys admins and developers on site if things went wrong. When the technology (and the idea behind it is new) nothing beats having the guy who wrote it sitting a couple of desks away. To be honest, I miss both the chance to catch up on my technology interests in a quiet environment with big desks (I live in London - home desk space isn't cheap ;)) and working with people that care enough to give up their Tuesday night to get that next task done.
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Posted: 2006/09/21 08:27 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
