The London Java Community

The London Java Community (LJC) is a great network of people in London who mix the sharing of knowledge and experiences in a social environment.  I was asked to help out with an Open Conference in November at IBM South Bank, last year and have since offered assistance with the community.

The LJC Associate meeting was held in London to decide what kind of topics we wanted on the agenda over the next few months.  This was a great meeting and we managed to get a bunch of topics lined up for the coming months.  The current agenda is below:

January Events

25th   London Clojure Dojo (full)

26th   Acceptance testing with GEB

26th   How to increase productivity by pragmatically applying and building domain specific languages

27th   Simon Brown: Software project SOS

27th   Bootstrapping a devops mentality

February Events

1st              Elegant software that just so happens to use Spring

1st              London Python Coding Dojo

2nd - 3rd     Linux & Open Source Expo / Cloud Expo Europe (free entry)

3rd              Gojko Adzic: Breaking the TDD mould

5th - 6th      FOSDEM - Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting - Brussels, Belgium

7th              Kanban clinic - build a kanban board or enhance your existing board

8th              London Ajax User Group Meetup: HTML5 Gaps

9th              Cloud computing with Scala and Gridgain

9th              DevTank

10th            Russ Miles: Getting Architecturally Agile with Event Driven Architectures

11th - 12th  Danish JUG: Java - a cloudy affair... 5th annual conference (£)

14th            Linda Rising: Who do You Trust? Beware of Your Brain

17th            Where are my messages!? An introduction to Complex Event Processing

21st            Groovy & Grails meetup

22nd           Steve Freeman - co-author of Growing OO Software with tests

23rd            Agile Testing UK:The (rocky) road to agile at The Walt Disney Company EMEA - An experience report

24th            Thoughtworks quaterly briefing - Developing for a crisis: The challenges for design, development & deployment of UNICEF's RapidFTR

http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-scrum/software-project-sos/

28th            Kanban Vs The Maffia - John Stevenson

March

18th            Functional programming exchange (£)

22nd           Applying Lean Software Development Principles Throughout the Organization

24th            Cuke Up

30th            Jurgen Appelo: The Big-Ass View on Competence

Zoe and I are currently working on an OSGi pitch to give at the LJC over the next few months also.  If you are interested in joining the LJC or attending some of their meets, why not give it a go! More info about the LJC can be found here.

Devangelist!

Firstly, an introduction!  My name is Simon Maple and I work for IBM's development labs in Hursley Park, Winchester.  I joined IBM 10 years ago in a test role for WebSphere Application Server (WAS) v5.0.  Since then, I moved into development where I worked on many areas for many releases of WAS, including the Transaction Service, Compensation Service and most recently the OSGi feature pack which was delivered on top of WAS v7.0.

I've recently split my role to undertake my existing development role and an OSGi technical evangelist role, in equal share.  I will be taking on some of the work Zoe Slattery is currently doing when she retires from IBM in April.

I'm sure my opinion of what a good technical evangelist does/should do will change with time/experience in the role.  However, my initial vision is that an evangelist should enjoy working with and believe in a technology so much that they want to increase awareness to generate support for the technology.

OK, let's assume that interpretation is correct for now... How can I achieve that?  Well, in IBM we have a wealth of technical minds and talent.  It's important not to lock that talent up in the labs, rather unleash it onto a number of mediums, such as conferences, blogging, workshops, tweeting, articles, sample code, webinars etc.  I interpret my role as one that helps build the support and following of a technology by increasing awareness via the described mediums or by networking to join up technical resources in the lab to talk and share at conferences etc.

I'll be updating this blog with some of my work and also interesting things I see on my way :o)