Hull Digital April Meetup

Just a week after the event, some notes from the Hull Digital April Meetup on the 11th.

I was a bit late arriving, but I did get to see some interesting stuff about Model View Controller (MVC) in JavaScript from Duncan McMillan. He’s a web designer and developer at Art and Soul. MVC is a very popular way to structure an application, and it was interesting to see how it can be employed when you are writing a web based client program with complex behaviours. If you want to find out more about this technology Duncan suggested the site todomvc.com as a good place to start.

Of equal interest, to me at least, was the Paper application that Duncan used to present his talk. This made for some lovely looking slides. The application is interesting for another reason too; they are using the “freemium” model to sell the program. The starter version costs nothing, but before long you are paying for extras to give you different fonts and sketching tools. I rather like this way of selling a program. It means that you can only pay for the things that you are going to use. It also means that you will take the trouble to learn how to use a feature once you have paid for it, and that you are not overwhelmed with features in the program when you first start using it.

Next up was a chat from Stephen Lewis who was talking about the latest developments in PHP. I first used this ages ago. I’m so old that I can remember that PHP stands for “Personal Home Page”. It is a server side scripting language of great power, that integrates really well with databases. I used it to run PHPBB, a bulletin board system that for many years powered the forum in our department. Stephen was telling us that the language is still moving forwards, with object oriented support and lots of other goodies goodies. I’m not sure his talk will send me back to writing PHP again, but it is interesting to see that such things are still moving forwards.

All in all an interesting evening. And I even got a free drink.

Raspberry Pi Take 2

 
The audience, still smiling at the start of the session.

We had our second Raspberry Pi session today. Good to see more people keen on spreading the word about the fun you can have with computers. And the Raspberry Pi is a great vehicle for that. If you want a really nice guide to getting started with the Pi, one of the folks that came to see us yesterday, Mark, has put together a most excellent guide which you can find here. You can also find the notes from the last session, along with another set of smiling faces, here.

Black Marble Wisdom

Steve Spencer and Rob (Boss) Hogg get down to business

We were very lucky enough to have Steve and Rob from Black Marble come over to Hull today to tell us about the business of software development. I think everyone should see talks like those, particularly people who think that creating software solutions is a technical problem. Because it isn’t. It’s pretty much an “everything else” problem with a bit of technology thrown in to make it work. Steve and Rob give about the best exposition of this that I have ever seen. They can talk about the mistakes that developers and managers make because they are candid enough to admit that they have made most of them over their time in business.

The staggering number of software projects that fail in the real world is down to human frailty as much as anything else, and what Steve and Rob do is point out the behaviours to watch for and the strategies that you can use to mitigate the problems.

My only regret about the talk was that we did not have more students there to get the benefit of it. Folks, if you thought about going but didn’t bother in the end, you have seriously missed out. With a bit of luck Rob and Steve will be back again next year, and you can get the benefit then.

Raspberry Pi Introductory Session

 
Just as we were getting started.

Tonight Emma-Jane, Simon, Neil and myself did our first “Raspberry Pi” event. Thanks to Emma-Jane’s special trip to the supermarket we even had some actual raspberry pi’s to eat, which was nice.

The event was organised for local schools and colleges who want to find out more about the platform and how it can be used for teaching and fun. Simon showed off the neat way that you can interact with Minecraft from within a Python program and I told my polar bear joke. Again. It was nice to see so many people who were keen to work with this splendid little piece of technology. You can download the slide deck for the presentation from here. If you want to find out more about my Raspberry Pi powered arcade table you can find out here. And yes, it is still “nearly finished”…

We are repeating the whole thing tomorrow, including probably the polar bear joke….

Software War Stories from Black Marble

If you’ve ever wondered what software development is really all about then you should come along to our next “Rather Useful Seminar” on Wednesday this week. Robert Hogg and Steve Spencer of Black Marble, a local software company which works closely with the Department and has recruited many of our graduates, are giving a seminar on Wednesday 17 April where they will be sharing their experiences of software engineering in the real world.

Robert and Steve are entertaining speakers and have a great deal of experience of real-world software development and running a software business. The presentation will be at 14:15 in RB-LTA. This is a slightly different time and venue from previous seminars. All are welcome, particularly Year 1 and Year 2 students.