This year is going to be my most hectic to date, with 3 sessions, 2 of which are show ‘n’ tells including my first session with fellow LDC’er Matt White, a pant wetting 5 hours presenting.

SHOW104 – Practical Java (with Julian Robichaux)

Sunday | 13:30-15:30 PM | Swan Osprey

Take a whirlwind tour of the many ways in which Java can make your life better as a developer. We’ll use Java in IBM Notes, Eclipse, and the latest IDEs. And we’ll show you examples of best of breed libraries that can analyze data, create PDFs, and perform image processing on the fly. Get connected to IBM Connections, access relational data, open sockets, and parse feeds. And along the way we’ll throw in tips for testing, performance, and writing good code.

SHOW303 – Proper Connections Development for Proper Domino Developers (with Matt White)

Tuesday | 10:30-12:15 | Swan Osprey

This is a session with a mission: to take a much loved IBM Domino app and deploy it to a client’s new IBM Connections environment. We’ll show different solutions such as the use of iWidgets or creating a REST API to make the application available to IBM Connections users and walk you through the process, from beginning to end. If you’re an IBM Domino developer who knows nothing about IBM Connections, this is the session for you.

BP303 – Empowering ICS Communities for SocialBizUG with IBM Connections(with Wellesley Information Services, Connectria and The Turtle Partnership)

Thursday | 08:30-09:30 | Swan Pelican 1 & 2

Socialbizug.org has evolved to provide a dynamic home for ICS communities and content. It was designed by WIS, hosted by Connectria, built by The Turtle Partnership and developed by The London Developer Co-Op on a combination of IBM Connections and IBM Domino. Attend to see how to pick the right pieces for a successful IBM Connections end user facing deployment. Take a behind the scenes look at the site, from the ground up. We will start from customer design requirements, including both anonymous and secured content. Then dig into server architecture design including the number of servers, staging areas and growth planning. Finally we’ll talk about development decisions as well as server scaling and ease of management in our cloud model.

It all started with a simple rule:

Back when LDC were first starting to do promotions and freebies for conferences Matt White (who is less the leader of LDC and more the person we don’t argue with) laid down just one guideline

“Each year’s promotion must be better than the year before”

This was to ensure that we never degraded our giveaways into free pens, mouse mats or any of the other dross that marketing are sure will stick in the mind of a potential client

To this end we thought of amazing tshirts (you can get them from here as wallpapers) with thanks to Ben Poole and Julian Woodward for some truly original designs, but we were producing an original design for each day of IBM connect/Lotusphere (plus some for the other LUGS and things like the caffeine shot mugs) so our creative sap failed after a few years.

Then we came up with the conference survival kit which was heralded as “the best Lotusphere give away ever”

…….and so now we are f**ked

we have tried, oh heavens we have tried

we have brainstormed

and conceptualised

and pondered

and even gave it some thought

In the end the strain started to tell, Woowar lost his hearing and sanity to an over loud playing of the Macarena, Ben Poole lost the toilet and I lost the ability to not realise coffee flavoured tequila is not a good idea, then came a faint croak from the parched lips of an LDC member “I wish I had a magic drink ticket”

We focused on each other, “What? as in Beer tokens?”, “Yes, but posher”, “so we can buy people drinks at any time, you give them to people when you are not near a bar or when people are busy, so when they see any of us later we know we owe them a drink, it means that we can catch up with them, they don’t have to find the same LDC member to get said drink, win win all round”

“sounds a great plan, what could go wrong”