Excerpt from some thoughts on LDC Via, See the full post is here

Alongside this gradual shift in focus away from Domino, has been a recent and fairly rapid rise in “NoSQL” databases. The irony, of course, is that Domino’s NSF data structure is itself a NoSQL database. But it’s an ageing one, with undoubted issues of performance and scalability when compared to some of the younger contenders. And with the rise of these databases has been a parallel rise in acceptance of new development architectures to make the most of them, most notably the “MEAN stack”. Here at LDC Via we opted to develop first against the MongoDb back-end, as that is arguably the most accepted and widespread of these modern NoSQL databases.

Where the Domino NSF database has always been a market-leader is in its security structures. Readers fields, Authors fields, encryption keys, database encryption, etc. There just isn’t anything else like it. Except, well, now there is: LDC Via.

So what was UK LUG has risen from the grave at the hands of ‘Tim Clark’, and this year was a one day event hosted at IBM South bank.

The location was cool as it not only added an air of authority to the conference its self but cut down on the costs as food/booze and venue are the chief expenses on such a conference (so thanks to IBM for that)

What I don’t know is how Tim managed to get IBM to let him have such a diverse set of session that talked not only about IBM technologies but NON IBM technologies, it made for a conference where there was at least 2 sessions I wanted to go to in every slot and a lot of stunned looking but happy conference attendees.

One of the golden rules of a conference is to have it out the way somewhere where the attendees can’t escape so they can be sold stuff, breaking this rule means you stand a large chance of attendees disappearing during the day as they bugger off to do something more interesting, the fact that the closing session was as full as the opening one at a conference held in the middle of London’s south bank on a sunny Friday says everything that needs to be said about the quality of the conference

Two thumbs up and a lot of thanks to Tim

Speaking of content, here is my short session, there was not a huge number of people (there never is on my fringe tech sessions) but it was the best and most responsive crowd I have ever presented to, most enjoyable.

P.S.

thanks to theo for making me look fat and pissed off during my session Album

Day 2 of the jQuery UK conference was the formal conference day with about 700 people in attendance.

It felt quite strange going to an open source conference for a none fringe project, particularly one that is treated as a product and used by many thousands of websites

On one side they do formal updates as you would expect from a corporation but as no one can fire them and they have no shareholders or such they can also tackle tricky subjects head on as well as take insults personally, which is a lovely change (although prone to a bit of ranting)

Much of conference context was very different to traditional corporate conferences due to the age of the attendees ( or rather the time they have been in IT) so they don’t have the history and background that many old farts have, as a presenter I am used to trying to pull people into this year (or even decade) while on the other hand dealing with people who have been programming computers since I was in nappies, in contrast this audience had a lot of people who are totally cutting edge but has only been in the business for a a few years (God I feel old).

The Good

• Excellent Content, bloody hell I don’t think there was a single time slot that I did not want to be in 2 places at once, it was also placed well (the hardware hacking session at the end was the best finale)
• Slide decks, I felt quite ashamed of my own slide decks in comparison to the ones used here and mine are a long way from being the worst I have seen, all of the side decks were interactive, responsive and browsers based, asking around came up with 3 possible candidates for the software doing the magic Slides, Proxi and reveal-js although my vote goes on reveal-js as that runs on node.js and I saw a lot of URLs that matched its pattern, anyway its time to buck up my ideas on that score.
• Organisation and refreshments for the conference was organised by White October who kept everything ticking over just nicely with unlimited red bull and water, yahhhh

The Less Good

• The were 3 tracks and basically only the main track had enough room in it, the other 2 tracks did not have enough capacity, I did not manage to get into any of them and neither did a lot of other people
• Not really for beginners, I know that sounds stupid but it was generally taken as a given that you knew jQuery and used it on a daily basis, this was not a conference if you were new to jQuery and wanted to know what it was about and how to use it best.

⇓ Even though the actual conference was on an industrial estate, it was a very pretty industrial estate

⇑ Coo a full conference, not seen that in a while

⇑ The hardware hacking session was roll around on the floor funny, very well done and opened up lot of avenues that you can put your javascript knowledge to work with

⇑ The goodie bag was excellent, no waste and thankfully in a carrier bag so there was no need to chuck out another useless and crummy backpack, I even kept some of the bits of paper as they were informative not just shinny things for directors to read, the freebies offered by the vendors obviously did not come from marketing as they were actually useful,

AngularJS has been a library that I never really saw the point of, back end server languages + the excellent front end frameworks such as jQuery and bootstrap have always delivered far more than even my most demanding corporate clients could want or need,  however while booking my ticket to the jQuery conference 2014 I  noticed that one of the workshops being held beforehand was entitled ‘Diving into AngularJS’  I figured that perhaps I just did not appreciate the framework’s better points and I should man up and learn it, also the fact it was being presented by Peter Bacon Darwin a well known member of the AngularJS world and a published author was not going to hurt

Initially I thought I had made a mistake, there were lots of mistakes in the printed version of the exercises and a distinct lack of structure to the course, then I pulled the stick out my arse and started playing proper attention,  the course was never designed to be completed in one day the material is a full course that you can do at your own leisure with all materials located on https://github.com/petebacondarwin/foodme,  Peter was there to guide you over the tricky humps, answer your questions and WTF moments as well as give you the background reasoning to a lot of the baffling areas of angular,

The day was in microcosm an exact replica of the classic AngularJS learning curve –V and Peter’s presence was the reason for that, hopefully this means I wont hit this save curve on a live project

In additional it provided me with a personal epiphany when it comes to javascript, I have never really enjoyed the asynchronous nature of javascript, it never had the same control that I am used to with things like Java multi-threading or better still Scala’s Actors, but peter took me though the whole thing and introduced me to the https://github.com/kriskowal/q library and its AngularJS derivative $q, I had been using javascript promises the same as everyone else (even if we don’t call them that) but this really opened my eyes on the whole subject 🙂

Frankly put I learnt more than my brain can absorb in a day, very very good value

Sigh, I’m a bit late writing this one up (again) but never mind

On a barmy spring evening Mr white and I potted up to a very trendy part of Old Street to attend the 29th London Node User Group

Held in the Shoreditch village hall (which was far posher than I remember village halls being and with no smell of urine)

This was in the background of Old street which used to be a place you would not venture into without a body guard and an axe but is now Londons start up tech hub

There were 3 talks on the night:

Jeremy Ruston A Tale of Two Hosts: rebooting TiddlyWiki for Node.js and the browser

This talk was done by its creator and such talks are always fascinating, his discussion had a lot of moving from old tech to new with serious and precises technical terms (I had to go look up what transclusion means)

The talk was less about node.js and more a product demo, this was fine as I was really impressed with Tiddlywiki the product, very cutting edge with a lot of CSS3 and HTML5, I learnt about a couple of new HTML5 features I was unaware of as well as lessons on large scale state manipulation or lack of it

The product it’s self looks a boon for academics although less so for corporations due to their habit of living on old browsers.

It runs in both the browser as well as node.js and its ability to create multiple entries or wikis at will puts corporate wikis to shame.

Simon McManusHome Automation With Javascript

The home automation talk was an easy going change from its hard core predecessor, but Mr McManusHome was just a tad rushed and garbled (sounds like he has been busy at work)

It was interesting to see the challenges that even an obviously clever person has in trying to glue all the various home automation standards into something you can use for what you want

It was captivated seeing how hard he had to work to get even simple things working, it does however seem that there are companies out there that are fighting the good fight.

In the end I felt dumb but exhilarated and galvanised to learn more

Ismael Celis Streaming downloads proxy service with Node.js

This talk rounded up the night and concentrated on the bootic eCommerce application.

While not as fun as the other presentations, it was pure practical demonstration, strongly focused on node.js and shared a lot of lessons learnt and good tips and tricks, well presented especially considering that English does not seem to be Mr Celis first language

Roundup

The atmosphere between and after the talks was really welcoming and very friendly compared to something like a Java user group (they even do free training nights), I suspect this was because most people were from start-ups rather than the serious corporate landscape, indeed my references to using various technologies inside the corporates was treated with a bit of horror as if I was suggesting selling out to the forces of evil, a strange but refreshing attitude and a good U.G. all round.