All the smart Notes/Domino and Connections people I know have multiple arrows to their quiver. All the way from Salesforce though node.js to hard and dark programming and high availability admin on totally none IBM technologies, and while we whisper this knowledge to each other we never really present on it or yell it to the wider world, so when some of these said people introduced the following idea to me, I nearly bit the top off my can of Red Bull in excitement.

Collaboration Stack Community Networking Event

Do you work with collaboration platforms? Meet your peers at an informal, technical get-together. Whilst making valuable new contacts, you can share ideas, debate best practice and explore emerging technologies.

March 21st – London

Somewhere we can talk about all forms of collaboration, from the Biggest project Like IBM’s down to Kickstarter projects based on open source

We are just setting up and searching for more speakers that will present on subjects that leave you stunned and needing a stiff drink.

So if you have something that you have been inching to tell the world about see any member of LDC or The Turtle Partnership

URL: http://cscevent.com

MAIL: event@cscevent.com

TWITTER: csc_event

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”

Last week the session that Matt White and I submitted for Connect 2014 was announced as one of the first wave of approved sessions.

This will be the first session that Matt and I have ever presented together, mainly due to our massively disparate methods of both preparing and presenting (he is the ultimate professional with proper preparation, practice and finishes everything well in time to step back and take an objective view of the session, as for me….I do all that as well but compact it into the two hours before I’m due to present 🙂 )

However given the opportunity of doing a f**king awesome session around a certain idea that seemed to have merit (which we thought of during a shared curry) we decided to work together (the decision might have been aided by the beers that went with the curry).

Well thank goodness the session got approved, and got approved EARLY as we now have s**t loads to get ready before we can even get to doing the 200+ slides for a “Show ‘n’ Tell”, Matt has to write a fully featured Notes app that will serve as a suitable base, not a noddy app either, one that you could see working in real life, while I build us a Domino and Connections demo environment, populate it with data and write the native connections app to go with the Notes db, this has got to be done to perfect standards as we have used the word ‘proper’ in the title and in our green and pleasant land that MEANS something, only then can we settle down and actually code and write the presentation, then Matt is going to make us practice it again and again till it’s perfect …. Wailll

Matt can’t we just go back to the curry house and do it later?

Two of the things you discover when you set out on a change of career, is how many friends you have got and how much real use you are after your years of effort.

Well I’m still working my way though the discovery of the latter (although initial work loads are looking good) but as far as the former goes it turns out that I am a very rich man,

Along that line a shout out goes to Mike Smith of the Turtle Partnership who took the time out when I was on site at their offices to pass on some tips that he has from his years of experience in running a consultancy / business.

With the tips came a book called The Perfect Consultant which made for interesting if slightly eye popping reading, a short book (barely more than a pamphlet), every page contained stuff I should not only know but act upon, think of it as an expanded and professional version of Working from Home by the Oatmeal, From finding Work and clients to behaviour and dealing with harsh decisions, this book seem to deal with it all.

This book looks like it will live up to is boast of “All you need to get it right first time” so thanks again Mike