As a member of LDC I’m re posting its “year in review“, as it basically mirrors my own

“A week before IBM Lotusphere / Connect we realised this was by far our biggest conference yet, with 2 speakers, 3 sessions, 2 sponsored parties and bleeding t-shirts everywhere. So, what have we been up to during the last year?

Well, bucking the global slowdown for one thing, new clients now include one of the worlds largest media websites, another multi-national insurance company, and myriad smaller interesting clients, with some monster projects in the pipeline (fingers crossed).

International clients are now the norm rather than the exception, with contact coming in from all over Europe and the US. To cater to these requirements our skills set has diversified even more. Adding to bleeding-edge IBM and Microsoft stuff, we have had large client implementations using Spring and Spring webflow, PHP and advanced HTML5.

Nearly every new project contains a mobile element and all coding now caters to this as a matter of course.

This was especially true of our XPages work which seemed to really reach a tipping point in 2011. Like other projects, everything we’re doing with XPages also has some mobile aspect to it, but the interesting thing is that there is now a constant stream of new applications being created with XPages (NB: that’s “new new”, not “new upgrades”). And 2012 doesn’t show any sign of slowing down.

2012 will be more of the same, providing more for our clients and keeping pace with the ever accelerating rate of change in both IT and business requirements.

It’s time to kick arse (we’re British) and write / delete code (remember: less is more, and more code means more test cases!).”

Its cool working with you lot, bring on 2012 🙂

Old Comments

Mary Beth Raven(07/01/2012 01:51:13 GMT)

Congratulations on a great year and best wishes for a better one to come! And, I hope to find some time to chat (er, or drink) with you at Lotusphere/Connect

Mark Myers(08/01/2012 11:50:29 GMT)

@marybeth thanks and count on it!

This is a brief ASW post*

I was kindly asked by Bruce Elgort to take part in the Taking Notes podcast No142 on behalf of LDC, where we discus the latest round of NoSQL databases and how they relate to IBMs offerings, it was a proud and nerve racking moment for me, so if for some reason, you’re in the IBM Domino community or interested in NoSQL and have not seen the pod cast listed under the Taking Notes Page or Bruces blog, you can find it here

• Also Bruce wont leave me alone till I post it.

Old Comments

David Leedy(22/11/2011 19:17:59 GMT)

Great Episode!

Mark Myers(22/11/2011 18:45:06 GMT)

@sean it was an honour to be asked by bruce

Sean Cull(22/11/2011 18:38:27 GMT)

I really enjoyed this podcast. Its good to know what else is happening out there.

Bruce(22/11/2011 18:26:18 GMT)

You signed a contract 🙂

Mark Myers(22/11/2011 19:38:40 GMT)

@David, it strange ive find out that no one ever tells Bruce/Julian if they enjoy the episodes (well i cant see any comments on the blog)

Well LDC have picked their favourite designs, as always we do over a dozen designs then pick out our top 7 (one for each day), this means there are some that don’t get picked, normally these are my feeble attempted creations in adobe illustrator or Ben Pooles terrible tech jokes, but in rare cases they are some of the amazing art done for us by proper artists, in this case “battle for London” did not get picked (it got my bloody vote) , purely due to how it might look printed on a tshirt, but it does make an awesome wallpaper, so I have popped it up here and at the London Developer Co-op website,
enjoy

Old Comments

John Head(16/11/2011 12:06:48 GMT)

reminds me of something that could fit within the Robotech universe – which is a very good thing in my book

Bill(16/11/2011 10:22:43 GMT)

Reminds me of the 80’s Maplin catalog.. Excellent..

—* Bill

Mark Myers(16/11/2011 12:35:48 GMT)

@John giant robots and guns are ALWAYS a goodthing

Mark Myers(16/11/2011 10:28:44 GMT)

@bill

I was lucky enough to win a free pass to the Skillsmatter NoSQL day on Wednesday, and with high expectations sat down notepad in hand ready to learn a shit load

While NoSQL in its current incarnation is a relatively new child, it is still a lot to squash into one day and it was a fast passed session list with ten min breaks between technical sessions, covering a wide range of subjects in the area, the complete list of talks and links to them on skills matters website is below, i urge you to go and watch them , my personal faves were the OGS and mongodb + scala session by Brendan McAdams, so if your only going to watch one or two, watch them.

• OGS
• Polyglot Persistence
• Building real world solution with document storage, Scala and Lift
• Doctor Who and Neo4j
• Real Life Cassandra
• MongoDB + Scala: Case Classes, Documents and Shards for a New Data Model
• The State of NOSQL Today
• Handling conflicts in eventually consistent systems
• Parkbench Discussion
• Python + MongoDB / MongoEngine As with all users group style sessions the presentation quality and style varied considerably and perhaps a tiny bit more practise would have been good on a couple of the session (not that I’m one to talk given my track record), but the audience was very good (there were about 120 of us) and asked questions and made challenges just as they should, answers were knowledgeable and honest from all the presenters

  Perhaps I am a bit spoilt by the IBM user groups run by Paul Mooney and Warren Elsmore, but I would have tried to get some more money from the sponsors and put them in stands at the front rather than charge for the day (hardly the point as I did not pay), but it was i feel worth the money and the fact that the presenters were available though out the day for serious grilling was ace, also the skills matters facilities and location are perfect for these small conferences. i left with a much better grounding on NoSQL in general, some great insights into the various players in the arena, the various ways to implement its usage on the different platforms as well as the best usages cases for the technology as a whole. All Good stuff

  PS. I got a freebie mug tshirt and books for mongodb so I’m happy

  PPS. As most of my audience are still IBM bods, you will be pleased to know that they gave the lotus notes nsf due credit for its place in the origin of the document Based NOSQL database (see picture)

  

Old Comments

Rob Wills(07/11/2011 21:05:13 GMT)

Sean, the NoSQL DBMS products I use (Rocket U2 and Ladybridge OpenQM) allow multi-valued fields and secondary indices that can include null keys. This allows really efficient selections using indices but also the ability to do dynamic SQL-like selections that you couldn’t do easily in Notes. I’d be happy to demonstrate this as it could be integrated into XPages fairly easily.

Sean Cull(07/11/2011 18:08:37 GMT)

newbie question ( if you can be a NoSQL newbie after 15 years of Notes ? )

My big frustration with Notes at the moment is not being able to efficiently filter data in repeats / views with multiple filters active at once.

The problem is that my scheme needs multiple rows for the same record.

The other problem is that there is no practicable way to only show filter choices that actually correspond to data as opposed to null data sets.

How do modern NoSQL databases do this ?

I was lucky enough to attend the latest IISYG (Independent Information Security Group) meeting hosted by Iain Sutherland, Managing Director of Information Security Solutions, this was my first attendance, up till now I had lacked either the experience or expertise to attend and now I see why

I am limited on what I can discuss as I signed Chatham House rules, but I did want to jot down my experiences.

Normally small discussion groups like this (about 20 – 25) have their fair share of people who just talk and don’t get anywhere or those with a lack of experience but don’t realise it, I found neither of these here, it was a gathering of experts and I found that I was too wrapped in following the discussions and the huge number of valid points raised, to venture any of my own publicly (although I did shuffle up to one the presenter and have a chat afterwards) , the presentation on the nature of risk transference as how it is pertains to companies and the attempt to mitigate the problem with insurance was particularly fascinating, now I know what you are thinking, but genuinely it was, it showed you the mind process of insurance underwriters and how you should present your security risk to them, what loopholes they will use in your policy and how to watch out for them. a true ‘how to’ guide.

The debate section of the meeting initially sounded quite dry but that only turned out to be due to its government title, it dealt with the opposing sides of the question of government security standards, these standards deal with the certification of the people who get to state if the IT systems we entrust our governmental data to are secure, bearing in mind that this goes from simple personal data such as voting registers all the way up the most secure of state secrets, it is something you really want to get right, opinion varied hugely and dealt with the problem from all sides, if the official speakers took away half as much as I did them it was well worth doing..

All in all a fascinating morning.