coastnerds.com domain expires in September

Hi All,

The coastnerds.com domain will expire on 14 September.  If anyone is interested in renewing it let me know otherwise I'll let it expire.  You will still be able to access the site using the blogger link should you wish.  The address is ccnerdsofafeather.blogspot.com

On the subject of future meetups, if anyone out there is keen to organise something let us know.  If you don't have publishing access to the site I can arrange that.  There is also the google mailing group, facebook and google+ channels available should you prefer. Otherwise I think we'll just play it by ear.  

Cheers,
Shannon

June Meetup - CANCELLED

The Meetup scheduled for 18th June has been Cancelled.

April Meetup

April Meetup

The next meetup event is going to be at:

Blink Mobile 

Suite 2, 125 Donnison Street, Gosford
Tuesday 16th April @ 6pm

The topic this month will be Tool Time ... how to
make your development and testing life easier

This month we have a DOOR PRIZE free license of
Redgate's ANTS Performance Profiler (worth $395)

Tool Time

Come along for a comparison of development tools
per browser vendor, and how to use them

 How to debug Node.JS with node-inspector,
how to debug Ruby on Rails
and a guide to remote debugging
Android / Blackberry / iOS.

And for Windows developers find out about
some great add-ins for Visual Studio, refactoring tools

test runners, package tools etc and a demonstration
of ANTS Performance Profiler. 


Door Prize kindly donated by

Starting at 6am there will be two quick
presentations winding up at around 7ish.  

*Also note the change of address for BlinkMobile.

Hope to see you there.

March Meetup

The next meetup event is going to be at:

BlinkMobile

Suite 2, 125 Donnison Street, Gosford

Tuesday 26th March

6pm

Yes, this is not actually the 3rd Tuesday of the month, but better late than never.  

This month I will be giving a short talk:

Silverlight to Knockout

As a .Net Developer I have spent a few years working with WPF & Silverlight. However, over the past few months I have been exploring the JavaScript MVVM library called Knockout that shares a similar data-binding pattern with WPF/Silverlight. In this talk I will walk through the common "Task List" MVVM example using both Silverlight (with Caliburn Micro) and Knockout.  

As discussed at the last meetup we will be trialing a new shorter format this month. The aim is to start earlier, have a quick presentation followed by dinner and wind-up at around 7ish.  We will decide on what to eat on the night. If you want dinner bring along some cash to chip in. 

*Also note the change of address for BlinkMobile.

Hope to see you there.

February Meetup

The next meetup event is going to be at:

The Austrian Schnitzelhaus, Erina Fair

Tuesday 19th February

7pm

This will be the first meetup for the year and we will be having an informal get together at the Austrian Schnitzelhaus at Erina Fair.

 Hopefully we can get things organised for our first round of presentations and talks in March.  Think of some ideas that you would like to talk about or hear about and we can start planning. 

Come along and enjoy a schnitzel, a beverage (or two) and good conversation with like-minded IT Professionals.

See you there.

November Meet-up

This year's final meet-up event is going to be at:

Building 2, 19 Grieve Close West Gosford
(Blink Mobile Interactive)

Tuesday 20th November

7pm

This month we have three lightning talks:

Presentation Layer Design Patterns

Presented By Scott Wallace
An introduction to presentation layer design patterns including Model View Presenter (MVP), Model View Controller (MVC) and Model View ViewModel (MVVM). It's time to separate those concerns!

AngularJS & Yeoman

Presented By Ron Waldon

Building a web app with AngularJS, google's "Superheroic JavaScript MVW" framework. Also - Yeoman, "a robust and opinionated set of tools, libraries, and a workflow that can help developers quickly build beautiful, compelling web apps".

Windows 8 Development

Presented By Ben Thomas-Brigden

Windows 8 has arrived.  Ben will share his experiences with developing apps for Microsoft's re-imagination of Windows. 

 

 

This will be the final meet-up for the year so it will be a good opportunity to learn about some interesting technologies to keep you busy over the summer.

 

We'll probably order in some pizza but we'll wait and see who turns up first.  If you want some pizza bring along some cash so you can chip in.

 

Hope to see you there.

October Meetup

The next meetup event is going to be at:

The Austrian Schnitzelhaus, Erina Fair

Tuesday 16th October

7pm

 

Unfortunately we only had a single volunteer to present at this month's meetup. Instead of our regular meeting this month we will meet for dinner at the Schnitzelhaus at Erina. 

 

We also need at least one more volunteer to present at next month's meeting which will probably be the last for the year. 

 

 

CoastNerds Needs You!

Volunteers for Presentations 

Come and tell us about an interesting project you are working on or some awesome new technology you have discovered.  Why not challenge your self to learn something new and tell us all about it?   

We cannot survive without people volunteering their time to give presentations/talks at our meetings.  They do not need to be long or use the most impressive PowerPoint ever seen.  All we are interested in is learning, sharing ideas and networking.   We have had a lot of success in recent months with one or two 20 minute presentations per meeting followed by plenty of Q&A and discussion. 

For a short time we can also offer each presenter with a 30 day Pluralsight subscription.  Pluralsight offers a huge library of online IT training videos by the best authors in the business.

If you would like to volunteer for our next meeting please contact us at coastnerds@googlegroups.com


Feedback Please - What night suits you?

Finally we would also like some feedback on what day of the week we should hold our CoastNerds meetups.  It seems we get a lot of positive feedback from members of the local community but they are unable to make it to our meetings due to various schedule conflicts.  Let us know what night would suit you best either by emailing or using the polling widget on our website.

Website's back

If you are reading this it means the CoastNerds website is back online.  Note that the URL has changed to www.coastnerds.com  Make sure you update your bookmarks.

August Meetup

The next meetup event is going to be at:

Building 2, 19 Grieve Close West Gosford
(Blink Mobile Interactive)

Tuesday 21st August
7pm

This month we have two presentations:

ASP.Net MVC - Validation

Presented By Shannon Marsh
This presenation will compare the "out-of-the-box" Data Annotations with a third-party library named Fluent Validation. It will cover both standard and custom validation techniques as well as unit testing.

Security – is anything safe? 

Presented By Robert Dyball

This presentation will cover many aspects of security, and include practical tips to help ensure your company’s reputation and data stay safe. Find out about SSL, threat modelling, pen testing, SQL injection, XSS - cross site scripting, hijacking sessions, socially engineered hacks and more. While this won’t be a complete guide to hacking, it helps to know how these hacks work to know where to look. 

also...

CoastNerds - 2 Years Young!

That's right.  This month we are celebrating 2 years of CoastNerds. Time flies when you are having fun (and learning from your peers).

We'll probably order in some pizza but we'll wait and see who turns up first.  If you want some pizza bring along some cash so you can chip in.

Hope to see you there.

PS. Remember if you would like to volunteer to give a presentation or talk please let us know.  We have quite a few 30 Day subscriptions to Pluralsight's online training to give to all our presenters.  Get them while they last!

July Meetup

The next meetup event is going to be at:

Building 2, 19 Grieve Close West Gosford
(Blink Mobile Interactive)
 

Tuesday 17th July

7pm

This month we will have a few lightning talks again. 

Ben Thomas-Brigden
Showing of how quickly mobilise a SharePoint list with the Blink Mobility Platform.

Ben Barclay
Ruby on Rails

Shannon Marsh
ASP.Net MVC - Validation. 
Data Annotations and Fluent Validation compared.

We'll probably order in some pizza but we'll wait and see who turns up first.  If you want some pizza bring along some cash so you can chip in.

Should be a good night.  Hope to see you all there.

Another Sponsor - BlinkMobile Interactive

The guys at BlinkMobile Interactive have offered up their boardroom as a location for us to hold our monthly meet-up events.  To recognise this we haved added them as a sponsor of our group.  Thanks guys!

June Meetup

The next meetup event is going to be at:

Building 2, 19 Grieve Close West Gosford

(Blink Mobile Interactive)

Tuesday 19th June

7pm

The guys at Blink Mobile Interactive have again offered up theer board room for us to use for our meetup.

This month we will have a few lightning-ish talks

Scott

Discussion on Automated Acceptance testing using Selenium, the Page Object patter and SpecFlow.

Ron

node.js and/or WebSockets

And/Or

Ben
Showing of how Blink can quickly turn Sharepoint lists into mobile forms.

We are also considering ordering in some Pizzas. Anyone wanting Pizza would need to chip in some $$$. If you are interested please let us know so we can organise this before hand.  Just send a mail to the google mail group or post a reply on facebook. 

Should be a good night.  Hope to see you all there.

Pluralsight Sponsorship

I am happy to announce that Pluralsight - Hardcore Developer Training is now a sponsor of CoastNerds.  Pluralsight will soon be providing us with 25 free monthly subscriptions to their online training library.  Also if any of you find yourselves unemployed let me know and we can arrange a free monthly subscription for you to help get up to speed before applying for a new job. 

This is a great step forward for our group as we can now offer a reward to our speakers/presenters, something we have been wanting to do for a while.  Going forward the first 25 people who present at our meetings each year will receive one of the free monthly subscriptions so now there is even more incentive for you to volunteer!

May Meetup

The next meetup event is going to be at:

Building 2, 19 Grieve Close West Gosford

(Blink Mobile Interactive)

Tuesday 15th May

7pm

 

The guys at Blink Mobile Interactive have kindly offered up there board room for us to use for our meetup. It's great timing too, because this month we have two excellent presenters.

 

Tony Quilkey

Proem - MVC for PHP 5.4

Tony will be giving a talk on Proem which is a lightweight MVC Framework for PHP 5.4 that he is building.  He will provide a brief history of Proem, and discuss why he chose to build "yet another" PHP framework and give a brief overview of the bootstrap process. 

 

Robert Dyball

Lightning Talks - TeamCity, NuGet, CodePlex, GitHub...

Robert deserves an award for giving the most presentations at CoastNerds, but he always delivers and this month will be no exception.  He will be giving 2 or 3 short lightning talks (time permitting) on a few of the technologies he has been working with recently.

1. A "really cool" demo of a scheduling tool.

2.  A quick presentation on TeamCity and how he has set it up to do to do auto-build, auto-test, auto-NuGet package create and publish.

3. Lastley a talk on open sourcing a library with NuGet/CodePlex/GitHub 

 

 

We are also considering ordering in some Pizzas. Anyone wanting Pizza would need to chip in some $$$. If you are interested please let us know so we can organise this before hand.  Just send a mail to the google mail group or post a reply on facebook. 

 

 

Should be a good night.  Hope to see you all there.

 

 

April Meetup

 

The next meetup event is going to be at:

The Gosford RSL Club, West Gosford

Tuesday 24th April

7pm

 

Change of venue this month.  This will be just a meetup for dinner and drinks.  We have a few talks/presentations on the backburner but nothing ready for this month.  If anyone wants to volunteer for next month please let us know so we can organise a room.

March Meetup

The next meetup event is going to be at:

The Austrian Schnitzelhaus, Erina Fair

Tuesday 20th March

7pm

 

We had a fair response to our call for volunteers to give presentations however no one was ready for this month.  Having said that we do have two great presentations lined up for next month's meetup.  More details will be posted closer to the time.

 

In the meantime we will continue our tradition of meeting at the Austrian Schnitzelhaus at Erina Fair on Tuesday night. We have found this forum to be quite a positive alternative to our regular meetings at the Erina Centre.  If you missed out on last month's meeting there was some good conversation around preferred Source Control Software, Android Mods and the latest version of PHP. 

 

Why not come along? You might even learn something new and that can't be a bad thing. Hope to see you there.

February Meetup

The next meetup event is going to be at:

The Austrian Schnitzelhaus, Erina Fair

Tuesday 21st February

7pm

This will be the first CoastNerds meetup for 2012.  To mark the occasion we will be having an informal get together at the Austrian Schnitzelhaus at Erina Fair.  

We decided at the previous meetup that we would use this event to do some planning and preparation for the year ahead.  So bring along some ideas on how we can build on the success of our first year and a bit.  Maybe a change of venue, different methods for information sharing, ideas for encouraging more people to come along or anything else that you think that could help.  

Come along and enjoy a schnitzel, a beverage (or two) and good conversation with like-minded IT Professionals.

See you there.

CoastNerds - Takes a vacation

As mentioned in the previous post, CoastNerds takes a break now until February.  Now is a good opportunity to thank all of our fantastic presenters for this year and also to everyone that came along to share their knowledge and experience.

Here is a summary of the presentations from this year:

• Using Git for Version Control - and why I wouldn't use anything else..  - Tony Quilkey
• Android Application Development - The First Few Hours...  - Shannon Marsh
• The What, How and Why of Database Version Control  - Justin Stafford
• Prioritising your Application Portfolio  - Campbell Page
• So what do Cucumbers have to do with Testing?  - Robert Dyball and Shannon Marsh
• Programming PIC Microcontrollers + Kinect SDK Preview.  -  Robert Dyball
• Continual Integration  - Ben Black
• Retrospectives  - Scott Wallace
• What's New in Web Technologies  - Ron Walden
• The Enterprise Mobility Market and The Blink Mobile Platform  - Ben Thomas-Brigden
• Introducing Windows Home Server 2011  - Robert Dyball
• Estimating Using Planning Poker  - Shannon Marsh

 

We also had our first CoastNerds Retrospective back in June where we discussed things we should start, stop, continue or do more or less of.

Well done everyone!

CoastNerds will re-convene in February. Based on the discussion at the last meet-up the consensus was that we would meet at the Austrian Schnitzelhaus again for a meal and discuss the agenda for 2012. We'll keep you posted on the date and time closer to the event.

Until then, Merry Christmas and All the Best for the New Year!

Image Credit: freedigitalphotos.net