Tag Archives: user group

Ann Arbor Scala Enthusiasts to meet August 15 at SRT Solutions

A week ago I posted to see if there was interest in a new developer group in Ann Arbor, dedicated to the Scala programming language. It appears that there is indeed interest, both from attendees and potential speakers.

We will meet at 6 pm on August 15 at SRT Solutions for an organizational meeting and for an open discussion on “Why Scala?”. Regular meetings will be held on the 3rd Wednesday of each month, starting with September. It would be great if we had a schedule for talks or workshops (depending on what folks want) by the time we leave the August meeting.

Join us! The meetings will be free and open to the public. We’ll take a donation for food starting in September.

FYI: Scala is a general purpose language on the Java Virtual Machine. Combining functional and object oriented programming, Scala offers powerful expression that allows developers to focus on solving problems with software rather than being distracted by boilerplate code. Particularly with recent announcements that features expected in Java in 2013 are being pushed back, languages such as Scala are attractive alternatives.

SRT Solutions is located at 206 S. Fifth Avenue, Suite 200 in downtown Ann Arbor. The office is at the corner of Fifth and Washington, with the entrance from Fifth. Take the elevator or stairs to the 2nd floor. Nearest parking structures are at Fourth & Washington or Fifth & Liberty.

 

JavaFX, Microsoft Surface, and TDD talks this week

The Ann Arbor area is ripe with events this week (apologies to our spouses).

Join up with fellow coders tonight at NSCoderNight, at Sweetwaters in Kerrytown.

Tomorrow night (Wednesday April 15), you will have to choose between attending a JavaFX talk at the Detroit JUG and a Microsoft Surface talk at GANG (Great Lakes Area .NET User Group).  Jim Weaver has solidly embraced JavaFX, and is working on his second book.  I'm thrilled that he's returning to the area, since I missed his talk at the Ann Arbor JUG late last year.  The meeting will be held at ePrize, 1 ePrize Drive, Pleasant Ridge, MI.  I had a hard time finding the location the first time I went there, so definitely check out the directions. The meeting starts at 6:30.

The Microsoft Surface is also pretty exciting.  VectorForm is a Michigan company that has been doing Surface development perhaps as long as the device has been available.  My first view of the Surface was in the James Bond movie (Quantum of Solace), and then I was also lucky enough to see one at CodeMash.  So if you haven't seen the Surface, definitely head out to the Microsoft office in Southfield (1000 Town Center Drive, Suite 1930, Southfield, MI 48075) tomorrow night.  Joe Engalan and Jennifer Marsman will co-present.  The meeting starts at 6:30.

And after the meeting (around 9 pm), join up with CoffeeHouse Coders in person at Mujo's in the Duderstadt Center on North Campus or on their IRC channel.

On Thursday 4/16 for lunch, choose between the monthly A2 Nerd Lunch or the weekly A2B3.  They're about a block apart, so perhaps you can hit both.

On Thursday evening, you have several choices in Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Startup Drinks at Grizzly Peak, and the Washtenaw Linux Users Group at WCC.

Also on Thursday, but a little further from home, Dennis Burton is speaking at the Greater Lansing .NET User Group with his talk on "Test Driven Development is Driving me Insane".  Dennis will discuss patterns and techniques for writing tests that are more robust and provide better information, including techniques that you can apply to your design when writing new code to make testing easier, as well as tools for working with existing applications that do not have good test coverage.  If you miss his talk on Thursday, catch this talk again the following week 4/21 in Toledo, at Northwest Ohio .NET User Group.

On Friday, you can learn how (and why) to join a non-profit board in the Ann Arbor area.  A2Geeks is helping to sponsor training at the NEW Center, for just $35.

This is your last chance (mine too!) for the 2008/2009 academic year to visit the MPowered Entrepreneurship Hour at UM.  The speaker this week is Joshua Pokempner of Entrepreneur Toy Company.  The meeting is held from 3:30-4:30.

Ann Arbor user group meetings, Oct 3 and 4

It's going to be a very cool week in Ann Arbor, next week. And no, I'm not talking about the football game.

Got some time to attend some user group meetings? Next week looks VERY cool; I just wish I could be in 2 places at the same time on Tuesday!

The following announcement is from the Michigan Python User Group on Google.

Python User Group

Arbor Networks

Tuesday October 3, 2007

7 pm

There are a couple of opportunities for people to get exposure to Python next week. First, the Python user group meeting, which is usually held on the first Thursday of each month, is being moved to Tuesday Oct. 3 for this month only, to accommodate a special guest speaker, Titus Brown, the author of the Twill testing tool. Jason Pellerin, the author of the Nose testing tool, may also be present, so this is an excellent chance for people to talk about automated testing with folks in the know.

Bruce Webber will be talking about wxPython, which is always a hot topic.

The Michigan Python Users Group will be meeting at Arbor Networks on  
Tuesday 10/3 at 7PM.

http://michipug.org

The downtown Ann Arbor location worked out well for heading out  
afterwards. Come join us!

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Unfortunately this conflicts with a very cool meeting at the Ann Arbor Java User Group (the following is from the Java User Group promo announcement):

An alternative to Code Generated GUIs

Washtenaw Community College

Tuesday October 3, 2007

7:30 pm

BuoyBuilder is a graphical user interface (GUI) designer and object configuration tool. It is for putting together user interfaces composed of windows, buttons, text fields and other visual elements for Java Swing applications. It also allows you to save your designed user interface and recover it back into the tool later for further modifications. But BuoyBuilder is much more than just a layout tool. With BuoyBuilder, you are working with real, live objects. These objects are usually Buoy Widgets, but BuoyBuilder allows instantiation and configuration of virtually any object. It also allows you to make connections between objects, which are persisted when the file is saved and restored when loaded. This leads to a substantial reduction in tedious infrastructure code. BuoyBuilder is a tool for building GUI applications enabling you to get the most functionality out of the least amount of code. BuoyBuilder's philosophy is to simplify application development by reducing the amount of code needed to do the job.

Presenters:

Jack Rosenzweig is the Vice-President and co-founder of 94West, LLC. Jack has worked in the software industry in Ann Arbor for the last 14 years in various roles from field trainer to product manager to IT director to director of development, all at MediaSpan (formerly known as Baseview Products). Jack launched 94West, LLC in the winter of 2006 with his partners to bring BuoyBuilder to market.

Peter Johnson is the President and co-founder of 94West, LLC. Peter has been developing software in Ann Arbor professionally for the last 13 years. Peter is fluent in Java, Swing, J2EE, Objective-C, C++ and C among other languages and environments. Peter wrote BuoyBuilder when he was unable to find anything nearly as good as Apple's Interface Builder for Java GUI design.

Location:
Washtenaw Community College

Click for map:

Contact email:

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TurboGears Web Development (Wednesday, October 4)

Ann Arbor IT Zone/Spark Central.  330 E. Liberty, Ann Arbor MI
 Wednesday, October 4, 2006
6:00 PM

Mark Ramm is going to be talking about TurboGears at the Ann Arbor Computer Society meeting on Wednesday October 4. Here’s an abstract for the talk (from AACS promo announcement):

TurboGears is part of a new generation of web development frameworks
designed to make development of database driven, Ajax enabled, web
applications easier.  The discussion will cover:

1. How well designed frameworks can increase productivity, maintainability,
and generally make web application development more fun.
2. How Ajax is integrated into the core of TurboGears, and how you can use it
to make your web applications more dynamic and easier to use.
3. He'll compare TurboGears to some other popular web development
environments, so you can better evaluate when TurboGears might be the right
tool for the job.

Mark Ramm is the author of the forthcoming "Rapid Web Applications with
TurboGears." He is IT Manager for Humantech, inc. Over the years, he has
programmed Web applications in a wide range of technologies, including
Python, TurboGears, CGI, Perl, PHP, ASP, Java Struts, and Ruby on Rails.
He has written for Linux Magazine and various online publications, and
maintains an IT Management blog (http://compoundthinking.com).
In his free time, Mark is working on a project to designing new collaborative
learning experiences around open source technologies.

AACS meetings are free and open to the public.
      Supporting membership is $20 per year, qualifying you for door prizes and voting