Project Group - May session subjects

[Alan Dean]

All,

For those who are interested in engaging with the 'ongoing project', I
am going to bring the spare room into play from the May Coding Day as
the "Project Group session track" (which actual room will be used will
depend on the numbers who elect that session.

Robin will be leading the Project Group, as has already been
announced. The sessions will still need to have subjects, of course.

Please discuss what session subjects that you would like to run this
month on this thread.

Personally, I propose:
- Morning: "Getting hands-on with Git"
- Afternoon: "Elaborating features in the real world"

The afternoon session will require that the Project Group has decided
what the problem domain to be tackled will be. Robin, over to you :-)

Alan

[Robin Minto]

Dear all,

I'm excited to be leading the ongoing project group, despite zero communication from me on the subject to date! We have a couple of weeks until openspacecode and it'd be great to get a dialogue going.

Having looked back at the earlier discussion on this subject and spoken to people at various events in London, there's strong feeling that we should look for a project that will make a contribution to the community. Ed Blackburn mentioned creating a developer community website. Jeremy Skinner suggested using the OpenSpaceCode website. Are there any other suggestions?

We also need to think about technologies that we'd like to use (although these are coupled to the problem that we choose). I'm assuming C# and GitHub - they might not be valid assumptions. The following have also been proposed:
- Fluent NHibernate
- HTTP Auth
- S#arp Architecture (implying ASP.NET MVC and NHibernate)
Feel free to throw anything else into the mix - we can always come back to it later if it's not appropriate now.

The other obvious missing pieces are unit testing framework and database technology. I suggest we fallback on NUnit and SQL Server and focus on getting to grips with the other technologies unless there's a strong desire to go in different directions.

I'm grateful to Alan for asking me to be project lead - it's nice to be able to contribute more to the community. I hope this email summarises where we are so far - let's hear some more suggestions!

Cheers,

Robin

[Alan Dean]

I'm happy to have the http://openspacecode.com used if you wish to do so but I suspect that there is more mileage in looking to unmet community needs. Entirely up to the attendees, natch.

I have a dedicated server on which I can host the app - it's running Win2003 and SQL2005. Can't do anything about the OS, sadly, but I can upgrade to SQL2008 if needed.

I saw that Jeremy offered his TeamBuild server for duty - thanks :-)

Alan

[Ed Blackburn]

A project suggestion was made after the Luciene.net / F# talk
yesterday. A CRM? The advantages of a CRM are:

- Interesting domain model, with some non-trivial graphs.
- A CRM engine can be agnostic to persistence and presentation.
Allowing the project to explore different technologies such as
NHibernate, EF, Couch DB, Azure; Web Forms 4, MVC, MonoRail,
OpenRasta, etc, etc.
- With a rich graph, analysis services could be developed using F#
- There’s a perceived lack of modern open source .net specific CRM
tools.

I’m not sure exactly how a CRM would meet with the community’s needs
but it’s an idea to discuss...


On May 18, 12:01 am, Alan Dean <alan.d...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm happy to have thehttp://openspacecode.comused if you wish to do so but

[Alan Dean]

A decent CRM based on aspnetmvc is an idea.

Also, there have been some tweets this morning about a reputation-based recruitment site. Might be an idea to consider.

Do we want to work on a 'product' or a 'service'?

Alan

[Stuart Campbell]

I like the reputation-based recruitment idea. It could be of direct value to our community and is a domain we're all reasonably familiar with.

[Alan Hemmings]

Hi All

 

RE: Cambridge venue

 

Sorry to take so long to reply about the Cambridge venue. My contact for the venue is currently out of town and will be back next Thursday so I am unable to confirm availability and exact seating numbers and whether we’d be allowed to connect to their wifi.

 

I’ve left a message and will reply to the group as  soon as I know more.

 

Cheers,

 

Alan

No virus found in this incoming message.
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[Lorenzo Stoakes]

2009/5/21 Alan Dean <alan...@gmail.com>:
[snip]

> Also, there have been some tweets this morning about a reputation-based
> recruitment site. Might be an idea to consider.

What was this? How would that work? Recommendations from colleagues
etc.? Intriguing!

[snip]
--
Lorenzo Stoakes
http://www.codegrunt.co.uk
Sent from London, Greater London, United Kingdom

[Alan Hemmings]

Ah,

This is a very old "holy grail" with so many reasons why it's not already
being done successfully.
I look forward the discussion around how we'd make that work, should be
lively.

<grin>

Cheers,

Alan

-----Original Message-----
From: opensp...@googlegroups.com [mailto:opensp...@googlegroups.com]

On Behalf Of Lorenzo Stoakes
Sent: 21 May 2009 11:12
To: opensp...@googlegroups.com

[Dylan Beattie]

You think we can do to Computer Futures what Stack Overflow did to Experts Exchange?

Where do I sign up?

2009/5/21 Stuart Campbell <stuart.c...@gmail.com>

[Jeremy Skinner]

Sounds like a good idea to me.

2009/5/21 Dylan Beattie <dy...@dylanbeattie.net>

[Zubair Khan]

I think it's a great idea, and we'll learn lots giving it a try if nothing else.

[Alan Hemmings]

Hi All

Just in  case it wasn’t obvious from my email, “I’m all for it”! (count me in)

 

I recently attended a workshop on Lean Agile by Dave Larrabee, where the “team” went through an exercise to produce it’s values, ...that helps clarify everyone’s expectations.

 

I’ve done this exercise on my own, and now have three words that describe *my* values, which I think I can say apply to this project, and they are :
                                                                  Courage,            Quality and        Customer Value.

 

I think pulling off a non commercial “stack overflow” version of http://www.theitjobboard.co.uk/ would definitely fall under the “courage” heading!

 

I think we should choose a niche, e.g. IT Recruitment, (since we’re all semi domain experts) otherwise we’ll be too general and won’t be able to differentiate our offering in any way?  It would also make modelling more interesting as we could have our model optimised to deal with specific customer problems.

 

What do you guys think?

 

Alan
(the other Alan)

 

At a later stage I wouldn’t mind doing an open coding day on Windows Azure. (future topic?)

 

 

 

From: opensp...@googlegroups.com [mailto:opensp...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Zubair Khan

Sent: 21 May 2009 12:08
To: opensp...@googlegroups.com

[Jennifer Smith]

Will add my name to the list of 'Yays' on the Stackoverflow style
recruitment site... Quite a topical one at the minute given how
strange the industry is being. Lots of existing sites to compare to
and as someone said earlier a whole bunch of reasons why it might go
wrong which makes it a bit of a challenge!

Thanks

Jen

On May 21, 1:30 pm, "Alan Hemmings" <a.hemmi...@goblinfactory.co.uk>
wrote:

> Hi All
>
> Just in  case it wasn't obvious from my email, "I'm all for it"! (count me
> in)
>
> I recently attended a workshop on Lean Agile by Dave Larrabee, where the
> "team" went through an exercise to produce it's values, ...that helps
> clarify everyone's expectations.
>
> I've done this exercise on my own, and now have three words that describe
> *my* values, which I think I can say apply to this project, and they are :
>                                                                   Courage,
> Quality and        Customer Value.
>

> I think pulling off a non commercial "stack overflow" version ofhttp://www.theitjobboard.co.uk/would definitely fall under the "courage"

[Lorenzo Stoakes]

Yup I'm up for it too!

I'm assuming we can work around those with limited knowledge of
ASP.NET, etc. (e.g. me)?

2009/5/21 Jennifer Smith <Jennifer....@gmail.com>:

[Liam Westley]

This sounds like a good topic to get to grips with, agreed, we have
domain knowledge as well as the ability to have a project with tightly
defined, and not too extensive requirements and design.

I don't think anyone need be worried about knowlege of ASP.NET, it's
only a UI presentation layer. Just a tip of an iceberg, the real
stuff is underneath; business logic, object persistance, unit tests,
automated build scripts, twitter feed, RSS feed, ... and who knows, a
WPF client, system tray application for 'alerts' etc.

I'm guessing we should take a peek at FogCreek's, http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com/,
but that is incredibly US based so there is an opportunity to create
something a bit more European in outlook.

Also, I'm on the train listening to In Business, part of 'Peter Day's
World of Business' from BBC World Service,

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio/worldbiz/worldbiz_20090514-2030b.mp3

All about how personal location is incorporated into software to
provide customised services to consumers. Not sure how this could be
morphed into an open spaces topic, more conceptual than technical, but
quite interesting concepts about mobile/location based services.

Liam Westley

http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers
@westleyl

On May 21, 2:20 pm, Lorenzo Stoakes <lstoa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yup I'm up for it too!
>
> I'm assuming we can work around those with limited knowledge of
> ASP.NET, etc. (e.g. me)?
>

> 2009/5/21 Jennifer Smith <Jennifer.E.M.Sm...@gmail.com>:

>
>
>
>
>
> > Will add my name to the list of 'Yays' on the Stackoverflow style
> > recruitment site... Quite a topical one at the minute given how
> > strange the industry is being. Lots of existing sites to compare to
> > and as someone said earlier a whole bunch of reasons why it might go
> > wrong which makes it a bit of a challenge!
>
> > Thanks
>
> > Jen
>
> > On May 21, 1:30 pm, "Alan Hemmings" <a.hemmi...@goblinfactory.co.uk>
> > wrote:
> >> Hi All
>
> >> Just in  case it wasn't obvious from my email, "I'm all for it"! (count me
> >> in)
>
> >> I recently attended a workshop on Lean Agile by Dave Larrabee, where the
> >> "team" went through an exercise to produce it's values, ...that helps
> >> clarify everyone's expectations.
>
> >> I've done this exercise on my own, and now have three words that describe
> >> *my* values, which I think I can say apply to this project, and they are :
> >>                                                                   Courage,
> >> Quality and        Customer Value.
>

> >> I think pulling off a non commercial "stack overflow" version ofhttp://www.theitjobboard.co.uk/woulddefinitely fall under the "courage"

[petemounce]

re: recruitment site & gaming the system - perhaps a CAPTCHA that
spits out invalid-syntax code, and the person posting has to correct
it to be considered human (and not robot/spammer/recruiter)?

Pete

[Stuart Campbell]

Would that be a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer scientists and HR Apart? :)

[robcthegeek]

I LOVE the idea of a recruitment site built "by the industry, for the
industry", the ability to lay the smack down on crappy recruiters
would also be so useful for both us as well as recruiting companies.

Maybe I would stop getting emails asking me to work on 1st line
support.. "but you do computers right?" - Seriously, I have had this
from an agent.

Could be some excellent challenges to overcome, but I think the reward
could be such a positive thing all round.

Great idea!