Sergio Pereira : alt.net, Tools

CouchDB Presentation

sergiopereira — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:26:00 GMT

In this month's Chicago ALT.NET meeting we will be taking a look at Apache CouchDB. I quote from the official site:

Apache CouchDB is a document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript. CouchDB also offers incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution.

CouchDB provides a RESTful JSON API than can be accessed from any environment that allows HTTP requests.

Get Comfy With CouchDB

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

CouchDB is one of the more mature schema-less map/reduce object dbs out there. In this talk we'll cover the basics of what CouchDB is, and why it's cool, and then we'll run through a sample application. The application will show off LINQ to Couch, basic persistance, views and full-text search with CouchDB-Lucene.

Alex Pedenko has been in software development for about 13 years, starting off on Borland Delphi, then spending about 4 years in Java and finally making the switch to .net around '03

Currently, he is the director of software architecture and chief architect at a healthcare services company. He has used that role as an opportunity to inject some modern ideas into an otherwise lagging industry, moving the company from a classic "giant web-app strapped to an even more giant db", to a distributed, service-oriented environment utilizing RESTful services, and rich-client applications.

Alex is also involved in a number of Open Source projects like Bistro and NDjango, and the .net side of CouchDB via Divan and LoveSeat

So you've been hearing about this Git thing

sergiopereira — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:11:00 GMT

The ALT.NET universe in Chicago gets together again on June 10^th, this time to learn and talk about Git, the SCM you're probably tired of hearing people jabbering about and still have not taken the time to look at.

The presenter will be myself and I hope to explain how Git works and how it can be a good alternative even for non open source projects.

Git Without Puns

This month we will take a look at Git, a distributed version control system that has been gaining a lot of popularity since its introduction.

As with everything that is new and is touted as a replacement for an existing product, it's easy to try and map Git's functionality to Subversion, CVS or TFS for example. To better use Git, we should avoid too much comparison and also try to understand how it was built and how it works under the hood.

Here are the things we will be seeing and discussing in this session.

Brief tour of Git on Windows (SSH, PuTTY, Git Bash, GUI)
Git is distributed. How does that benefits me?
Git's object database.
Git's main objects (blobs, trees, commits and tags)
Git workflows. Choose or create yours.
Working with Git
- Configuration tips
- Create a repo
- Clone a repo
- Add/Commit changes
- Reference another repo
- Update repo (to/from)
- Branching, merging, rebasing
Hosting Git
Github, social project forking

Uncle Bob shows FitNesse and Slim

sergiopereira — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 02:34:00 GMT

UPDATE: Steve has published the video of the presentation.

~~There are still a few seats left for the next Chicago ALT.NET meeting.~~ The meeting is on April 8^th and we will have a demonstration of FitNesse by Robert Martin.

FitNesse is used by many people for acceptance testing and many in our group wanted to understand it better. So come and see what this is all about.

Collaborative Acceptance Testing with FitNesse

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

Robert Martin is back, this time to talk about FitNesse, an Acceptance Testing turned into Wiki framework built on top of Fit.

Who else would you want to see talking about FitNesse? Uncle Bob, was one of its creators and is its maintainer. In this session he will explain what Acceptance Testing, Fit and FitNesse are, why they are useful and how to best use FitNesse in your process.

He'll also show off Slim, the new test-system that supersedes Fit and enables a whole hose of new features and capabilities.

Robert C. Martin has been a software professional since 1970. In the last 35 years, he has worked in various capacities on literally hundreds of software projects. He has authored "landmark" books on Agile Programming, Extreme Programming, UML, Object-Oriented Programming, and C++ Programming. He has published dozens of articles in various trade journals. Today, He is one of the software industry's leading authorities on Agile software development and is a regular speaker at international conferences and trade shows. He is a former editor of the C++ Report and currently writes a monthly Craftsman column for Software Development magazine.

Mr. Martin is the founder, CEO, and president of Object Mentor Incorporated. Object Mentor is a sister company to Object Mentor International. Like OMI, Object Mentor is comprised of highly experienced software professionals who provide process improvement consulting, object-oriented software design consulting , training, and development services to major corporations around the world.

7:45 pm

Time for our monthly open discussion. Aside from any specific topic that anyone wants to bring to the group, we can continue the discussion on Acceptance Testing and report the progress on the effort to produce the Chicago Code Camp.

Video - ORM Discussion/Fishbowl

sergiopereira — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:11:00 GMT

After the IoC talk we had the monthly discussion. This time we tried the fishbowl format (or some approximation of that). The topic was ORMs.

Video - IoC with StructureMap

sergiopereira — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:47:00 GMT

I finally got some time to import and upload the videos of September's Chicago ALT.NET meeting that happened almost 2 weeks ago.

In this first video jdn shows how DI and IoC containers can be used to add flexibility to an application design.

Video - Aug 08 discussions at Chicago ALT.NET

sergiopereira — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:58:00 GMT

The second half of the meeting was an open discussion that revolved around practices of Agile teams. There's also an entertaining rant by I'm-still-Brad in the middle.

Video - ThoughtWorks Cruise at Chicago ALT.NET

sergiopereira — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:34:00 GMT

This video was captured at the Chicago ALT.NET August 13th meeting. This first video is the Cruise presentation.

Cruise and Agile discussed - videos forthcoming

sergiopereira — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:05:00 GMT

Update: The videos of the presentation and discussion have been posted.

This month's Chicago ALT.NET meeting was pretty awesome and it was all caught in video. As soon as I have some time to do some post-production on the raw material (read, just stitch pieces together) I'll make it available somehow.

As previously mentioned we started off with a presentation of ThoughtWorks Cruise, where Robert Norton explained the idea of CI server, Agents, Pipelines and went through many of Cruise features, system requirements, and futures. He also clarified his company's position regarding CruiseControl.net, which will most likely not receive a lot of attention in terms of funding, being left for the community to keep it going.

Cruise seemed promising to me but it's clearly a typical version 1 product that needs some work to get enthusiastic thumbs up from me. Hopefully they move quickly and release a few updates before the year is over to make the product top notch. I don't mean to say Cruise in unusable. It's definitely usable and does things in a very smart way. Given time I'm sure they will take care of the rough edges and have a chance to answer customer feedback. My particular concerns tend to be on the side of ability to integrate with other systems in the enterprise, like your bug/feature tracker.

After the presentation portion we all sat together for an open discussion. The fallback topic was CI practices but what the group really wanted to talk about was Agile teams and their dynamics, so that's what the discussion became. As usual, that's my favorite part of the meeting and it's a pity that only 50% of the attendance stuck around for it.

It's nice when you go to a meeting like this and can take home a lot of new knowledge.