Lazy Developer : Community

I'm back and moved

Jimmy — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 10:41:00 GMT

Hi all

After a long break I'm back. This time I decided to go on my own and set up a new blog here. It was a privilege to be here on devlicio.us. If there are any people that subscribed to my feed, please update your feed to http://jimmylarkin.net/syndication.axd

Jimmy out

See you at DDD South West

Jimmy — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:35:00 GMT

I'm heading down to Taunton this Saturday for DDD Sout West (www.dddsouthwest.com) where I will have a session (see below). Pop in and say hello if you will be there.

Hope to see you there.

Early morning train

Jimmy — Sat, 09 May 2009 16:37:00 GMT

Finally I have some spare time to actually sit down and write something ant even this only because I'm in the 6.48 in the morning train for London and apart of sleeping I have nothing better to do. It's been a while since my last post and I think I lost my blogging commitment somewhere. Assuming I ever had any. Anyway, that is not really relevant to what I wanted to write about.

Stroud

What is your first thought when you thing about developers' communities? Mine always was something around free t-shirts and having a fun. I still think the same way but cool and free t-shirts were recently replaced by hard work. Luckily fun is still there. Why hard work then? Well, if you are not from my area you may not know but I've started a user group and it's a whole lot of work. I've never suspected that there are so many things to do and to manage but even if I would I will do that again. It's a great experience and even better satisfaction when you see people coming over for a meeting.

Kemble

It's taking a while to write that, maybe because I'm working on my DDD presentation in the same time. Back to the user group thing. Everything really started over a year go when I thought about this for a very first time. Since then I was talking and promising that I will start one soon and those were empty promises for a long while. Finally I grabbed enough courage and determination and started. The very first thing was to have a web site. After a quick look around I decided to use the offer Kentico has for user groups which includes a free hosting. Perfect, no costs involved. After a few days of work the site was up and running. Then I had to face the greatest challenge and find at least a few members. A quick chat with my manager and all my colleagues had the group in their objectives. I'm joking of course but it's roughly how I started; by spreading the news among everyone I knew; and it worked. At this moment the counter hit over 60 members which seem to be not very bad for the area I hope.

Swindon

The very first meeting was a huge stress. Not only the meeting itself but also organisational aspects of it. I had to find a venue that would suit people from all locations around, which will have required facilities, close to a bar and cheap. Yes, money was the biggest problem I had to face and I have to admit I'm quite lucky here for my manager agreed to sponsor it. It is however difficult, especially if you don't know the area very well like me. Finally the very first meeting was a big success with 25 people, great presentations and my lack of experience and confidence. Now, when I'm close to the fourth meeting next week I feel like veteran and you know what? It feels good.

Ditcot

Over last few months I had to manage many, many things. I had to find another venue that will be cheaper, preferable free, because I couldn't assume I will always be able to pay. I had to find some sponsors to have swags to give away because people love swags. Then I had to find speakers who will come over here to show something. It's challenge and quite a lot of work sometimes but I've never regret I started. I have feeling I'm doing something good and it feels just great.

Middle of nowhere

If you are thinking about setting a group then stop and just do it. You will never regret.

First GL.net Meeting

Jimmy — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:23:23 GMT

The GL.net very first first meeting will be on 25th February 2009. Two truly great speakers kindly agreed to join us. Guy will be talking about new features in C# 4 and Paul will show live coding session with Silverlight. The meeting will be held in Royal George Hotel, Birdlip, UK. If you are living or just visiting Gloucestershire then don't wait and go to the meeting page to register now.

I hope to see you there.

New User Group

Jimmy — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:51:38 GMT

Happy New Year!

Finally, after ages of talking about I did it as my New Year resolution. Just few hours ago, GL.net user group has been officially open. Herein I would like to invite all .NET geeks from Gloucester, UK area. Of course, anyone else is warmly welcome.

Cheers

More About Building Community

Jimmy — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:06:00 GMT

I’m pretty lucky that my boss understands how important the community is and supports us with that in any possible way. Last time I wrote about having some fun together, this time about something more technical.

It will be over a month now since we started “eleven sessions”. Basically that means on our session at 11 o’clock twice a week. Each session is a one hour when one of us shows something. It can be some presentation, something one learn and want to share, some interesting webcast of screencast, just everything about .NET, agile, methodologies and software development. We are discussing various concepts, ideas, technologies and trends. Its brilliant way to share the knowledge, integrate and spent time together. It’s also the great way to train presentation skills and review knowledge.

What I found pretty difficult is to encourage people to do presentation. We are all professionals with great knowledge and experience but it’s difficult to convince one to stand in front of us and talk.

What is in your companies? Do you have something like that? What is your experience in that area?

My First Podcast

Jimmy — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 14:57:00 GMT

Michal Grzegorzewski published my first podcast on Zine.net page yesterday late night. We were talking about AJAX. Unfortunately podcast is in Polish as well as zine.net so sorry for all non Polish speaking readers. Currently we are planning to record the next one about continuous integration this weekend.

Joined to AJAX Control Toolkit Team

Jimmy — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 10:56:00 GMT

Now I can officially say that, I joined to AJAX Control Toolkit team which I'm very proud of. A number of new challenges and things to learn are waiting for me now. I'm so excited.

First thing I'm going to take is ContextMenu Extender. Kirti put short requirements list on her blog, I will allow myself to copy that post here. Two copies may increase possibility of feedback.

One of our new contributors (that's me) has volunteered to author a new control which will behave like a context menu. It will prevent the default browser menu from showing up when you right click and show you a custom menu and provide you with richer, more relevant functionality. We would have to essentially override the contextmenu event and show a popup. The new context menu could easily use the existing FloatingBehavior support in the Toolkit to show a custom menu control.

Name of the control: ContextMenuExtender

TargetControl: Control

Properties: I am almost stealing this from the HoverMenu control in the Toolkit. The ContextMenu is the HoverMenu handling the contextmenu event instead of the mouseover/mouseout events. We could reuse most of the functionality in that control.

TargetControlID: ID of the element, right clicking on which will cause the context menu to show
PopupControlID: ID of the menu popup that will serve as the context menu
Position: Position of the menu popup with respect to the target control. Any position supported by PopupBehavior?
ContextMenuCssClass: Name of the css class that will be applied to the menu popup element.

Accessibility: When the target control is focusable the ContextMenu should be able to be activated using the keyboard alone so the extender needs to support keyboard eventson the target control as well. The popup panel should have the features expected of an accessible control like semantic html, alternate text, high contrast support, keyboard support and more. This would be a to-do for the website developer though and not the control author since the Extender consumes whatever Menu Control is passed to it.

International: Would there be any left-to-right/right-to-left concerns we should have if we are exposing the Position property? Users can make their page globally aware using that, correct?

Usability: This is something that end users who deploy this control should take into consideration. Right-clicking in a browser to expose non-browser menus is not something that users will discover intuitively. It should be considered that the control needs to communicate in some way that it has a contextmenu that is not the default browser one. It needs to be somehow advertised that there is more possible with the target control beyond just clicking and/or hovering over it. Talking about usability, what would be the Safari story? Would any Macintosh users like to chime in?

Any more feature requests, ideas?

Validator Extender back again (under a new name now)

Jimmy — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 20:43:35 GMT

Welcome again in the topic. Some time ago we went through a course which gave us fully functional extender. Just to remember, the course has the four parts:

Introduction – what Atlas Extender is and how to create our own validation extender,
Page methods – how to add AJAX server-side validation,
Migration – from Atlas to ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX,
Integration with the page – how to integrate extender with the ASP.NET page to perform full form validation.

Today I've decided that this project has to be resurrected and should grow up. In the first shot I've change all project structure, name and redesign everything. The Validator Extender becomes now part of AJAX control toolbox I would like to build. It has been also updated to work with the 1.0 release of the ASP.NET AJAX. However, if you have an idea or want to join and add your controls to the library I will be more than glad to see you.

I named the project ASP.NET AJAX Control Set and I hope I will get along this with your help and comments and there will be something worth to download.

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 4 - Registration Open

Jimmy — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 02:30:00 GMT

Just want to let you know, registration for DDD4 is now open. All UK developers go quickly to avoid dissapointment :)

[Link]

See you there.