Announcing 6th DevClub.lv

This time there will be a lot of information about JavaScript and TDD.

Venue and time for this event: 15.11.2012 18:30 at Hotel "Radi un draugi", Mārstaļu iela 3.

Here's the speaker lineup:

  • Māris Zemgalis from C.T.Co will talk about "JavaScript Trends"
    (Language – English )
    JavaScript was used for displaying alert boxes and opening annoying pop-up windows.. That was the common use for it for some long time.. It was then.. Now in the era of browser wars JavaScript is used to build enterprise level apps in browser environment, to build native & hybrid mobile apps and even used for building server side applications. In presentation I'll cover the demise of Flash, rise of the JavaScript frameworks and fancy tools to make your work productive and entertainment more fun.
    Tags: JavaScript, node.js, Titanium, PhoneGap, Backbone.js

    Māris Zemgalis helps people to get things done by giving them simple and beautiful tools to organize themselves. He has enthusiasm for beautiful, pragmatic code and an eye for simplicity.

  • Surprise
  • Raimonds Simanovskis from eazyBI will talk about "Test Driven Development (TDD) – Why and How?"
    (Language – English or Latvian)
    There are many myths about Test Driven Development (TDD) – takes too much time, not applicable, not working in real life etc. In this presentation these myths will be "busted" and main benefits of TDD will be explained and recommendations how to try it out and start doing. In the end small practical live TDD will be demonstrated using JavaScript.
    Tags: TDD, Agile, JavaScript

    Raimonds Simanovskis is software developer and consultant with strong "enterprise software development" history and Oracle technologies background but during recent years he has been passionate Ruby and JavaScript developer. He is regular open source contributor and has created Oracle database adapter for Ruby on Rails, PL/SQL unit testing library with Ruby and recently working on integrating Mondrian OLAP engine with JRuby. Raimonds is also active participant in Latvian Agile software development and Open Data communities. Raimonds is founder and core developer of business intelligence web application eazyBI.

We would also like to thank our sponsors: Devtraining, 4FINANCE Group and C.T.Co.

Announcing 5th DevClub.lv – focused on Security

This DevClub will be focus on security because it is and always will be an important topic!

Venue and time for this event: 18.10.2012 18:30 at Hotel Kolonna "Konventa sēta" (conference room – Kampenhauzens), Kalēju street 9/11.

  • Didzis Balodis from DPA Latvia will talk about "Web application security – hacking weak authentication implementations"
    (Language – Latvian)
    After the latest security breaches when millions of user accounts have been compromised at such companies such as LinkedID, Yahoo and Gamigo we will present the current trends in password attacks, how the different attack vectors work and what kind of weaknesses they exploit. Then we will move on to different strategies of secure authentication implementation and will demonstrate some practical proof of concepts.
    Tags: Password attacks, Secure authentication

    Didzis Balodis is currently leading IT Security unit in DPA Latvia. He has more than 10 years of IT experience in development, support and administration of IT systems in the public and commercial sector companies. Last five years Didzis has more focused on IT consulting and security audit, serving clients in Latvia and abroad. Most of the time is spent in leading security audit, vulnerability and penetration testing assignments, among his recent clients there are companies from financial, utilities and public sector. Didzis has also developed and is delivering to its clients a User IT security awareness program which often is accomplished with some social engineering attacks. Didzis also holds CISSP and GPEN certifications.

  • Andrey Podshibyakin from C.T.Co will talk about "Mobile security"
    (Language – English)
    Will talk about 3-4 items from our companies mobile app security checklist. Will describe the problems, provide solution and show code examples or demos. Tags: Mobile app security, iOs examples

    Andrey Podshibyakin is working in IT for 6+ years. Geek level 85. Love mobile devices and cutting edge tech. Working in CTCo as development manager in mobile development team.

  • Mehis Hakkaja from Clarified Security OÜ will talk about "Red pill vs. blue pill – penetration testing perspective"
    (Language – English)
    Edutainment mode presentation of typical web application blunders with live hacking demos and real-life examples my penetration testing team encounters all too often. I wrap it up with some visually entertaining fun with recent Java and IE exploits.
    Tags: Penetration testing, Live hacking demos, Real-life examples

    Mehis Hakkaja is a security practitioner who has viewed IT security from many different viewpoints. Mehis is a U.S. Military Academy, West Point, graduate with a B.Sc. degree in computer science with special interest in cyber warfare. Besides his military background, Mehis has worked as a penetration tester and pentest team leader, security manager for a telecommunications company, has promoted CERTs (Computer Emergency Response Teams) at ENISA (European Networks and Information Security Agency) and has managed information security for a global company. Currently Mehis is the CEO and founder of Clarified Security OÜ which is specialized in technical security audits and penetration testing and also teaches hands-on security courses.

We would also like to thank our sponsors: Devtraining, DPA, 4FINANCE Group and C.T.Co.

Announcing 4th DevClub.lv

It’s time for 4th DevClub.lv to get input from each other and our speakers.

The venue and time has changed! This time the event will happen on 20.09.2012 18:30 at Microsoft Latvia located at Zala street 1, 4th floor.

  • Tautvydas Dagys from Microsoft will talk about "Windows Azure – what it can do for a small web project and big scalable systems"
    (Language – English)
    Windows Azure is scalable PaaS, IaaS platform for developers and Enterprises. It supports tons of scenarios and technologies: .NET, PHP, Java, node.JS; Come and learn how it could be suitable for you from technical part and business part.
    Tags: Windows Azure, PaaS, IaaS, Cloud Computing

    Tautvydas is Technical Evangelist at Microsoft Baltics. He takes care of Developers and IT Pros in the region. Tautvydas is always on the edge of newest technologies: Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, New Office, Visual Studio 2012, …. Before Microsoft Tautvydas used to work many years as developer, team leader and unit manager in variuos IT companies.

  • Hanno Jarvet from Devtraining will talk about "Waterfall vs Agile vs Lean Start-up: useful stories from real life"
    (Language – English)
    In these three worlds a developer has very different roles and responsibilities. Changing your viewpoint will help you foresee the future of your employer/customer and live a happier life. 
    We will look at how development teams and companies have changed or not changed and their respective results.
    Tags: Waterfall, Agile, Lean Start-up, examples from life

    Hanno is an independent consultant who helps companies to improve performance. Since 2009 he has helped more than a dozen companies and software teams to improve their processes and productivity. During this time he has also co-founded Agile Estonia non-profit organization that organizes regular agile conferences in Estonia. He is a senator and past national president of Junior Chamber Estonia.

  • Aleksandr Jastremski from Danske bank will talk about "Bots, application automation"
    (Language – English or Russian)
    Do we play games or do games play us? What to do when you cross the line? Write your bot and let him play when you are spending time with your friends and family. Or go even deeper and write the bot that will do a job instead of you. It is possible and I will show you how…
    Tags: Bots, C#

    Aleksandr is skilled .NET programmer, he hates routine and gets rid of it by using programs since he was six years old. Aleksandr had played computer games a lot. When he noticed that games became routine he began to write programs playing for him.

We would also like to thank our sponsors: Devtraining, DPA, Microsoft and C.T.Co.

Review of 3rd DevCub.lv

Requirement: Code Quality – Gunta Strode

The main idea behind this presentation was that developer should write the code in such way if person who will have to maintain this code afterwards is a maniac who will come after him or her with a knife. Gunta Strode also wanted to show that good code is very subjective and depends on who is looking at the code. She told that good code has meaningful names and code is simple and self-documenting and company or Microsoft guidelines are taken into account. Everyone in a project should care about code quality!

Functional programming – F# – Valdis Iļjučonoks

Valdis has a goal to learn a new programming language every year and this time he got to F#. Valdis believes that F# didn’t become mainstream and is great tool for solving various problems with unconventional methods. Through the course of the presentation Valdis showed simple examples and many versions of the same solution. Unusual aspects of the F# syntax and tools for comfortable work with the language were also reviewed. A very appropriate question for the topic was: “Why learn this language and where can it be applied?”.  The main fields are financial, insurance, mathematical models, life insurance which has very complicated formulas and research. Of course the language also enriches your general view of problem solving.

PHP – life after fork() – Arvīds Godjuks

Arvīds spoke about his personal experience working with PHP daemons, about stereotypes, cases of utilization, as well as methods of avoiding various non-obvious mistakes. In general the presentation was quite constructive as well as multilateral, quite fully covering the topic. Solutions and tools for using PHP daemons for personal objectives as well as production were reviewed. From personal experience Arvīds knows that he found a rather convenient and useful tool.

Functional programming – F# – Valdis Iļjučonoks

Functional programming gone mainstream by making this Microsoft Research language as first-class citizenship in Visual Studio. Developers can use functional approach to resolve specific problem domain issues. F# can also be used in mainstream development like Windows Phone applications. What is functional programming, why should I care about one and where can I make use of that? Those questions will be answered by this session.

PHP – life after fork() – Arvīds Godjuks

PHP and deamon – usually these two together provoke only one reaction from the audience – the speaker is trolling. I will make an effort to convince the audience that this is not the case anymore as of PHP 5.3. This will be a success story of using a daemons written in plain PHP to process some few million USD worth of transactions per month in production mode for 2 years.

Announcing 3rd DevClub.lv

It's time for 3rd DevClub.lv!
The event will happen on 16.08.2012 19:00 at TechHub Riga.

As always we have three awesome speakers with the following talks:

  • Gunta Strode from DPA will talk about "Requirement: Code Quality" 
    (Language – Latvian)
    Nowadays it’s very popular to talk about code quality in software projects. It seems that every programmer can recognize bad code, but does they know how to create good one? This presentation will focus on good code quality, defining it, describing how to achieve, maintain and measure it and what happens if one fails to do that.
    Tags: Code quality, Technical debt, Cost of Defects, Code Conventions, Comments, Code Review, Pair Programming, Tools, Measurements, Improving Quality, Test Coverage
  • Valdis Iļjučonoks from Geta will talk about "Functional programming – F#"
    (Language – English)
    Functional programming gone mainstream by making this Microsoft Research language as first-class citizenship in Visual Studio. Developers can use functional approach to resolve specific problem domain issues. F# can also be used in mainstream development like Windows Phone applications. What is functional programming, why should I care about one and where can I make use of that? Those questions will be answered by this session.
    Tags: f#, functional programming
  • Arvīds Godjuks from VoipClub will talk about "PHP – life after fork()"
    (Language – English or Russian)
    PHP and deamon – usually these two together provoke only one reaction from the audience – the speaker is trolling. I will make an effort to convince the audience that this is not the case anymore as of PHP 5.3. This will be a success story of using a daemons written in plain PHP to process some few million USD worth of transactions per month in production mode for 2 years.
    Tags: PHP, daemon, cli, yii framework, billing, merchant processing

In case you can't make it to the event we'll try to broadcast it live and record all sessions.

We would also like to thank our sponsors: Devtraining, Skype, Microsoft, DPA, TechHub Riga and DevClub.eu.

See you at 3rd DevClub.lv!

Vote for topics

Hi guys! As we were talking, we need your assistance in organizing DevClub.lv. Please vote and give us more understanding about topics you would like to see at next DevClubs.lv

 

Odnoklassniki. Surviving the High Load. Architecture – Oleg Anastasyev

Oleg started with history of project "Odnoklassniki", which born in 2002 and for now have 130m registred users. Project is written mainly in Java and database is working on MS SQL 2005. In general presentation was about technologies in differnet layers of project which helps keep all the 5m users online. Was discussed cons and pros of different parts of solutions which was used and some was replaced in past of project, caching (really lot of cahce), project monitoring solutions, deployment, statistics and others.

JavaScript unit tests with QUnit – Dace Zariņa

QUnit is a library which helps to write unit tests for JavaScript code. QUnit is used by the jQuery, jQuey UI and jQuery Mobile projects and is capable of testing any generic JavaScript code. In presentation will be shown main things which are needed to write JavaScript unit tests with QUnit as well as some JavaScript unit tests. During presentation also will be shown what good things QUnit can offer to developer.

Church of St.Agile – Andrei Solntsev

There is a lot of agile preachers arguing that it is time to abandon the "traditional approach" and work in new ways. Do they really want to make our lives better or just make the dough? Is it possible to produce software without bugs? Is it possible to write code without documentation? Is it possible to dispense with architects and analysts? Does Agile really work, or it's just another buzzword?

Review of 2nd DevClub.lv

This time Devclub event visited more than hundred people interested in new technologies! Thank you all for coming!

 

Oleg Anastasyev "Odnoklassniki. Surviving the High Load. Architecture." 

Oleg started with history of project "Odnoklassniki", which born in 2002 and for now have 130m registred users. Project is written mainly in Java and database is working on MS SQL 2005. In general presentation was about technologies in differnet layers of project which helps keep all the 5m users online. Was discussed cons and pros of different parts of solutions which was used and some was replaced in past of project, caching (really lot of cahce), project monitoring solutions, deployment, statistics and others. 

 

Dace Zariņa "JavaScript unit tests with Qunit"

Dace told us about Javascript Untit testing library called “Qunit”, and first question for discussion was “why we really need Unit testing in Javascript”. During the presentation she showed a few simple live examples of using Qunit for a better understanding how it really looks in practise. Also she showed a few other Javascript testing libraries like Mojo and Phantom JS and discussed differences and cases of application of these libraries. In the end Dace showed a large list of libraries, which can be used for testing and I think for beginners in Javascript testing – it's pretty useful information.

 

Andrei Solntsev "Church of St.Agile"

Andrei is our guest from Tallinn and his gift for the listeners was a very live presentation of a popular methodology “Agile”. Andrei broke the stereotypical illusions of people who don't know much about this methodology and hadn't seen it in action. The main idea is to break a project in milestones, small iterations and after each iteration discuss the completed work with the client to be sure it's still what he wants and make changes very fast right now if it isn't. He discussed the benefits of pair programming in this case, because it pulls developers out of their comfort zone and keeps their mind clear for what they're actually doing. The methodology looks very nice in Andrei story and great thanks to Andrei for this magical presentation!

Announcing 2nd DevClub.lv

    It is time to meet for 2nd DevClub.lv. The main goal of DevClub is bringing people together to discuss different topics, getting input from all participants and of course from speakers. The second gathering takes place on July 19th at 19.00 at TechHub Riga  
    Topics for the second meeting are: Oleg Anastasyev from Odnoklassniki.ru will talk about "Odnoklassniki. Surviving the High Load. Architecture."
    In this presentation we'll overview architecture of odnoklassniki.ru. We'll describe main components and technologies working under the hood in order to build a high performance, scalable internet site, making it able to serve 5 million of concurrent users. We'll tell what data storage technologies we use and how to squeeze most of performance from your SQL servers. We also tell how is it like to operate highly loaded system and what tricks we use in our day to day life to make odnoklassniki.ru even better.
    Dace Zariņa from Idea Port Riga will talk about "JavaScript unit tests with QUnit"
    QUnit is a library which helps to write unit tests for JavaScript code. QUnit is used by the jQuery, jQuey UI and jQuery Mobile projects and is capable of testing any generic JavaScript code. In presentation will be shown main things which are needed to write JavaScript unit tests with QUnit as well as some JavaScript unit tests. During presentation also will be shown what good things QUnit can offer to developer.
    Andrei Solntsev from Codeborne will talk about "Church of St.Agile"
    There is a lot of agile preachers arguing that it is time to abandon the "traditional approach" and work in new ways. Do they really want to make our lives better or just make the dough? Is it possible to produce software without bugs? Is it possible to write code without documentation? Is it possible to dispense with architects and analysts? Does Agile really work, or it's just another buzzword?