Community

Posts about getting involved in the software development community

Goodbye, Amegala

For the past two years I’ve worked with Amegala to bring Indiana the developer conference it deserves. During that time Amegala has gone through some organizational changes and our visions for what the Indy.Code() conference should be have diverged significantly enough that I’ve elected to cut my ties with Amegala. I am no longer affiliated with Amegala or any of the .Code() family of conferences. I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished with Indy.Code() but the time was right for a clean break.

Despite severing my ties with Amegala I still strongly believe that Indiana needs a world-class, locally-run, technology agnostic, community-driven developer conference and I’m still committed to making that happen. So much so that I’ve already assembled a new team of strong, local development community leaders to do just that!

I’m really excited to announce that on the evening of June 15, Tiffany Trusty, Kevin Miller, and I had our first official meeting! We’re still in the very early planning stages so we don’t have much to report yet but stay tuned – we’ll release more information as our plans materialize!

Conference Planners

Tiffany Trusty, Dave Fancher, and Kevin Miller commemorating their first conference planning session.

I don’t know what Amegala’s future plans are but if you’re looking for a truly Indiana-based conference run by people who know the Indiana development community, this new event is the one for you.

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Upcoming .NET Course at Eleven Fifty Academy

Well, I’ve really done it this time – I agreed to lead the Intro & Intermediate Microsoft .NET course at Eleven Fifty Academy here in Carmel, Indiana. I know that the target audience for this course isn’t likely reading my blog but if you know someone who would be interested please pass this along.

In this seven day bootcamp style course we’ll cover the following topics:

  • Walkthrough of the Visual Studio IDE
  • Declaring Constants and Variables
  • C# control statements, loops, and enumerators
  • String manipulation
  • Working with Arrays, Dictionaries, and Hashtables
  • Function Declarations
  • Anonymous functions
  • Class definitions, Structures, Enumerations, Generics
  • ASP .NET MVC 5 Overview
  • ASP .NET MVC Lifecycle
  • Controllers and Routing
  • Entity Framework 6 Code First and Database First
  • Validating form input
  • Building and Consuming RESTful services
  • Interacting with third-party API’s
  • Debugging

The course runs from October 10 through October 16 and costs $2,500 but thanks to the generosity of our sponsors T2 Systems, Do It Best Corp, and BitWise Solutions, the discount code ‘OpenHouse50’ is available for a 50% discount!

Upcoming Events

I have a few speaking engagements coming up that I wanted to let you know about. First, I’ll be visiting Cincinnati, Ohio on July 28 for CINNUG. Then, on August 20 I’ll be making the quick trip down to Louisville, Kentucky for the Louisville .NET Meetup Group.

For both of these events I’ll be speaking about Functional .NET. In this talk we’ll explore some of the ways that we can utilize higher-order static methods and extension methods to enable the rough equivalent of some functional patterns in C#. As a bonus, I’ll also be giving away a copy of my book, The Book of F# at each of these events!

If you’re in the Cincinnati or Louisville areas and interested in learning how applying functional techniques in C# can improve your overall code quality, be sure to join us! As always, check the respective group pages for up-to-date logistics. I hope to see you there!

Kansas City, Here I Come!

It’s hard to believe that KCDC is next week in Kansas City, MO! I’m excited to be giving two talks.

On Thursday you can see F# Type Providers in Action which is an abridged version of my new Pluralsight course, Building F# Type Providers. On Friday I’ll break from the technical conference norm with a lighthearted look at some of my experiences from my trip into the book publishing world while I wrote The Book of F#.

Please check the schedule for updated rooms and times.

As a bonus, I hope to have a few copies of The Book of F# to give away during my sessions! I’ll be giving away a copy of The Book of F# during each of my sessions! I hope to see you there!

January Indy F# Meetup

We’re on a roll! The third consecutive Indy F# Meetup is on Tuesday, January 20th at 7:00 PM. As always, we’ll be meeting at Launch Fishers. Check out the meetup page to register and for logistics information.

When we started the group we decided to alternate the format between dojos and lectures. Since last month was a type provider lecture this month will mark a return to the dojo format. We thought it would be fun to change pace and hone our recursion skills a bit by working through the community-driven fractal forest dojo. I haven’t worked through this one yet myself but I’ve seen lots of beautiful images tweeted by people who have so it should be a great time and experience. I hope you’ll join us!

Nebraska Code Conference Call For Speakers

Wait… What? Nebraska? Yes! Nebraska! Last year I had the good fortune to present both a workshop and a breakout session at Nebraska Code Camp and the entire experience was one of the highlights of my year. The event has evolved from a two-day code camp to a three-day code conference being held March 19-21 in Lincoln! A bigger conference means a new venue, more sessions, and more networking opportunities that you definitely won’t want to miss.

The Nebraska Code Conference call for speakers is currently underway and I highly recommend submitting a talk but hurry, the call closes on January 16th. Even if you’ve never given a talk before, there’s no better time to start than now! I also have it on good authority that the conference organizers would like to see a decent number of F# talks so to all of my F# friends: please get those submissions in!

 

Busy Week Ahead

[12/15/2014 Update] Due to time concerns FunScript has been dropped from the Indy F# meeting. If you were really looking forward an introduction to FunScript stay tuned – we’ll be coming back to it in a few months.

This is a busy week for me on the community front with talks at multiple Indianapolis user groups. If either of these topics interest you I hope you’ll register and join us.

Indy F#

Double Feature: Type Providers and FunScript
Type Providers
Tuesday, December 16, 7:00 PM
Launch Fishers (info and registration)

On Tuesday I’ll be kicking off an Indy F# double feature by talking about Type Providers. We’ll begin with a short tour of several existing type providers and seeing how they make accessing data virtually effortless. With a good taste of what type providers can do we’ll then look behind the curtain to see how they work by walking through creating a custom type provider that reads ID3 tags from MP3 files.

Brad Pillow will follow with an introduction to building single-page applications with FunScript.

Indy Software Artisans

TypeScript: Bringing Sanity to JavaScript
Thursday, December 18, 5:30 PM
SEP (info and registration)

On Thursday I’ll change gears from F# to TypeScript. If writing JavaScript frustrates you or you just want to be more productive when developing browser-based applications you’ll definitely want to check out TypeScript. This session is not only a tour of TypeScript’s language features but also highlights the resulting JavaScript code. To help showcase how TypeScript can fit into your new or existing projects, the demo application is an AngularJS and Bootstrap application driven entirely by TypeScript.

December’s Indy F# Meetup

IndyF#After a successful first meetup in November we wanted to keep the momentum and get the next meetup on the calendar. Our second meeting will be at 7:00 PM on December 16th at Launch Fishers.

In keeping with our plan to alternate between hands-on sessions and the more traditional speaker-led sessions, the December meeting will follow the later format with not one, but two talks! The event will feature me giving an introduction to type providers and Brad Pillow will give an overview of using FunScript to develop single-page applications.

If either of these topics interest you, please swing over to our meetup page and register.

We hope to see you there!

Indianapolis F# Developers Coding Dojo

There’s a new developer group in town! The inaugural meeting of the Indianapolis F# Developers group is upon us. On Tuesday, November 18th I’ll be leading the group through the Digit Recognizer dojo from Community for F#!

Since I suspect we’ll have some people new to the language, we’ll spend some time talking about some language concepts that are critical to successfully completing the exercise. Make sure you bring a laptop because after the introduction we’ll then split into a few groups (pairs, probably) and work through the problem together. After some time we’ll come back together as a group to talk about the problem and discuss some of the ways that F# lets you focus on the task at hand.

If F#, functional programming, and/or machine learning are of interest to you, please register for the event on our meetup page. We’ll be meeting in the 20 person meeting room at Launch Fishers. The meetup starts at 7:00 PM. We’d love for you to join us!

Talking TypeScript in Fort Wayne

I’ll be back in Fort Wayne on October 15 to talk about TypeScript. If writing JavaScript frustrates you or you just want to be more productive, join NUFW at the Cole Foundation Conference and Training Center to learn how leveraging TypeScript in your existing projects can lead to cleaner and more expressive code.

Please visit the NUFW site for logistics and registration details.

I hope to see you there!