April meetup

Hi all.

This meetup has been postponed one week and is now taking place on Wednesday the 13th. Additionally, we have joined forces with Goto; Nights London and have secured the awesome Code Node as our venue.

Please follow this link to RSVP (https://www.meetup.com/GOTO-Nights-London-UK/events/228523067/).

In addition to our talks, which on top of Simon include the author, Steve Freeman and Docker's Justin Cormack, we'll have drinks, bites to eat, and loads of space to socialise.

Please follow the link and see you all in April and see below for all the details (copied from the other page).

Jamie

Join us for an evening with Steve Freeman, Justin Cormack and Simon Garland! Come over for a drink, talks and some networking with us!

Steve will kick off the evening with his talk, "Rediscovering the command line, or Your Data isn’t that Big" followed by Justin and Simon.

There will be plenty of time for Q&A too!

Steve Freeman - Rediscovering the command line, or Your Data isn’t that Big

This is a little rant about my rediscovery of just how much I can get done with the unix shell and a few tools. Working at the command line is an unexploited resource that too many developers have forgotten. We’re too easily seduced by hipster frameworks designed to address much bigger problems, and we’ve become too comfortable in our full-screen IDEs. These days, I find it easier and more effective to return to old-style tools that I can compose together and interact with quickly. You have nothing to lose but your tool chains!

Steve Freeman - Bio

Steve Freeman, author of Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided by Tests (Addison-Wesley), was a pioneer of Agile software development in the UK. He has developed software in many organisations from small vendors to multinational investment banks. Previously, he has worked in research labs and software houses, earned a PhD, written shrink-wrap applications for IBM, and taught at University College London. Steve now works for Springer Nature Publishing and Zuhlke Engineering in London.

Justin Cormack - Abstract

Greenspun's Tenth (and only) rule says: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." Now though the scope of our programs has expanded, and they also include a file system and a network stack. These functions have traditionally been stuck inside a monolithic application, the kernel, which has inflexible interfaces and a slow upgrade and development cycle. Unikernels take modern development methods and apply them to system software, at the same time expanding the microservice development and deployment model to the whole operating system stack.

Justin Cormack - Bio

Justin Cormack is a software developer at Docker, previously at Unikernel Systems, based in Cambridge. He tries to avoid programming in C wherever possible.

Simon Garland - Chief strategist at KX - ”The Bowl of Petunias, Revisited”

Simon Garland - Abstract

The current ”big data” tools encourage a far too blinkered view on what’s possible - often problems like maintaining a cluster or setting up a vastly distributed database hide the fact that if only looked at differently the underlying problem may be very simple. If a systems has been written using cumbersome tools then later optimisation is almost impossible. We’ll look at the benefits of elegant designs, and the difference that very, very fast access to data can make.

Simon Garland - Bio

Simon has been working with array languages and big data since long before it was even called”big data”. He has been with Kx for over 15 years and has worked with many customers implementing high performance systems in demanding environments like finance”