Carl Reynolds tells us how important the NHS Hack Day is. This event will take place on 26th and 27th May at the University of London Union, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HY.
NHS Hack Day 2012
Why does an NHS Hack Day matter?
NHS digital technology is too often disappointing, we’re stuck with user experiences that ten years ago would have been barely passable, but today are totally unacceptable. As a junior hospital doctor NHS digital technology causes me pain. As a geek who loves the NHS I know we can do better.
We all deserve, and can have, digital technology in the NHS that delights, technology that is a pleasure to use, that helps rather than hinders, and makes all of our lives easier.
What is it?
NHS Hack Day is a bunch of geeks who care about the NHS who want to work on something that might improve their world. We’re providing doctors, nurses, data, and refreshments, and we’ll see what happens next.
So far there are about 100 people signed up, with a range of skills from medics to programmers and designers. They’ll work in teams or individually to produce something that’s of interest. We have no idea what that will be.
So the question is what would you build to help save lives?
Whose idea is this?
I am a junior hospital doctor and a geek. Driven by pain, I am keen to bridge health and technology and give NHS IT a much needed shake up. Several conversations with friends, meeting Ross Jones at Pycon and a lot of enthusiasm led to all this.
How can people help?
By coming, by donating ideas, problems, data, and prizes but mostly by programmers doing something they want to see done – http://www.NHShackday.com.
What can people work on?
Anything they like that’s related to healthcare – from a patient checklist, to a guerilla poster generator with the right phone numbers on it. To get involved visit NHS Hackday follow @nhshackday or contact me – (carl.reynolds@openhealthcare.org.uk) .
Is Java dead? A question asked by a lot of unbelievers and to cut it short the answer is NO, it is not dead, Java is becoming widely adopted by a lot of people (students, children and professionals) and it is still the first choice in the Web and Enterprise applications.
What people might mean by “Dead” is that Java is not the default choice for projects and that’s totally wrong as Java is the default choice for most of startups or startups that have grown to be big companies like LinkedIn for example.
With every new release of Java, Oracle reminds us the Java is here to stay with some new cool features and enhancement not only in the Java but also in the JVM which evolved a lot and now Java programs can compete with C programs from performance perspective, JVM is the main reason behind the emerge of some new languages like Scala, Groovy,.. This makes it really amazing and rich.
As people say: No one is Perfect, so is Java and that’s why there is always something to come (like Java 8 and 9) but with these new releases new cool features rise to ease our development.
On 9th and 10th of March Egypt witnessed the biggest Java community conference in Middle East and Africa (JDC 2012) with more than 500 attendees and more than 40 sessions about Cloud, Parallel Programming, Mobile and much more and with a clear message from Oracle: “Java is not dead and we will make sure it is not”
Long Live Java!
For the second year running, I went to the 33rd Degree Conference in Krakow.
On Sunday I had a chance to visit the Schindler Factory Museum, South of Kazimierz (the Jewish Quarter) or should I say south of the Wistula river. Unfortunately, the museum is mainly about the Nazi occupation 1939-1945. Why do I say “unfortunately”? As I mentioned in one of my previous posts I will never visit Auschwitz as I don’t seem able to cope with the evil side of humans, I was hoping that the Schindler Factory Museum would show me hope but it did not work out as very little is shown about Oskar Schindler so I came out pretty upset.
From there I walked back through Kazimierz and visited my first Synagogue – unfortunately the inside was very much under renovation so I could not really appreciate the beauty of it. Walking through this old quarter, I was very amused by the old small shops, just a door and a small window – old but so quaint. It is rather refreshing to see these shops when everything else is the same. Wherever you go you will be met with KFC, MacDonald, IKEA etc., even in Krakow.
Enough ramblings, what about the 33rd Degree Conference?
According to the organizer, Grzegorz Duda, the number of attendees increased by 70% over last year and registration was shut a month before the conference due to the lack of space. So next year, 33rd Degree might have to move to new premises. The 650 attendees come from all over Europe – Poland of course, Germany, Ukraine and all surrounding countries. (I believe Grzegorz will be writing a post about the technical side of 33rd Degree. Hopefully it will be ready next week.)
One of the key speakers was Venkat Subramaniam – it is always a pleasure to have a chat with Venkat but I will not pretend that I understood his talks –
Don’t know Venkat? Venkat is the author of several books including:
As you can see a prolific author as well as a good trainer and public speaker.
One of the highlights for me is the speakers diner – I know I am not a speaker, but I am kindly invited for the evening. We went to a typical Polish restaurant in Krakow Centre and enjoyed some good food. The best part was being able to chat with some great guys – Guillaume LaForge (Groovy), Arun Gupta (Oracle) Michael from Oracle, Prague etc. I am sure I will met them all over again during the year.
The primary reason behind setting up the conference is because we are in the business of Big Data, and more specifically we work closely with Apache Cassandra. One of the project committers, Eric Evans, is working with us. He is also the primary developer of the Cassandra Query Language. Being based in Europe we have noted difficulty in catering for the European community due to the sheer scale of US-centric activities dominating the scene. It is valuable to many prospective users of Cassandra to be able to listen to what others have done with it, and learn more about the technical details surrounding Cassandra. With our two tracks – Case Studies and Cassandra 101 – we provide attendees an opportunity to do exactly that. This will ultimately allow attendees to either better use Cassandra or ascertain the suitability of it towards their own use case. The fact that we’ve secured industry veterans from across the world, should not only make the conference being based in London more accessible to the European community, but also that bit more special.
For over a year we have been supporting the local community through sponsoring regular meetups like Cassandra London and organising Big Data London. In spite of this, demand for such a conference has been evident and so we’re extremely pleased to be able to organise it (and perhaps break the US stronghold). Considering this is our first edition, I believe we’ve been very lucky to secure the quality of speakers we’re seeing – Netflix, Spotify, Rackspace and many more. Attendees are also flocking from all across Europe (from Russia, Lithuania and Sweden, to France, Spain and Germany) and are representing a huge cross section of industries: from the financial services to media and tech. The global community is clearly excited as well, with the message even reaching New Zealand. We’ve also teamed up with Berlin Buzzwords to provide benefits and discounts for attendees of both conferences. It’s looking great. The reaction so far has been brilliant so naturally we’ll be hoping to make this a regular conference that will grow over the years.
This post is by Konrad Kennedy, organiser of Cassandra Europe 2012 and member of the Acunu team.
The conference will be held on March 28th at the Hilton London Metropole, 225 Edgware Road, London. Interested in Big Data? Book your ticket here.
FlossUK and O’Reilly sponsor a Presentation Skills Training Course to help anyone that needs to learn or feel more confident about “public” speaking. The course will be held in London on April 16th.
When speaking to a small or large audience – to your board of directors, prospective customers, or at a conference – do you want to:
- capture the audience quickly
- hold their interest effortlessly
- educate and entertain them in equal measure
- sometimes even inspire them?
Damian Conway explores simple and effective techniques for achieving these goals in any kind of presentation.
The first half of the class focuses on preparation, content selection, visual design, delivery, handling questions and effective techniques for presenting various kinds of technical information (code, data, statistics, charts, structure diagrams etc.)
The second half of the course is an in-depth tutorial on improving the ‘look and feel’ of presentation materials – especially Powerpoint/Keynote/Impress presentations. In particular, it demonstrates practical techniques for making your slides not suck!
Should you not yet be convinced, please read An Almost Perfect Present. The author, Mark Keating, MD of Shadowcat Systems Limited, writes so much better than I do and he experienced Damian’s talk. I sat on one of Damian’s talk at EuroOSCON a few years ago – he had everybody in stitches. Don’t be fooled- what he says is remembered and put into practice. So book now!
To all new parents – with lots of love and a little coding- peace shall reign again in the house.
All the things you learn at Codemotion – 23rd and 24th March. Hopefully I will see you there with or without baby.
On the second day, I met with Russ Miles, author of Learning UML 2.0, AspectJ Cookbook, Head First Software Development and soon (famous last words) Programming Spring. Why do I say “soon”? I think I had that conversation with Russ during QCon 2011… Never trust an author! It is always nice to talk to Russ – he is always full of enthusiasm but extremely busy – I believe that he is now off to Saudi Arabia, so goodbye book. As mentioned previously book signings are not my favourite activity. Just one great thing about them – I meet the authors and that can give me the opportunity to talk about the book, talk about avenues we have not thought of in marketing the book etc. and to be honest it is always nice to put a face to the writer’s name.
I also met with Adewale Oshineye, author of Apprenticeship Patterns. Not only Ade is a very sucessful author, developer advocate on the Google+ project, he is also a great photographer. With Ade, I always feel that I can learn a lot more, that everything is possible and, yes, me too, I can become a master of technology. Unfortunately that great feeling evaporates soon after Ade leaves and I am now struggling with Google+. Sometimes I think it is more a question of time than inefficiency. So beware you will soon find me on Google+.
Lots of sponsors attended the conference, in particular 10gen, the company behind MongoDB, CouchBase, Basho – there seems to be a lot of demand for various databases. The answer at the moment seems to be no SQL, Open Source and following the Red Hat business model… but I might still be wrong so please check it yourself. It just reminded me that we need to update our CouchDB book. I also ran into the JRebel crowdfrom the Zero Turnaround company who I am going to properly meet next week at the 33rd Degree conference.
Finally, the big change for exhibitors this year was the division of exhibitors between the 3rd and 5th floor. Even though the organizers did a great job trying to get people circulating between the 2 floors, I don’t think that this new layout is working. People are not going to move from one floor to the next when they are having a chat, lunch or coffee – they stay put. See what next year as to offer.
25 again today! As a treat I am spending the day at QCon. it sounds negative but it is not at all. QCon is one of the most successful Conference in London – a 3 days, 6 tracks conference with over 1,200 attendees. For today, I have organised some book signings… hopefully our authors will be there and the delegates will come. I have a love and hate relationship with book signings – it can be so successful and pleasant or so embarrassing. On today’s menu, we have:
- Francesco Cesarini – Erlang Programming
- Joe Armstrong – Programming Erlang
- Maximiliano Firtman – Programming the Mobile Web/JQuery Mobile
- Adewale Oshineye – Apprenticeship Patterns
- Ian Robinson – REST in Practice
It will be great meeting these guys, I am sure I will learn something new but might not be about technology though.
Just received an email from Avaaz.org.
Apparently the European Commission is trying a last attempt to make ACTA official. You can, if you so desire, ask the the Court of Justice to look at all the legal impacts of ACTA, and release an opinion that tells the truth about ACTA’s attack on our rights. If you feel strongly about this principle, please sign the petition to the European Commission President Jose Manuel Borroso.
I do not understand. I am at the PHP London Conference – yes, you guessed it – at the Business Design Centre in Islington. On Friday morning it feels completely reasonable to get there early and make sure the stand looks good and everything is ready for the onslaught. But why do I have to be there at 8am on Saturday morning? Why do they let everybody in so early when I could still be in bed… I suppose my role is not to question.
All the big names of the PHP community are here –
- Rasmus Lerdorf – a look at PHP in 2012
There is no need to describe Rasmus, we all know that he is the person behind the PHP project that he got off the ground in 1995.
- Nikolay Bachiyski – To a thousand servers and beyond: scaling a massive PHP application
A friend from Sofia and a long-time WordPress contributor working for Automattic who also teaches at Sofia University, but most importantly – he has got a bear!
- Ian Barber – Teaching your machine to find fraudsters
Ian is the development manager at Virgin Management in London – and you can be pretty sure that if you go to a PHP conference, you will meet Ian as one of the key speakers.
- Andrew ‘Bob’ Brockhurst – Monitoring your back-end for speed and profit
After talking to Andrew for 5 mins he reminded me that we knew each other – we met at Maker Faire, Newcastle… he was the man strolling around with a pram mounted with a kind of tank pointing to the crowd. All very inoffensive but fun. Inside the pram there was his very young son who had the most wonderful giggle – a very sunny little boy.
- Derick Rethans– Introduction: MongoDB with PHP
Yet another well travelled person with lots of speaking commitments – PHP Barcelona, PHPNW and many more. Derick has contributed in a number of PHP projects including the Xdebug, the mcrypt, etc.
Lots of sponsors exhibit their goods or services including:
Bytemark Hosting is known as the “geek hosting outfit of choice” for UK hosting since 2002, run by programmer Matthew Bloch and network engineer, Peter Taphouse.
Infobright – a new high performance, self-tuning analytic database created by four academics from Warsaw University about 6 years ago. I am hoping that somebody from Infobright will write a post in the near future.
Of course I should have started this listing with the platinum sponsor: Automattic, without whom you would not be reading this post. Also, thank you Automatic for bringing us so much colour through your stand.
There were many more sponsors that you can find on the PHP Conference 2012 website.
Lots of the companies came to PHP London in view of fulfilling some vacancies for good PHP Programmers – apparently they are very difficult to find. So if you are good and looking for a new job, have a look at the PHP market.
… and what about the organisers?
Ciaran Rooney, CTO of Kimlinks and president of PHP London
Sam Bell, Creative Director at Ideal Websites and PHP London Secretary
Betty Tran – PHP London Auditor
Franck Cassedanne, CTO of info.com
Abigail Egea, leader of the Operation Team at the Book Depository
Richard Johnson, Team Lead at Skimlinks
John Le Drew, antz29 Ltd – he can be found on Twitter at @antz29, Facebo and LinkedIn.
Zoe Slattery
Thank you guys for putting up such a great show! I am sure you spent many evenings working on this event and wondering why you were doing it. Now we know why!