DevXS 2011

DevXS

On the 11th November, I went to the JISC event DevXS. As I am a fan of the Dev8D events held every February, and this event is for undergrad and postgrad students I thought it would be a great chance to meet some very talented computer science students from all over the country.

This event was set to cover the whole weekend, and instead of a focus on teaching sessions like Dev8D, it focused purely on competitions in which teams are given 24 hours to implement their projects in a ‘code marathon’.

Friday Night

As there were a few of us going from UWL, I decided rather than travel to Lincoln alone, I’d go with one of my colleagues, which like me wanted to explore some of Lincoln during the day before the evening event registrations. Have to say I was fascinated with the Cathedral, Castle and Roman remains. I think that after the brief look I got, I would like to go back to explore more of the city.

After some exploring, Malte and I went to registration and then went on to get the hotel keys for the hotel room. The evening was then filled with food, socialising and drinking. The organisers created a game called bingo, which required the person to meet people and see if the statements contained in their grid fitted that person and then get a signature. Once all the grid statements were signed you shouted “bingo”, got a badge and got another drink ticket. This proved a very good way of getting everyone to talk and get to know everyone. After the food and drink, me and another of my colleagues went into Lincoln town to experience the nightlife.

Saturday

Have to say I was rather hungover for the morning, but still ready to get going on one of the competitions. Because there were only 4 of us from my institution we decided to form a team named Team UWL. We decided to try and do a bluetooth system for distribution location based information and events, as part of the Freshers App competition. During the day they had an array of sweets and drink which was good, and we got a good lunch. In the course of the day there were several keynotes, but to be perfectly honest other than the magic show in the evening, I’m unsure how many people really were listening to them.

The Venue

What I found amazing was the amount of people still working hard at 2am, the atmosphere was great, and proved a great way of getting help and support from lots of people. I found also the tip to use f.lux given in the midnight keynote to be fantastic. My team managed to keep programming until about 02:30.

Sunday

In a somewhat funny way, the organisers put “Wham – Wake me up before you go-go” on the speakers to wake us up. There was a great breakfast, and a final rush to try and get everything working and finished in time. If you view our git repo featured in the last post you will see the amount of activity increasing closer to the noon deadline.

We then had to pitch the idea of our work to the whole hall, as a way of the everyone including the judges to see our projects explained, in 60 seconds or less. This was a great way of hearing and in some cases seeing some of the fantastic work done by everyone. Sadly my team had trouble getting both parts of the system to work together but we have agreed it would be great to continue the work.

Overall I had a fantastic weekend, met some great people and now looking forward to Dev8D 2012.

Anyone interesting in knowing more about the event, go to http://devxs.org.

Dev8D 2010

Last month I attended for the second year running the JISC supported Dev8D event in central London. For this year because of my change to a PhD, I had a bit more freedom to when I could attend so I decided to go two days this year instead of just one, concentrating on Thursday and Friday. What I found amazing, was how much the event had grown since last year! I’ve haven’t seen so many people like myself in ages, was really nice.

On Thursday I chose to attend the expert lighting talks in the morning with the Cloud Workshop in the afternoon.

Picture of Cloud Computing Workshop at Dev 8 D 2010

Cloud Computing Workshop

In the exper talks there a few talks in particular that stood out to me, firstly the talk about genetic programming, secondly the talk about web security which I took notice of some of the tips they suggested!

Arduino Workshops – Friday

These workshops were by far the coolest thing I’ve done in a good while! I attended two workshops, one for beginners in the morning and a more advanced workshop for the afternoon. In the morning we got a talk about the hardware and how to do very basic programs like getting a single LED to flash and also using a speaker to make very sounds, with one group able to program their arduino to make the Simpsons theme song!

Below are some of the things I worked on in the advanced workshop, including multiplexing LEDs and driving a motor using the arduino

Overall I had a great time, and look forward to next year. Hoping there to be more Arduino workshops.

Brummieville

Rightio last week I spent two days in birmingham for two events. The first day started abut on a bad note because of train delays which made me a hour late even though I left earlier. But was an interesting day, got to hear about other projects going on. We then went to a dinner at a french style restaurant which was nice, maybe it was the wine that sweetened the night. After dinner I went drinking with a few of the guys and ended up getting slightly over easy. Was funny though setting up our project poster up still drunk. Was a shame though how little the guests interacted with the various project stands, obviously the food stand was more important. Anyhow the trip back was ok, with no delays. Overall good experience with pictures of my room below below.

The Desk

The Desk

My Bed

My Bed