Happy developers
As mentioned before on this blog, last week we ran a large event aimed at software developers in HE. Slightly tempting fate, the event was called developer happiness days, but judging by the mood of the event, the feedback and by the happiness meter that one of the delegates cooked up, it lived up to its name.
The event was organised and driven forward with immense enthusiasm by David Flanders, one of two new recruits to the JISC Information Environment team (look out for a future blog post for further news on that). I was fortunate enough to be able to help David with the event and also attended for 4 of the 5 days. The event was a hive of activity, much of which was captured on either Twitter or the event blog. I wanted to highlight some of the really interesting things that have emerged from the event so far:
There were a number of interesting talks given at the event, perhaps most relevant to this blog were:
- An introduction to agile development methodology by Graham Klyne
- A talk on the problems with PDF by Peter Sefton (video)
- A discussion on collective intelligence led by Tony Hirst
The industrious delegates also knocked up some interesting tools during the event:
- The happiness meter mentioned above was developed by Sam Easterby-Smith to use Twitter to measure the happiness of those at the event. It will be able to be reused for other events. Ben O’Steen (who had a large role in designing the event) has a really useful summary of the use of Twitter at the event on his blog.
- Chris Gutteridge was particularly industrious, producing:
- A url shortening service for people giving demonstrations and presentations
- A JSON output for EPrints
- A new way to deal with Microsoft Office documents for EPrints, as described on Les Carr’s blog
These are just some highlights of a great event and the most interesting outputs may be yet to come. The main focus of the event was a competition called the developer decathlon where delegates were asked to show us the future of academic software. There was a strong focus on the user in the competition as 10 users were brought in to come and talk to the delegates about their software issues. We ran a dragon’s den to give feedback on the delegate’s ideas and the dragons were all very impressed with the ideas of the 11 teams who ventured into their den.
The winner of this competition will be announced in a month’s time and this will coincide with a more thorough report on what was a very rich event. In the meantime, the event blog has lots of useful content and is worth exploring.
Comments
2 Responses to “Happy developers”
Leave a Reply
[…] users, and technological tinkerers in an exciting new forum.” The event was a success success and its own blog http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/ contains short profiles of some of the development […]
[…] users, and technological tinkerers in an exciting new forum.” The event was a success success and its own blog http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/ contains short profiles of some of the development […]