The Third Bit

The latest issue of PragPub has Adam Goucher’s article on page objects in Python—check it out!

Announcements

David Scannell, an ex-student of mine who is now at GridCentric, has posted an interesting article on using elastic clouds for continuous integration. Lots of ideas here I only vaguely knew — worth checking out.

Announcements

Jeff Balogh, a former GSoC student of mine now with Mozilla, will be speaking at DjangoCon about “Switching addons.mozilla.org from CakePHP to Django“. Please go and heckle on my behalf

Announcements

A new event series is starting up: Toronto Live Interviews.  The first is on Tuesday, July 20, 6:30pm – 8:00pm, at the Centre for Social Innovation, Room 120 (215 Spadina Ave).

Tickets are free, but please register as space is limited: for information and registration, see http://guestlistapp.com/events/25203.

The guest, Karl Schroeder, is an award-winning science fiction author. He’s a world-builder able to convincingly juxtapose high and low tech. He goes beyond Arthur C Clarke’s idea that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” to understand the worldview, philosophy and economy of people living in these magical possible futures. In his work as a foresight consultant and environmental blogger, he flips these perspectives around to understand how we can make a future we want to live in.

Karl will be interviewed by Jen Dodd. Jen is a physicist, designer of public science events including SciBarCamp and Perimeter Institute’s Quantum to Cosmos Festival, and is now managing director of Subtle Technologies, Toronto’s annual festival of art and science.

Location instructions: on arriving at 215 Spadina, go through the Dark Horse cafe to the lobby, go up the stairs to the left of the elevator, and room 120 is through the glass doors straight ahead.

Announcements

The Jolt Awards for best software (and book) are back: this page on the Doctor Dobb’s Journal site has the schedule and categories.  It’s a shame that neither of the collections I’m helping edit right now (one on evidence-based software engineering, the other on the architecture of open source applications) will be in print in time to qualify this year, but there’s always 2011

Announcements, Architecture of Open Source Applications, Making Software

In 2009-2010, almost 90 students from over a dozen universities across the country earned a course credit by working in teams on a variety of open source projects. Thanks to our friends at Google, O’Reilly, and CACS, the program is going to run again this fall and winter — see this announcement for details, and the new web site for more information.

So, if you are:

• an open source project looking for some talented help,
• a professor in a Canadian computer science department who’d like to help students learn how to work on real software in distributed teams, or
• going to be enrolled in CS at a Canadian university this fall, in your senior year (or grad school), with strong grades and a sense of adventure,

then please give the organizers a shout at admin@ucosp.ca.

Announcements, Teaching

Seneca College (in Toronto) has just been awarded $2.3 million over five years for open source technology research. This is great news—congratulations to everyone involved.

Announcements

From StreetKnit:

The National Post has done a story on our world record attempt. Have you told your two friends? Join us on June 12—and bring everyone you know!

Announcements

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve just signed a contract with Pragmatic to edit a book on the architecture of open source applications. Our goal is to describe the architectures of some moderately complicated pieces of software, both because they’re interesting in their own right, and to show readers how experienced software designers see the world. Contributors will explain:

• What are the major elements of the application?
• How do they interact?
• Why?
• What alternatives did you consider and discard?
• What tradeoffs did you make?
• Why?

The current list of contributors and topics is included below; I’m very excited to be working on this, not least because all of the author royalties will be donated to Amnesty International.

Announcements, Architecture of Open Source Applications, Books

The full announcement is up at StreetKnit: on Worldwide Knit in Public Day (Saturday, June 12), Toronto-area knitters are going to try to set a new world record.  Please come out and help if you can!

Announcements