Synergy Centre holds 1 lunchtime and 1 breakfast seminar every month for startups and SMEs. We were invited to talk about SaaS applications on 10th of August.

Here is the presentation of saas-lifecycle. Send me mail if you want to know more about:

• how new features kill your applications and why
• why scalability planning is important from the start of the project
• why relaying on existing software / frameworks isn’t always the best solution
• why applications are rewritten every 3-5 years
• how we make web apps the way users like it

I’m sorry to everyone who have been checking my blog for events and hadn’t found anything new from start of July. I will try harder next time to give you events earlier. A lot of conferences are happening in August and September and there is less free events around. That’s probably because of vacations. As usual - events I’m posting is Business or IT related. Feel free to comment if you think some more should be added.

Events Jul, Aug and Sept

• 13th-16th July / ICGSE2009 / Limerick - The 4^th International Conference on Global Software Engineering will bring together researchers and practitioners interested in exploring how globally distributed teams work and how the challenges can be met (prices from $300 - $1200).
• 14th July 19:00 / The Digital Hub / Science Gallery, FREE - Join this brain storming session to discuss the creation of The Dublin Hub. The vision of the Dublin Hub group is to create a flexible, affordable, shared working environment for freelancers, small businesses, the self-employed, and home-workers looking for a desk, or a meeting space in town.
• 16th July 18:00 / Social Media Networking / Kudos Bar, Clarion Hotel IFSC - A FREE Business Networking event that will help you understand how social media can help you grow your business.
• 18th July 10:30 / Open Coffee Dublin / Dakota Bar, FREE - informal event for web / business people to get together and chat about anything and everything.
• 21st July 08:30 / Maintaining work/life balance as an Entrepreneur / Synergy centre breakfast seminar, FREE
• 22nd July 10:00 / Quickly Discovering and Understanding your Software Applications / FREE - organised by ASG software solutions
• 22nd July 18:00 / HotHouse United / School House pub - business networking event for all current and former participants of the DIT Hothouse programme.
• 23rd July 08:30 / Free NovaUCD event about security / FREE- don’t miss it as there isn’t much free events in NovaUCD
• 23rd July 18:30 / OWASP Chapter meeting - group dedicated to fighting the cause of software insecurity in Ireland
• 30th July 19:00 / Connector BBQ / The Church - connecting people around web, business and technology
• 31st July 09:00 / Podcasting training courses from Podcasting Ireland / 100 EUR
• 2nd Aug 13:00 / Geeknic / Farmleigh Park - picnic for geeks, there is also a farmers market that day
• 5th Aug 18:30 / 121 Marketing Club / Mint Bar, Westin Hotel - usually around 30+ people is attending event, includes 1h speed networking
• 5th Aug 20:00 / Ireland Girl Geek Dinner / Kennedy’s on Westland Road - meet fellow girls in IT
• 6th Aug 10:30 / Open Coffee Club / Science Galery, FREE - informal event for web / business people to get together and chat about anything and everything.
• 14th Aug 18:00 / Free Business Networking / The Bewleys Hotel, Ballsbridge - speed networking and presentation. Great event for networking. Last time more than 60 people attended.
• 15th Aug / CupcakeCamp / Belfast - while I really thought that this was baking event rather than IT, somebody convinced me that it isn’t. So if you wanna go and try it out, let me know afterwards ^^
• 16th Aug 19:00 / Dublin ALT.NET / check website for place (probably The Vaults again), this months talk will be about “ORM with NHibernate”
• 21st Aug 09:30 / SQS Agile Workshop / 4-5 Dawson St, 100 EUR - explore the key principles of agile development with a particular focus on the quality and testing aspects.
• 24th-28th Aug / epicenter - The Irish Software Show / Trinity College, 99 EUR - 197 EUR - the biggest ever event in the software space ever held in Ireland. Should be fun.
• 27th Aug 13:00 / Simply Zesty Summer Camp / The Church, 99 EUR - earn how social media can transform your business
• 10th Sept / OWASP conference / 90-150 EUR - first Irish Application Security conference in historic Dublin University, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
• 10th Sept / Confidence in Action conference / FREE -  if you’re looking to navigate your way through the current economic climate, then Confidence in Action is the perfect place to start.
• 19th Sept / OSS BarCamp / DIT Kevin Street Dublin - open source bar camp
• 19th Sept / BizCamp - website isn’t updated yet, but I’m sure there will be more information closer to date
• 20th-24th Sept / COSAC 2009 / Killashee House Hotel, Naas, Co. Kildare - 16th International Computer Security Symposium (prices from 350 - 4000 EUR). A lot of speakers from outside Ireland. It is self organised event so don’t be afraid of website
• 24th Sept / Mobile Marketing 2009 - explore and develop the many opportunities that has and will drive this sector for the future

Some more information

One week from now on you can promote yourself on Irish Business Women forum. This event happens only once per year and you can promote yourself as much you like and how you like.

If you are just starting networking, few of the Dublin City Enterprise networking groups are quite good. I have heard lot of good things about Link! network. Usually you can attend one event for free to check them out.

If you are in web development check out The Rally Rev-up Webinar about Agile and Rally development methods happening every Thursday. As you might know our company does Agile Scrum development and we are interested in everything agile.

Other non-IT and non-business events you shouldn’t miss this summer is Festival of World Cultures and Electric Picnic at the end of August.

Last Wednesday I attended MIX Essentials conference organised by Microsoft. Overall attendance wasn’t really great as most employers can’t afford their employees waste one day on conference.

I’m not a Microsoft fan as I do love Apple more, but it is always important to know news from competitors. I do love testing so seeing what’s new in IE8 was very valuable for me. It was also interesting to see their new search engine Bing.com which I still haven’t tried. If you want to know more about IE - try their blog.

Let’s make quick list of new things that seemed important to me in IE8:

• Standards compliance - their new IE won’t be compatible with previous IE however it will now follow all standards - CSS, HTML, ACID2 and DOM
• Rendering website to previous IE versions. This is a big benefit to all developers and testers. Finally we don’t have to install numerous IE versions to make sure our site looks good on all of them. It is also possible to set a meta tag for website to make it allways be generated as one previous IE versions.
• Web Slices - follow only the part of site you are interested. E.g. in independent.ie there is section of latest news. You can slice only that section and see it almost like bookmark (hard to explain it, I know). All you have to do is add to the < div > tag text class=”hslice”. To be honest is very similar to Apple Web Clips which have been around for quite a while. There is still no standard for Web Slices.
• Accelerator - it is possible to add pop-up menus for different words on sites. E.g. if I select word Paris, my pop-up menu might contain hotel deals, flights or search for it in Google.
• Be a Search Provider - IE8 allows you to use different searches from websites. E.g. not only Google search, but also independent.ie search. You can do this with simple XML.
• IEAK - build your own IE8 with settings you want your users to use and let them download your version
• As usual there is a lot of improvements in security - anti-phishing, data protection, XSS filters, InPrivate browsing and InPrivate blocking. And I hope they won’t do the same mistake as before where there was more security than usability.
• Improved Performance allowing more threads and connections as well as JavaScript improvements
• New Developer tools - JavaScript debugger, HTML&CSS debuggers, JavaScript profile

Second presentation was made by Sabrina Dent. I have been looking at her blog before and I really love design.

Her presentation was meant to start with Froggie ad from 1955. However, there was connection problems so we missed it. We received few really great tips on how designer should work.

1. Eliminate choices. If you give customer too much choices of design, he gonna pick what he thinks important from all of them. So at the end you will get good for nothing design. 90% clients will be happy with first version you send to them.
2. Like Yoda be - to be honest I didn’t got this point
3. Just say No and don’t explain. If client wants some small changes (from his perspective) and you know it will take few days, say No. He took you do the job and he shouldn’t teach you how to do it. You don’t teach dentist how to fix your teeth, don’t you?

After this presentation I really understand why people love Sabrina. She has really strong personality and does what she loves to do.

See more at the presentation slideshows here

Seems topic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) wasn’t as popular as previous ones at Dublin ALT.NET so there was only 15 people attending. Only 1 person in room had experience with it and few others have heard about it. It seemed pretty complicated and was hard to get my head around it.

Following paragraph is my summary of what I understood from the evening. Please correct me if I’m wrong at some points.

As I understood ESB is message layer that communicates between components within enterprise system. There are asynchronous ESB listening processes that handle each message request and distribute them. It is good for scaling, but ESB integration needs big money investment, constant monitoring and it has large learning curve. This is one of the reasons it’s not usually implemented in small systems / small organisations.

You can read more about ESB at Wikipedia or buy a book about it

Saturday I went to OSSBarCamp and apparently Girl Geek Day was in the same building. I didn’t stay for a long though, but I got insight of both of them.

I would argue that OSSBarCamp was really bar camp. In real Bar Camp sessions are proposed and scheduled by attendees, mostly on-site, typically using white boards or paper taped to the wall. Most of the talks was scheduled beforehand and there wasn’t much discussions what people want to hear. If we say it was conference then it was presented marvellous. Thanks to Jaime and Laura for organising it.

I heard 2 great talks in OSSBarCamp. First talk was about introduction to Ubuntu. I’m not really familiar with it so it was interesting to listen to it. Second talk I went to (there was 3 parallel talks all the time) was about green party’s IT policy. We got to the few suggestions on how make people use it and implement it in practise. Great way to actually impact what will be going on in IT world in future. Can’t wait to see real policy, which will be created in next few months.

Girl Geek Day was organised by Laura and supported by Martha Rotter from Microsoft. We got really nice dinner from Celtic kitchen and talked about different difficulties what women get working in IT. Girl geeks are minority in IT so we work harder and it’s difficult to achieve things. And sometimes we do feel lonely because people don’t take us serious.

I had to run away so I didn’t stay for the rest (drinks afterwards and few more talks), however I did enjoy it. All photos taken by my camera are blurry again (I really should buy new camera), so no photos this time.

Update - got photos from Girl Geek Day

Finally there is new version for WordPress called Coltrane that just came out on 11th of December. I loved the preview and customising screens seems similar to me as BBC or Facebook sites. When I get new version I gonna re-organise my first page as sometimes I think it is quite hard to view. And that will happen when my administrator will have time. And if what they written is true, next time I won’t even need to trouble my administrator.