Summer Code Slinging

This summer has a lot of opportunities for developers to get involved with the local community. GiveCamp Memphis (http://givecampmemphis.org/) is coming June 22nd-24th. From the GiveCamp Memphis website:

"GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where technology professionals from designers, developers and database administrators to marketers and web strategists donate their time to provide solutions for non-profit organizations. Since its inception in 2007, the GiveCamp program has provided benefits to over 150 charities, with a value of developer and designer time exceeding $1,000,000 in services!"

Feedback from last year's event was overwhelmingly positive, so make a point to register if you get the chance.

The Java User Group is hosting a series of cross platform, 20 minute short talks at their June meeting on Thursday the 21st. Five talks are already scheduled on topics ranging from Twitter Bootstrap to the CasperJS integration testing tool. A few more slots are available for talks, so if you've got a talk in your pocket, or if you've never given a talk before, this is a great opportunity. Register at memphisjug.org and join their mailing list to submit a topic for your short talk.

The .NET user group met this month and gave an introduction to Windows Phone 7. A lot up close and personal time with the phone and the developer tools really gave the attendees a great feel for developing on the device. The emulator gave Android devs something to envy, but the Expression Blend tools were even more impressive (to me at least).

The PHP user group gave a general Q&A session on PHP at their last meeting and the appeal of the open format showed in a great turn out. The energy in the room was way up as everyone seemed to approach the subject with a beginner's mind. If you've ever been remotely interested in learning PHP, make sure to attend their next meeting.

February Status

There's plenty to love this month for a developer in Memphis. This week the Java User Group held a Coding Dojo. They explored three problems in at least five languages. Concepts from TDD and BDD were covered in a pair programming environment. Participants got to show their solutions on the big screen and deconstructed them as a group. Feedback was positive, with some participants hinting that a monthly dojo might have a place in Memphis.

This coming week, the Python, .NET, and PHP user groups all have meetings. The Python User group is holding a web scraping workshop. Make sure to bring a laptop, this sounds like a very interactive meeting. No word yet from the .NET or PHP user groups on their topic, so make sure to check their respective websites this week for updates.

We recently updated our Memphis Developer Blogs listing in the sidebar. If you have or know of a blog written by a Memphis Developer that we don't have let us know in the comments. Requirements are that the author must be a local software developer, it must be updated at least yearly, and the topic of the blog must focus on computer science, programming, or technology.

Start off 2012 with local tech meetups.

There are two #memtech events this week.

If you haven't heard, Tech Coffee happens every Tuesday morning starting at 8am at Republic Coffee on Walnut Grove.

Tech Lunch has moved from Thursday to Wednesday, but still starts at 11:30am and meets at Panera Bread at Poplar near Perkins.

Both of these weekly meet-ups is open attendance and everyone is welcome.

There are two local programming user group meetings this week.

The Memphis Python User Group is meeting tonight, Monday January 16th @ 6:30pm. Details at http://mempy.org/.

The Memphis Java User Group is meeting Thursday, January 19th @ 6pm. Details and registration at http://www.memphisjug.org/.

Both are held at the Macon Cove Campus of Southwest Tennessee Community College in the Fulton Auditorium. Map and address of the campus at http://www.southwest.tn.edu/maps/macon.pdf

The Fulton Auditorium is in the west end of the Fulton Building.

The Mid-South Makers are having a special event this week.

This Saturday the Mid-South Makers are going to do "Lunch with the Makers". They're meeting at the Pizza Hut on Union (1961 Union Ave Memphis, TN 38104)  at noon. They'll hang out and eat and then head to the space. The plan is to be back at the space at 2 or so. Come eat lunch with them and come see what's been going on at the space.

Where: Pizza Hut on Union (1961 Union Ave Memphis, TN 38104)
When: 1/21 Noon @ pizza hut Space @ 2pm

More details on the Mid-South makers at http://www.midsouthmakers.org/.

October Announcements

Another month, another Intro to #memtech session has passed, this one on .NET from Jeff Cox. Check out the video at http://www.justin.tv/launchmemphis. If you haven't gotten a chance to work in C# this talk is really informative.

The Memphis Java User Group is meeting this week. Their topic is the "Charms of Eclipse and IDE Plugins". The speaker is Gautam Dev, a software engineer with more than 15 years experience in various industries. Gautam obtained Ph.D in physics SUNY, Stony Brook. Right now he is working on the Fast Code open source Eclipse plugin project. The night promises to have a bunch of live "fast" coding going on.

.NET and PHP meetings are also scheduled for this month, but the topics are still a mystery. Check their respective webpages for updates, and if you find updated information post it in our comments!

Local Updates

The first talk of the "Intro to Memtech" series was on last Monday. This presentation was on Java. The stream is on Justin.tv/launchmemphis. Code samples and slides can be found at the presenters blog. http://postrequest.blogspot.com/2011/09/intro-to-memtech-java-deconstructing.html

The #memtech lunch and twitter were awash with talk of the Windows 8 developer preview this week. You can find the streams of the Microsoft Build event sessions on their site for the official lines. http://www.buildwindows.com/

The Memphis Java User Group meet this past Thursday for a full presentation on the Spring Framework. Code samples also included the JSON tool Jackson and the JavaScript library jQuery. Also, Thomas Langston became the new president of the user group.

Next week's PHP user group regular meeting has been rescheduled for a joint meeting with ISSA on Wednesday 29th @ 6pm. The meeting is located at Autozone and registration is required. Sign up at http://memphisissasept2011.eventbrite.com/ and ignore the incorrect date on that page. I am assured it will be held on Wednesday the 28th.The event has been moved to the 29th.

If this means your Thursday night is free, take time to go to the .NET user group meeting. Presenter George Mauer will be giving a talk on Lambda expressions. Additional details can be found on their Google group as they are announced.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/memphis-net-user-group

Labor Day Developments

#memtech
Noun
1. A twitter hashtag.
2. A series of tech related events.
3. A group of developers, entrepreneurs, and technology users.
4. A way to connect with the Memphis technocrati.
5. http://www.launchmemphis.com/memtech/

At the link above you can find a listing of all tech related user groups, not just the developer-centric ones here on MemphisDev.com.  You can also see details for the #memtech coffee, lunch, and cocktail events so you can knock elbows with local tech heads at any hour.

On a more code related note, #memtech has gotten a little open source appreciation in the form of two open projects.  A group of #memtech developers has a Windows Phone 7 app in the works, as well as a JSON API that pulls from the Memphis Developer Network calendar (woot! Nothing like validation that we're providing useful data.) .

I haven't contributed any code yet, but I did take the time to create an icon set.  You can check out the photo album linked below.

#memtech icon set

The "Intro to #memtech: Java" event is coming next Monday. This will be a 1 hour presentation giving developers who've never read any Java code a crash course. You can register at http://memtechjava-autohome.eventbrite.com/.

Updates

Last week the Java user group watched the Java 7 webcasts together. One of the topics covered was Project Coin. Project Coin was Java's initiative to provide a lot of small usability and syntactic sugar changes, which have keep Java from competing effectively with more newer or more nimble languages. These changes as well as another set of similar changes in Java 8 promise to reduce the ceremony and boilerplate often associated with Java.

The Memphis Tech Corner hosted their weekly Web Development Workshop. Word on the street is that the Twilio API played a role in the meeting. We'll be adding the Web Development Workshop to our calendar feeds, so check them out soon!

This week the .NET user group is going to have a series of developer tool short talks, followed by a discussion to generate future meeting topics. If you've got a cool tool that you've been wanting to share, this might be your chance to do so.

The PHP user group is also meeting this week. They'll be having a hands-on workshop on contributing to open source. Not content to create a toy project for the workshop, they'll be contributing directly to existing open source project FRAPI, a high-level API framework that claims to put the “rest” back into RESTful.