A strong and vibrant IT community based in the North East Of England

The latest from SuperMondays

An introduction to massive data sets, using SQL and noSQL approaches

Running a database is often challenging. Issues such as speed, reliability, scalability and data consistency often keep DBA’s awake at night with worry.

This month we are going to takle the difficult topic of massive data sets. We have invited to speakers who have experience managing large data sets, these are:

  1. Sam Lambert — DBA and Linux Admin for Smith Electric Vehicles.
    Sam manages a complex computer system that handles over 1.2 billion INSERTS a day. This system has very specific technical challenges including failover, scalability and data consistency. Sam will discuss each of these in detail.
  2. Jonathan Halliday — Developer in the JBoss team at RedHat
    Traditional database solutions often fail to provide for the speed and quantity of data capture demanded in today’s environment and often force valuable information to be ignored or discarded prematurely. Fortunately help is at hand in the form a variety of solutions built on new models of distributed storage and processing. New systems bring technical choices, and often too much choice! Jonathan will discuss some of these alternative solutions and provide guidance on how to select a suitable solution for your environment.

The event will take palace on Monday 30th January, starting at 18:00 in the Beehive Research Facility at Newcastle University.

Register for 26th April 2011: Lightning Talks on Eventbrite

Share

Lightning Talks — Review

This month we had a few presenters who presented short five minute presentation on some of the projects that they have been working on. These speakers were (after the break):

(more…)

Share

Review: An introduction to 4 programming languages

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday SuperMondays!! (@mynameiscolin )

Every day we work with the tools that we are familiar with. We develop applications, build web sites and deliver projects to happy clients. However, it is frustrating that sometimes the tools we use are not perfectly suited for the job at hand. Learning to use new programming languages is hard, indeed there are so many to consider!

Here are a few write ups of the night:

(more…)

Share

Review: Games, the state of play

If you follow the news in technology, you’ll have seen that games (and specifically gamification) is a big thing right now. This month Supermondays (or Super MonTuesdays thanks to the Monday Bank Holiday) took the subject head-on with talks from various angles in the industry, ranging from Java-based gladiator cricket games, to running games at conferences. (you can continue reading this excellent account of the night on Vikky Teinaki’s excellent blog ).

(more…)

Share

Am I Bovvered? (the because of effect)

Here at the SuperMondays HQ we are constantly interested in what we call the ‘because of effect’. This is the very powerful and often intangible benefit that people get by bovvering to attend events like ours.

This month we asked people to tell us something that happened because of their attendance at a previous event. We were really impressed with what people had to say, some of these are listed here:

  • Gained confidence in public speaking. Since my talk at Super Mondays I have gone on to talk at a local seminar helping businesses
  • I’ve found some contract work probably/possibly because of knowing people through SuperMondays.
  • Connected with other developers in NE.
  • After a talk in the pub got a job with a company and went on to develop an application for them – would not have got that without SuperMondays!
  • SM gave me my first experience of public speaking, because of this I realised it was both nothing to fear and something I actually enjoy, and have gone on to give more talks & presentations since.
  • visited other user groups in the north east, woken up to the NE tech community, there’s lots going on.
  • learnt lots of interesting stuff and met lots of interesting people
  • met some very interesting people;
  • attended jboss and drupal groups
  • Met lots of cool tech people. Got my new job.
  • I became active in more local IT user groups eg JBOSS user group, Drupal user group, and events like Dorkbot, Datarama, Geekiest drink, Howduino by hearing about them through Supermondays contacts or forum. Some of the events have contained ideas I can put into practice immediately eg UX, messaging, freelancing, whereas others have either been thought provoking or caused me to find out more about the subject eg Software Testing, the Difference Engine. I stimulated the local economy by spending more money in the bar at the Trent pub than I otherwise would :-) The payoff was some high quality technical discussion with like minded people.
  • Kept in touch with local friends and tech industry players; kept up-to-date with key trends; had my eyes opened to new topics; met new people

The results show that people benefited by meeting like-minded people who  introduced them to new technologies, job prospects and other user groups. We were very happy to hear this….long may it continue.

Share