• 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.

• 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 discussed some of these alternative solutions and provided guidance on how to select a suitable solution for your environment.
  

Sam Lambert: Managing 1 billion INSERTs into a mysql resource

Philip Poots: An introduction to redis.

Paul Callaghan: An introduction to Monad

Michael Peacock: An introduction to Twilio

You can download the code used in Michaels presentation here:
https://github.com/mkpeacock/Talk-Rating–twilio-

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:

• Stephen Moretti
• Vicky Teinaki

The speaker videos and slide decks are here:

This months event was expertly curated and presented by James Ruterford. As always, we want to thank our sponsors Newcastle University and Codeworks Connect.

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.

• Call me Delia: A tale of good design – Leanne Johnson
• HTML5 apps for iOS (and probably beyond) – Andy Far
• CMS design integration/theming – Richard Carter

The slides are also available from Slideshare:

• Call me Delia: A tale of good design and Presentation Notes
• HTML5 apps for iOS (and probably beyond) and the app at http://unflappable.semibad.com/
• CMS design integration/theming

Reviews

• Stuart Holmes published a review on his blog.

Our speaker presentations are:

The event took place at the Baltic Campus of Gateshead College. We are very grateful to Gateshead College for the help in hosting this event.

• Ian Oxley: HTML5 form validation
• Michael Peacock: Jenkins Continuous Integration tool
• Alex Kavanagh: A whirlwind history of copyright and what it means for the 21st century
• Jonathan Dixon: web sockets and Web Data Storage
• Gregory Marler: OpenStreetMap.org: Not just a pretty web map, using the raw data. Featuring elephants, table tennis, and toilets.
• Mark Stairmand: UX challenges for application developers
• Ross Cooney: Messaging idioms.
• Richard Powell: HTML5 Canvas
• Matthew Peacock: Scala

Stuart Holmes wrote the following review:
http://www.xero-g.co.uk/trubru/2011/05/supermondays-lightning-talks-a-review/

1. Peter Bull — Developing ZuneCardr, a Windows 7 mobile app
2. Sam Harrison — Mapping a different way
3. Audrius Jankauskas – web CMSs and related technologies
4. Ross Dargan — An introduction to Flex-Raid
5. Aidan Garnish — An introduction to the concept of time banking
6. Bobby Patterson — happiest
7. Adrià Mercader — Customised web maps
8. Derek Frost — Development using the Spring framework

Oli and James from Memory Merge have written this excellent review of the evening:
http://blog.memorymerge.com/post/3047211319/supermondays-reflash-talks

Stuart Holmes also wrote this excellent review:
http://www.xero-g.co.uk/trubru/

Paul from Web Design Futures wrote these words:
http://paul.webdesignfutures.co.uk/2011/02/super-mondays/

We want to thank our sponsors, Newcastle University and Codeworks Connect.

Gregor Rae, BusinessLab and ActiveAge

First up was Gregor Rae who is a co-founder of BusinessLab and a strategist in ICT and corporate strategy, marketing and communications.  Gregor has led a research programme into the ‘Competitive Advantage of Ageing’ and the role of ICT in extending the economic and social vitality of an older population.  His presentation discussed the ActiveAge programme which is a research project looking at the market opportunities of an ageing population.

Caroline Findlay, Newcastle Science City

Caroline Findlay followed Gregor to give an overview of Newcastle Science City and how it can help with developing products and services.  Newcastle Science City is heavily involved in ActiveAge which “is a collaborative action research programme that is exploring the opportunities that lie within new markets being created by the ageing demographic and how ICT innovation can help to meet the changing social, physical and economic needs of an ageing society“.

Andy Hudson, Broadband Computer Company

Andy Hudson practically needs no introduction. He is, amongst other things, the founder and CEO of the Broadband Computer Company which has developed the ‘alex‘ computer system specially designed with the older computer user in mind.  Andy gave a very amusing, challenging, and poignant talk on how we, the digital community, have largely excluded the vast majority of the older population from using digital technology and, specifically, computers.  Actually, he seemed to mostly blame Microsoft!  But it was revealing that we have built up a language and mystique around computers, the internet, and even mobile phones that is exclusive.  If you’re not part of the club, you just won’t understand the MB, RAM, baud, bps, GPRS, 3G, ADSL and other terms we happily throw around.  Andy has also brought some demonstration machines running Alex to show the simplicity of the system.  Most telling, for me, was some of the letters that he read out from happy customers who had finally found a way of interacting with their siblings over long distances.  Or email to the rest of us!  A great presentation which is included here.

Dr Paul Watson, Newcastle University

Dr Paul Watson, from Newcastle University, is the Professor of Computer Science, Director of the Informatics Research Institute, and Director of the North East Regional e-Science Centre. He also directs the UKRC Digital Economy Hub on “Inclusion through the Digital Economy”. Paul did an engaging presentation on the work that SiDE project are doing which can be seen below.  It focussed in on the technology behind the ‘active’ kitchen and how they are collecting instrumentation (data) on activities that take place in normal home settings, so that algorithms can be developed to provide automatic assistance from pervasive computers in the home to people with onset dementia and similar issues.

Dr Sanjeet Pakrasi, Connect for Care

Dr Sanjeet Pakrasi finalised the line up on the evening by showing how the application of some very standard internet technologies can actually transform the lives of elderly people, particularly those in various stages of dementia.  It was heart-warming to hear on the video linked below about how simple two-way video conferencing, when packed into an easy-to-use system, can reconnect different generations within families and help maintain and build social bonds and inclusiveness.  Sanjeet was extremely passionate about how the technology has helped and, for me, it was great to see how actual people can benefit from the tech stuff that we play with every day!

You can watch a video describing Dr Pakrasi’s work here: http://www.connectforcare.com/video.html