This event has been curated by Justin Souter. The lineup is:

1. Justin to give a quick introduction – 5 minutes
2. Slot 1 – 40 mins
1. Joeli from Codeworks to recount how the CultureCode events went, what the thinking was behind it, and what future plans may be – 5 mins probably
2. Brigitta to address ‘Experimental Approaches to Data Visualisation’, and thus broaden the scope by talking through her data visualisation work – 12 mins
3. Adrian Park to outline his work with Processing and recent CultureCode attendance etc. – 12 mins
3. Q&A session involving these three presenters – 5-10 mins
4. Comfort break – 5 mins
5. Slot 2 – 25 mins
1. Local industry player to talk about business intelligence tools – 20 mins (tops) + 5 mins Q&A
2. Potential slot for sponsor to speak, at this point
3. I still need to finalise this, so any volunteers – please get in touch –@souterconsults :-)
6. Slot 3
1. Stuart Smith from Wood Holmes – 20-25 mins + 5 mins Q&A
1. Stuart to talk about more technical side of data analysis
2. This is what we used; not how we used it; challenges we faced in doing it
7. Wash-up and Q&A – 10 minutes

Justin has written more details about the event here:

http://souterconsulting.eu/2012/05/08/supermondays-data-visualisation-evening-may-28th/

The event will take place at the Culture Lab in Newcastle University on Monday 28th May starting from 6.00pm. You can find a map to the venue here:
http://culturelab.ncl.ac.uk/about/contact

Running a SuperMondays event costs money. In the past we paid for this out of Public Sector sponsorship, this has subsequently dried up. We are trying an innovative scheme this month by giving attendees the opportunity to make a small donation when booking your ticket.

This month’s Super Mondays is an insight to the world of the homebrew makers and “hardware hackers”. The bedrock of today’s computer industry, this movement is seeing an international comeback and pushing today’s technology forward and making it accessible to the masses.

Our presentation topics were:

• 3D Printing
  3D prototyping has been available for decades but only in recent years has the hardware cost has been affordable. Thanks to this, open source software and sharing on the Internet is it now practical to make a 3D printer at home. Cay Green gave us a thrilling presentation on how the technology works.
  
• The Raspberry Pi
  The Raspberry Pi is at sub $25 single-board computer with the aim of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools and is often equated to the 1980s BBC Microcomputer. Demand for the device has been extraordinary bringing down both the Farnell RS Components web sites on launch, but luckily Tony Dixon managed to get one of the initial 10,000 boards produced and he gave us a full rundown of its capabilities.
  
• The Arduino
  Arduino is a popular open-source microcontroller board designed to make using electronics more accessible to everyone. The hardware costs around £20, is easily programmed by coders and non coders alike from any computer, and can react to and control all kinds of electronics devices. Ed Bisdee gave us a great introduction to the Arduino.
  
• BeagleBone
  The BeableBone presentation was the fourth and final presentation on the night.  Nigel Hope introduced us to this rather powerful opensource development board.
  

• 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/