This month we had two excellent speakers, Michael Peacock and Jamie Curle.
Jamie spoke energetically about django, a framework for python. Through interesting stories, jokes and code examples he handed over nuggets of helpful information on how to setup, develop and deploy django based apps. You can download his slides here:
http://t.co/gjL4arWG
and his code examples here:
http://t.co/GXXpn1Gw
Michael is a regular speaker at SuperMondays and this month spoke in detail about Vagrant, a tool that he uses extensively to manage his various development environments at Ground Six. You can download Michael’s slides here:
http://www.slideshare.net/michaelpeacock/vagrant-14094782
This month we focused on visualisation tools and techniques, and featuring the Processing programming language, as well as business intelligence tools and lessons learned.
Our speakers included:
We really hope that people who are inspired by some of the projects shown. David Cox has setup a Flickr page and hopes that you share some of your own visualisations here:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/supermonday_datavisualisation/
David also put together a Google Doc with links to some tools which might be a good starting point for people wanting to have a play with creating stuff from their own data which can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e4hyp_wvmCoES0_zBiv14bGfH4OoXV9MO9WfjCfAvAs/edit
This months event was one of the most anticipated and well received events in quite a while. We are very grateful to Justin Souter who curated and hosted the evening.
Our thanks go out to Newcastle University (and in particular the CultureLab), Codeworks and Rombus for sponsorship and support.
With over 130 attendees this was our most successful SuperMondays event in around a year.
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.
