November Meeting: Build Smarter Cross-Platform Applications

Posted on by Mark A. Wilson

Join Pratt & Miller Engineering and us on Tuesday, November 26th, at 6:00 PM in the Redwood Conference Room of the Microsoft Charlotte Office. Building “smarter” applications is a popular and important topic in the software development community. In many cases, machine learning is the primary tool used to create apps that improve their delivered value by dynamically adjusting as more relevant data is made available. In addition to “smarter” applications, maximizing code re-use by creating cross-platform applications is another popular and important topic among software development professionals. With Xamarin, you can deliver native Android, iOS, and Windows applications with a single .NET codebase. What if you needed a cross-platform “smart” application? Is this possible?

In this session, we will explore how to leverage Azure Cognitive Services and ML.NET along with Xamarin to create a cross-platform RSS reader that is “smart.” As we use it, it improves and gets smarter.

The meeting presenter is Richard Taylor.

Richard L. Taylor Jr. is a 25-year software development and technology professional living in Huntersville, NC. His experience includes the design and development of small to enterprise-class applications. He currently serves as Vice President of Platform and Cloud Engineering at SentryOne.

Richard is a believer in using the right tools for the job and has leveraged ASP.NET (Web API, MVC), SQL Server/MongoDB, Angular, Bootstrap, JavaScript/NodeJS, KendoUI, and Xamarin (just to name a few) to deliver solutions. He has a great deal of experience but likes to explore new technologies, tools, and techniques to help create better software.

Richard has a passion for the software development community. He serves as one of the organizers of the Modern Devs Charlotte meetup group and is the founding organizer of the Charlotte Xamarin Developers meetup group. Both groups try to create environments where developers of all skill levels can come together and learn about the latest technologies, tools, and techniques to create software. These groups also provide a venue to network with fellow developers in the community. In addition to serving the local software development community via meetup groups, Richard also speaks at regional, national, and international technology user groups and conferences. His speaking schedule can be found here: http://www.rightincode.com/page/speaking-schedule

Richard recently received the Progress (Telerik) Developer Expert designation. DE’s are highly skilled, visible, and elite industry leaders who write, speak, help, and code using Progress (Telerik) products. There are 44 DE’s in 13 different countries who are ambassadors for Progress Products to the tech community.

When not developing software, Richard is focused on spending time with his lovely wife Shondrecca (she gives the best hugs!!) and their five children (Richard III, Ayanna, David, Jonathan, and Stephen).

The meeting sponsor is Pratt & Miller Engineering.

Pratt & Miller is a product development company that through technology and innovation, solves customers’ most technical and complex challenges in Mobility, Motorsports, Defense, and Manufacturing industries.

Logical Advantage recently joined the Pratt & Miller family! Pratt & Miller specializes in custom engineered IoT devices and enterprise software, including firmware, message brokers, cloud services, data acquisition, analytics, and visualization for IoT. Learn more at http://www.prattmiller.com.

Please RSVP so we know how much food to order.

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July Meeting: David Neal Presents Software and The Art of Delivery

Posted on by Mark A. Wilson

*** NOTICE: Please note the location change for the July meeting only! ***

Join Pratt & Miller Engineering and us on Tuesday, July 23rd, at 6:00 PM at the LAB@SentryOne off Yancy Rd. Engineering, DevOps, IT, Marketing, …you name it, there is a constant battle between going fast and doing it right. Add to the mix the fact that coordination across teams and departments comes at a high transaction cost. How can we minimize friction?

At my time at LeanKit, we strove to improve our processes across the entire organization continuously. Along the way, we developed FSGD, which distills many lean (and agile) core principles into an easy-to-remember and easy-to-communicate thinking tool you can use to make better decisions about the work you do.

In this talk, I’ll share with you the challenges we faced as we scaled, how we struggled, what we learned, and how we evolved. The goal is for you to walk away with tools and practical processes that will impact you and your team’s success.

The meeting presenter is David Neal.

David is a family man, musician, illustrator, software developer, and Microsoft MVP living in North Georgia. He is currently a Senior Developer Advocate for Okta, runs on a high-octane mixture of caffeine and JavaScript, and is made entirely of bacon. Learn more about David at http://www.reverentgeek.com or follow him on Twitter @reverentgeek.

The meeting sponsor is Pratt & Miller Engineering.

Pratt & Miller is a product development company that through technology and innovation, solves customers’ most technical and complex challenges in Mobility, Motorsports, Defense, and Manufacturing industries.

Logical Advantage recently joined the Pratt & Miller family! Pratt & Miller specializes in custom engineered IoT devices and enterprise software including firmware, message brokers, cloud services, data acquisition, analytics, and visualization for IoT. Learn more at http://www.prattmiller.com.

Please RSVP so we know how much food to order.

Downloads: Slides

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November Meeting: Rethinking Business Rules – From Creation to Code

Posted on by Mark A. Wilson

Join Pratt & Miller Engineering and us on Tuesday, November 27th, at 6:00 PM in the Redwood Conference Room (formerly named MPR or the Multi-Purpose Room) of the Microsoft Charlotte Office. If you work with business applications, you certainly have business rules. As obvious as it might sound, how you collect, write, and organize your rules go a long way in determining the success of your application. In this talk, we will take a look at business rules: where they come from, different ways we write them in code, and how we glue them together to make up an application. We will then look at how the move to serverless computing forces us to rethink how we write and compose our rules.

This talk is in C# and F# using Visual Studio and Azure.

The meeting presenter is Jamie Dixon.

Jamie Dixon has been writing code for as long as he can remember and has been getting paid to do it since 1995. He was using C# and javascript almost exclusively until discovering F# and, more recently, Python. Jamie now combines all four languages for the problem at hand. He has a passion for discovering overlooked gems in data sets and merging software engineering techniques to scientific computing. Jamie has a BSCS in Computer Science and a Masters in Public Health. He is the former Chair of his town’s Information Services Advisory Board and is an outspoken advocate for Open Data. He is a 4-time Microsoft MVP and the author of Mastering .NET Machine Learning. You can find him on Twitter at @jamie_dixon

The meeting sponsor is Pratt & Miller Engineering.

Pratt & Miller is a product development company that through technology and innovation, solves customers’ most technical and complex challenges in Mobility, Motorsports, Defense, and Manufacturing industries.

Logical Advantage recently joined the Pratt & Miller family! Pratt & Miller specializes in custom engineered IoT devices and enterprise software including firmware, message brokers, cloud services, data acquisition, analytics, and visualization for IoT. Learn more at www.prattmiller.com.

Please RSVP so we know how much food to order.

Downloads: Slides & Code

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