Duchess Newsletter #4

Hello Duchesses,

This 4rd Duchess newsletter is to announce our upcoming events, general announcements and recap our past events.

Table of Contents

• Event: Duchess dinner after J-Fall - November 12, 2008
• Event: Duchess Talk at Devoxx - December 10, 2008
• Announcement: One free Devoxx pass (university + conference) - December 8-12, 2008
• Event: Introduction to Agile by Michael Franken (AgileHolland) - January 20, 2008
• Announcement: Participation Fee
• Announcement: One Male Guest
• Recap: Spring event by Arjen Poutsma (SpringSource)
• Recap: Groovy & Grails event by Maarten Hoppen (VX Company)
• Announcement: Photos on Flickr

Event: Duchess dinner after J-Fall - November 12, 2008

This is already becoming a tradition. After J-Fall we will have dinner together at restaurant Chaco, Brinklaan 92-94, Bussum

Meeting point is in the lobby at 18:30. We can go together to the restaurant in the center of Bussum. This dinner is not sponsored, so please bring enough money. Let us know if you want to join us by replying to this email. Please let us know ASAP (before end of the day Tuesday 11/11) so we can finalize our reservation.

Event: Duchess Talk at Devoxx - December 10, 2008 at 20:00

Clara and Linda will give a presentation at Devoxx in Antwerp about Duchess and the issues involving women in IT. Last time we did this at the Benelux jBoss meeting, it turned into a nice discussion. So if you’re going to Devoxx, please drop by. More info on the Devoxx site at http://devoxx.com/display/JV08/BOF+Day+3.

Announcement: One free Devoxx pass (university + conference) - December 8-12, 2008

One free Devoxx pass for both university and conference - the whole 5 days. First come first serve by replying to this email. The only requirement is that you write a recap for us about your experience at Devoxx.

Event: Introduction to Agile by Michael Franken - January 20, 2008

We are proud to announce our next event - Introduction to Agile - by Michael Franken, agile coach in the Netherlands and founder of AgileHolland.

Agile is a way of working that focuses on communication, teamwork, and delivering business value with quality software in a cost effective and timely manner. The work is done by self-organizing teams with a leadership focused on facilitating and inspiring.

The date for this event is set on Tuesday, January 20, 2008, at 18:00.

We are still looking for a location. If one of your companies is willing to sponsor us with space for this event, please let us know!

Please sign up on our website at http://jduchess.org/events/duchess-agile-event.
The fee is 15 euro per person for attending this event. See below.
Announcement: Participation Fee

As we organize more events, we have been running into the problem of finding money for our operating costs. While we are looking for general financial sponsorship, we have decided to ask for a small participation fee at each event. The cost for attending an event is 15 euro per person per event. The fee includes dinner since most are our events take place in the evening. We have decided on a fee per event instead of membership fees because most of our members are in other countries. This will also help us minimize no-shows. Please note that we will still need sponsoring for location, food, as well as general financial support. So please help get the word out to your companies to support women in Java.

There will be a participation fee starting from our next event.

Announcement: One Male Guest

We have often been asked by our male colleagues and other guys that we come across at conferences if they can come to our events. So, taking the idea from GirlGeekDinner, we have decided on that each member may bring one male guest per event. Hopefully, this will lead to a atmosphere of collaboration between the sexes at our events.
Recap: Spring Event by Arjen Poutsma (SpringSource)

On September 5th we had our first event: Introduction to Spring. The evening started a bit late due to heavy traffic, so most people were late. But we welcomed 9 ladies and had a wonderful Spanish buffet with several warm dishes, some bread and salad, sponsored by SpringSource.

After everybody had enough food, Arjen Poutsma gave a very interesting presentation about what he thought were the main reasons to use Spring. The attendees gave a lot of feedback. We discussed various uses of Spring in enterprise application. All in all it was a very inspiring evening. In the end all attendees received a SpringSource shirt and a DZone refcard for Spring configuration, which incidentally, you can download at the DZone website. You can also download the refcard Spring Annotations, which is the more current way of configuring Spring applications.

To see photos from the event, go to our website for the online recap at http://jduchess.org/recap-spring-event.

Recap: Groovy & Grails Workshop by Maarten Hoppen (VX Company).

On October 9th we had our second event: a workshop on Groovy and Grails. After a pizza and sandwiches sponsored by VX Company, Maarten Hoppen gave an introduction to Groovy, the language that is behind grails. In a nutshell, Groovy is a dynamic language influenced by similar languages such as Ruby and Python. Groovy, however, has a strong integration with Java, and therefore allows to easily adoptation by Java developers and easily integration of Java backend and Groovy frontend. Grails = Groovy + Spring + Hibernate. The dynamic nature of Groovy, without the need to compile into bytecode like Java, allows for fast development. Groovy and Grails bridges the enterprise Java world and the scripting world, which is up-and-coming as machines become faster.

After a short introduction, we got in pairs to work on the exercises. After a quick glance at the basics we have played with more advanced features: closures, how groovy handles with collections, with regular expressions. The evening was too short to complete the exercises so we all took that home with us. VX Company provided us with the course material, including hands-on exercises, and a CD with the necessary software, and in the end every one also received the book “Beginning Groovy and Grails“.

To see photos from the event, go to our website for the online recap at http://jduchess.org/recap-groovy-workshop.
Announcement: Photos on Flickr

From now on, photos for Duchess events will be uploaded to Flickr at http://flickr.com/photos/jduchess. Link to us and help us take more photos from Duchess events or send us photos from Java events that you have attend.

Regards,

Duchess