XPages201 TackItOn Day

IamLUG is just a week away and I have been remiss in not mentioning the XPages201 training day which I am running next Wednesday after IamLUG in St Louis.

This video explains a little more...

The aim of the day is to dig a little deeper into XPages if you've been playing with them for a few months. So I'm going to cover some of the basics that I've seen commonly misunderstood, like Scoped Variables, but then also we'll look at some more advanced things such as using Java and Managed Beans in your XPages applications.

If you'd like to sign up then head over to XPages101 and if you're already registered for the IamLUG conference itself, don't forget to use the discount coupon code which you received in your confirmation email for a $100 discount.

Heading home

It seems like a long time since I went away on holiday, and it is. Since the middle of July I've been to Latitude (great), Madeira (great), IamLUG (great) and run an XPages101 day (seemed to go well). So all in all it's been a really enjoyable few weeks.

I'm sat in JFK airport in New York waiting to start the final leg of the journey home and much as it's been a great couple of weeks away, I am *really* looking forward to getting back home and just decompressing for a couple of days before getting back into the real world with a vengeance on Monday morning.

IamLUG was a really superb event, Chris and the rest of the team do put on a good show. Everything was run incredibly smoothly, the content was very good indeed and, as ever, the people were great company. I presented my "Ten XPages Design Patterns" session, probably for the last time as I've used it for a year now. So I need to start thinking about future sessions pretty seriously now. (Bet you can't guess what I plan to speak about next time!).

After IamLUG, we had the inaugural "Tack It On" day, and I'd really like to thank David Leedy for his invaluable assistance during the day. I had been rather lax and not given him a huge amount of guidance before the day itself but he dealt with all of the questions with good grace and humour. Things really wouldn't have run as smoothly without him there. Overall I think the day went pretty well. I'm sure there'll be more of these sorts of things happening in the future.

Gone fishing

Well it doesn't happen very often (it's over two years since I last took a proper holiday), but I'm off on holidays for the next two weeks. This weekend we're heading up to Suffolk to the Latitude Festival and then later next week it's off to Madeira for a family trip where we'll be celebrating important birthdays for my parents amongst other things.

When I get back from holidays I literally switch airports and fly straight off to St Louis for the IamLUG conference. (If you've not registered for it and the Tack It On day which follows then what have you been doing?)

So all in all it's going to be a fun few weeks. But if I don't respond to your email you'll know why.

My IamLUG Session

Yesterday Chris Miller announced the first batch of speakers and sessions for this year's IamLUG conference in St Louis. I'm fortunate enough to have had my abstract accepted. And so I'll be presenting an updated version of my "Ten XPages Design Patterns" session.

There is already a great list of speakers and sessions announced, so if you've not registered yet then get over to the IamLUG site quickly to get signed up, it's a free conference remember!

And then, of course, there's the Tack It On extra day of deep dive content provided by Rob Novak and the SNAPPS team, Chris Miller and myself. All in all, three days of great sessions, interesting people, and I'm sure more than a little fun as well.

GSX Day, travelling and Portland

After IamLUG finished up about 30 people stayed on for the GSX Day which was all about setting up your environment to monitor what's going on, prevent significant outages and make everything run smoothly in your organisation. Even for a lowly developer such as myself this is useful content to know. The GSX software itself looks very interesting from a performance monitoring and scalability planning point of view and of course now that Elguji is running more and more hosted sites we need to make sure that our servers are in tip top shape.

The day itself was very well planned to not be a sales pitch, so the presentations were valid even without the GSX software. A very clever way of doing marketing I'd say.

Then yesterday really was the end of the trip to St Louis, with a very relaxed start to the day and some fun and games on the travel following that. US Airways cancelled the second leg of my flight to Portland so when I got to the front of the queue to re-book the lady looked a little shocked and said "But you've been booked onto the flight that leaves in 45 minutes from Terminal 2!". Oh it was very entertaining getting my bags, changing terminals (in 111 degree heat), checking in, getting through security and boarding all within 30 minutes. But I did manage it at least so I was only half an hour late to meet Bruce and Gayle, so ultimately a successful day.

Today we head off to Cannon Beach on the Oregon coast to relax, catch up and spend some quality time working on IQJam. Interestingly, this is the first time that Bruce and I have actually worked in the same place before in the two years that we've been working together. Either we'll get lots done or I'll need to go back to being 5000 miles away :-)