The Filter at DDD Southwest

DDD South West was a free one-day technical event for developers hosted by The University of the West of England in Bristol last Saturday 11^th June. It aimed to promote a day of learning, discussion and collaboration in the regional development community of the South West.

DDD (which in case you’re wondering stands for Developer, Developer Developer) is part of a vibrant UK .NET community. Its goal is to provide professionals in the tech industry with free technical education and the opportunity to mix with peers and develop relationships.

Three members of The Filter’s development team – Fern Scott, Emma Russell and Kim Falk Jørgensen attended the booked-out event, which included various interesting talks on programming trends:

Richard Dalton of devjoy.com provided insights into Test Driven Development.

“I particularly liked the idea of taking a Test-Driven approach to one’s Test-Driven Development process, or TDTDD,” reflects Emma.

George Adamson talked about using jquery templates for rendering dynamic content in web pages and provided an interesting twitter feed viewer application as an example of this.

Mark Rendle’s Minimalist Software Development talk was also a favourite, focusing on using lightweight web development frameworks for simpler applications where fuller frameworks like ASP.NET MVC would be too cumbersome. He covered WebMatrix and Nancy, a .NET version of the Ruby web app framework Sinatra. He also talked about his own SimpleData package, for simple intuitive database access, and demoed using it from Nancy – the idea is that you can access data using properties and method names derived from the database structure instead of writing a SQL query and it just works (sort of like a lightweight Entity Framework).

“Most importantly,” says Emma, “the quality of refreshments was significantly improved from last year, as you can see from the above photo of Fern demonstrating the generous dimensions of the scones provided with afternoon tea.”

Events like this demonstrate that there is a growing and thriving technology community in the South West of England, and that companies like The Filter play an important role in promoting an environment of innovation and development in the region. It also shows you can get tasty scones in Bristol.