When: Tuesday, May 28 @ 5:30-7:00 PM (pizza/networking @ 5:30, presentation @ 6:00)
Where: Tipping Canoe (601-62 Albert St., Winnipeg)

We will examine some of the things you can do to make faster more responsive web sites.
Server side as well as coding and style techniques will be examined and discussed.
Discussion points will include GZIP compression, code minification and expires headers.

Who: David Engel is a PHP and .NET developer with a Computer Engineering Degree from the University of Manitoba. David currently is the Applications Developer for Maxim Truck & Trailer where he works with open source and Microsoft technologies to develop both internal and external applications.

How: We’ll start the meet-up with pizza and networking at around 5:30. David will present at 6:00 and will try to wrap up by around 7:00 to get you home at a decent hour. Feel free to stick around after the presentation, however, as some of us like to carry our discussions over to King Street for refreshments.

Where: Tipping Canoe (601-62 Albert St., Winnipeg)

What: You can cache everything. OK, maybe that isn’t exactly true, but it may be truer than you think. We will discuss caching techniques to speed up your user experiences with a mix of back end and front end, and hopefully a nice balance of code and theory. Memcached will be our primary focus in this talk as far as code goes, but the theory should be applicable to other technologies as well.

Who: David Engel is a PHP and .NET developer with a Computer Engineering Degree from the University of Manitoba. David currently is the Applications Developer for Maxim Truck & Trailer where he works with open source and Microsoft technologies to develop both internal and external applications.

How: We’ll start the meet-up with pizza and networking at around 5:30. David will present at 6:00 and will try to wrap up by around 7:00 to get you home at a decent hour. Feel free to stick around after the presentation, however, as some of us like to carry our discussions over to King Street for refreshments.

Where: Tipping Canoe (601-62 Albert St., Winnipeg)

What: Writing software can be difficult for various reasons.  Gathering requirements is hard.  Requirements evolve as the complex business processes being automated are expressed in software and become better understood by the programmers and the users alike.  Programming APIs are not always as user friendly as they could be.  Making changes to one part of the software can cause unintended changes in other parts of the software.

In this presentation Dan will attempt to provide you with his lessons learned developing software.  He will demonstrate how he goes about ensuring his deliverables, and discuss published best practices in the field of software development.

Who: Dan Bernardic is a University of Winnipeg-educated software developer, and has been developing for the Web with PHP for about 5 years.  A big fan and advocate of WordPress for Web development, he is involved in organizing the 2013 Winnipeg WordCamp coming up on May 4th.

Dan is happily employed as a senior Web developer for Farm Business Communications, Canada’s largest agricultural publisher, on a team of 6 web developers.  He has also enjoyed finding cool freelance projects alongside his day job for the past 2.5 years.

More information about Dan including contact methods can be found at http://gravatar.com/dbernar1

How: We’ll start the meet-up with pizza and networking at around 5:30. Dan will present at 6:00 and will try to wrap up by around 7:00 to get you home at a decent hour. Feel free to stick around after the presentation, however, as some of us like to carry our discussions over to King Street for refreshments.

When: Tuesday, Nov 27 @ 5:30-7:00 PM(pizza/networking @ 5:30, presentation @ 6:00)

Where: Tipping Canoe (601-62 Albert St., Winnipeg)

What: MySQL goes hand-in-hand with PHP as its most popular (common) choice for data storage and retrieval. Although many different queries can be used to retrieve the same set of data, the specific way that MySQL collects and organizes the data can vary wildly, even though the differences in the queries seem insignificant.

In this presentation, we will breakdown the general way MySQL interprets a query, go over how to read a MySQL EXPLAIN statement, and pointers will be given on what to look for. We willexamine specific examples drawn from production applications (custom applications and WordPress) using commonly used data structures (i.e. users, posts, comments).

Who: Michael Riediger is a Certified MySQL Database Administrator with a Ph.D. in Engineering Science from Simon Fraser University. He works at Tipping Canoe where he is responsible for the databases behind several high-traffic (top-100 Alexa country ranked) web applications.

How: We’ll start the meet-up with pizza and networking at around 5:30. Michael will present at 6:00 and will try to wrap up by around 7:00 to get you home at a decent hour. Feel free to stick around after the presentation, however, as some of us like to carry our discussions over to King Street for refreshments.

When: Tuesday, Oct 30 @ 5:30-7:00 PM
(pizza/networking @ 5:30, presentation @ 6:00)

Where: Tipping Canoe (601-62 Albert St., Winnipeg)

What: OAuth is an open standard for authorization. It allows users to share their private resources stored on one site (Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, …) with another site without having to hand out their credentials, typically supplying username and password tokens instead. Each token grants access to a specific site for specific resources and for a defined duration. This allows a user to grant a third party site access to their information stored with another service provider, without sharing their access permissions or the full extent of their data.

We will be examining the implementation of the OAuth protocol in PHP and looking at simple Client Side implementations.

Who: Jeff Friesen and Varun Mehra are both developers with Computer Science Degrees from the University of Manitoba. Both Varun and Jeff work at Tipping Canoe where they develop mobile applications (Android, iOS) for a variety of websites using an in-house REST Api developed using PHP.

How: We’ll start the meetup with pizza and networking at around 5:30. Jeff and Varun will present at 6:00 and we will try to wrap up by around 7:00 to get you home at a decent hour. Feel free to stick around after the presentation, however, as some of us like to carry our discussions over to King Street for refreshments.

When: Tuesday, Sept 25 @ 5:30-7:00 PM
(pizza/networking @ 5:30, presentation @ 6:00)

Where: Tipping Canoe (601-62 Albert St., Winnipeg)

What:
How a meta-language can help you take control of your stylesheets and help improve your style productivity. Whether you are a developer looking for inheritance, a designer looking for structure or a manager looking for efficiencies, the dynamic stylesheet language could possibly be just the tool for you.
We will examine such features as

- variables
- mixins
- operations
- nesting
- alternatives like SASS

Who: David Engel is a PHP and .NET developer with a Computer Engineering Degree from the University of Manitoba. David started developing .NET apps at Pulse Engineering to manage the business and engineering processes, then moved on to Tipping Canoe in 2007 where he helped build web-based consumer-driven applications on the LAMP stack using PHP. David currently is the Applications Developer for Maxim Truck & Trailer where he continues working with open source and Microsoft technologies to develop both internal and external applications.

How: We’ll start the meetup with pizza and networking at around 5:30. David will present at 6:00 and we will try to wrap up by around 7:00 to get you home at a decent hour. Feel free to stick around after the presentation, however, as some of us like to carry our discussions over to King Street for refreshments.

Where:  Tipping Canoe (601-62 Albert St., Winnipeg)

Note that this is a new location! The 6th floor of 62 Albert St.

What :  Learn how to leverage the power of XDebug to insert breakpoints, step through your code and watch variables in PHP. Guaranteed to reduce coding-related hair loss.

Who:  Evan Falk has been a development team lead at Tipping Canoe since 2006. He has been responsible for architecture and implementation of high volume, high availability web applications and is a strong advocate for simple, elegant solutions that are easy to learn and to maintain. Evan has a B.Sc (Computer Science) from the University of Manitoba.

How:  We’ll start the meetup with Pizza and networking at around 5:30. Evan will present at 6:00 and we will try to wrap up by around 7:00. Feel free to stick around and chat after the presentation as well (we may head to the King’s Head after)

Where:  Tipping Canoe (601-62 Albert St., Winnipeg)

Note that this is a new location! 6th floor of 62 Albert St.

What :  Jenkins is an open source product from the Java community that provides a slick web interface to build tools like Ant, Maven, or whatever else you can imagine you would like to do as a regular “job” on your code. This could include running unit tests when someone commits code to your SCM, packaging up an artifact for deploying, deploying code to various servers, sending messages, running SVN statistics programs, virtually any automation you can think of.

In this talk Joel will install Jenkins, go through the configuration and suite of tools you’ll need, connect it to an SVN server, and set up some jobs. By the end a demonstration of using Jenkins in practice should be complete.

Who:  Joel Klaverkamp graduated from the Computer Analyst / Programmer course at RRCC in 2001 and proceeded to work for the City of Winnipeg, Concordia Hospital, the WRHA and Manitoba eHealth before quitting government work altogether to join the team at Tipping Canoe in 2008. After a year of working there he was made Head of Development for Quidco and a year after that relocated to London, UK to hire and train a team of developers to bring the Quidco development in house. After setting up the team and installing the Agile process, Joel moved back to Winnipeg and now works once again as a software developer for Tipping Canoe. There are many technologies Joel is familiar with, but he always enjoy learning more. Joel also enjoys making music and spending time with his family.

How:  We’ll start the meetup with Pizza and networking at around 5:30. Joel will present at 6:00 and we will try to wrap up by around 7:00. Feel free to stick around and chat after the presentation as well (we may head to the King’s Head after)

Where:   Tipping Canoe (101-141 Bannatyne Ave. Winnipeg)

What :      PHP 5.4 RC6 is out. We’ll take a look at it to see what it can add to our development environments.

• Traits
• Class invocation without construction
• Class constructor chaining
• Array dereferencing of functions
• And more…

Who: David Engel started his career as a .NET developer, but has primarily been a PHP developer since taking up with Tipping Canoe in 2007 where he helped build web-based consumer-driven applications on the LAMP stack. Currently David works in applications development for Maxim Truck & Trailer building internal and external applications in both PHP and .NET. David holds a Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Manitoba.

How:  We’ll start the meetup with pizza and networking at around 5:30.  David will present at 6:00 and we will try to wrap up by around 7:00 to get you home at a decent hour.  Feel free to stick around after the presentation, however, as some of us like to carry our discussions over to King Street for refreshments.

Where:  Tipping Canoe  (101-141 Bannatyne Ave. Winnipeg)

What:  Design patterns in software are nothing new but a lot of times the decision needs to be made when to use them and when not to use them.  Joel:  “This talk will cover a few real world examples of times I’ve used design patterns in my work to make the code more flexible and to work around typical gotchas that occur when you don’t use the patterns when you should.  I will also look at times where they’ve been used where not appropriate and the troubles they’ve caused.”

Who:  Joel Klaverkamp graduated from the Computer Analyst / Programmer course at RRCC in 2001 and proceeded to work for the City of Winnipeg, Concordia Hospital, the WRHA and Manitoba eHealth before quitting government work altogether to join the team at Tipping Canoe in 2008.  After a year of working there he was made Head of Development for Quidco and a year after that relocated to London, UK to hire and train a team of developers to bring the Quidco development in house.  After setting up the team and installing the Agile process, Joel moved back to Winnipeg and now works as a freelance software developer / IT consultant.  There are many technologies Joel is familiar with, but he always enjoy learning more.  Joel also enjoys making music and spending time with his family.

How:  We’ll start the meetup with Pizza and networking at around 5:30.  Joel will present at 6:00 and we will try to wrap up by around 7:00.  Feel free to stick around and chat after the presentation as well (we may head to the King’s Head after)