Back in March, we ran our Clojure Launchpad as the first of what we hoped would become a series of community training events.
I'm now very excited to announce our second event.
Typesafe have very kindly loaned us the use of Philipp Haller for a weekend and Cake Solutions are shipping us an only-slightly-used Jan Machacek.
We therefore have the makings of a truly awesome (and I use that word only after careful consideration) two day Scala training course on the 20th and 21st of September.
The idea of the Launchpad series is to provide affordable training in interesting languages and technologies for Scottish developers. The events are inexpensive because they are run by unpaid volunteers who want to share their knowledge and increase the uptake of the technologies they care about.
NCR pick up the tab for the volunteers' expenses and open up our offices to host the events.
Although we could make the events completely free to attend, only a limited number of places are available on each course.
To ensure that the people claiming the spaces are genuinely interested in the technologies and that turnout on the day is high, we therefore charge a nominal ticket price. It's intended to be just high enough that make you think about it, but still low enough to seem shockingly cheap.
By happy coincidence, this amount is generally about the same figure that will cover catering for everyone at the event.
The courses are open for anyone to attend, but are generally aimed at professional programmers that are at a beginner level in the language or technology covered by the course.
The "Launchpad" name was orignally coined by Adrian Mowat from Glasgow's clojure community for a course he ran at techcube. We borrowed the name, Adrian and his course for our first Launchpads and with his kind agreement we've kept the name for the rest of the series.
We've managed to get two great trainers for the Scala Launchpad.
Philipp is one of the top committers to the Scala language.
He's the author of the original Scala Actors library and is currently working on various improvements to the language including pickling and futures and promises.
Philipp works as a consultant for Typesafe and has a reputation as an excellent trainer.
Although he is inconveniently located in Geneva, we're going to put him on a plane and fly him to Edinburgh.
Jan is CTO at Cake Solutions and a regular speaker at Scala conferences.
He's on the wrong side of the border in Manchester, but Cake Solutions are going to put him on a train and bring him to us.
We expect this to be a very popular event and are looking at ways in which we can open it to a larger number of people.
We might be able to find a bigger venue, but if we do, we will need additional volunteers with some Scala knowledge to help on the day.
So far, Jason King from JP Morgan has kindly offered to help out. If you could assist then please get in touch.
To try and ensure the tickets get spread around a little we're selling them in batches. The first batch is available now from Eventbrite.
Update: the first batch of tickets sold out within 24 hours. Next batch will be announced via twitter.
Henry Coles
Tags: scala, launchpad
July 2nd 2014