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Joy of Coding 2013
On March the first, I headed for Rotterdam to try and find the Maassilo, where I expected to encounter dozens of enthusiastic fellow coders. I arrived relatively early, but even so, I had to stand in line to get my badge. So I guess my fellow coders really were enthusiastic! It’s not often that I encounter so many coders that don’t mind getting up early. With my badge and bag of goodies in hand I headed off to the main stage, where coffee, muffins and cheese scones could be found.
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GotoCon Aarhus 2012
It’s taken me quite a while, but I finally finished my summary of GotoCon Aarhus. On the StoryTroop website you can find all my blog posts about the sessions I attended. But for your convenience, I’ve written this summary of the summaries with links to the individual stories (the link is in the title).
Sunday September 30th
Influence Strategies tutorial by Linda Rising
This was a half day tutorial about six possible strategies you can use to influence the people around you.
Problem-solving and Decision-making by Linda Rising
This was another half day tutorial, but this time about how you make decisions yourself. Linda debunked some of the common misconceptions about thinking that we all have.
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Devox 2012 – Conference day 3
On Friday we decided to sleep in, as there would be no more sponsor exhibition. We were still early enough to talk to some people and for me to have breakfast. Our first session of the day was on Cloud Robotics by Damon Kohler. Read more…
Devoxx 2012 – Conference day 2
JBoss announcement
Once again, we had gotten up early to evade the worst of the morning rush hour in the tram. Before the keynote there was an announcement by JBoss about the new name of the JBoss AS. They had intended to have ended the naming contest and to have a new name to present, but sadly the legal department interfered and they didn’t have the new name yet. Instead they had five candidate names that we could vote on before the end of the month.
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Devoxx 2012 – Conference day 1
I started the day early, so I could beat the queue at registration. In fact we were there before eight, but fortunately they were already open. And the only reason I had to wait a little before I got my wristband was because I had to find the barcode again that I had downloaded onto my phone. After that we had some quiet time to have breakfast and greet people as they came in. Just before nine o’clock we headed over to room 8 for the keynote session. I thought it would start at 9, so I was a bit surprised when the doors hadn’t opened yet. Only when we had settled down into the room I found out that it didn’t start until 9:30. But the room filled up quickly, so we were glad we’d come early (as most other people had done so as well).
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Adding layout to your Docx4j-generated word documents, part 2
In the previous two blog posts, I wrote about creating tables in a docx document and about adding images and some layout. In this blog I’ll continue with some more examples of the layout of a document:
Adding images and layout to your Docx4j-generated word documents, part 1
In the previous blog, I wrote about creating tables in a docx document. In this blog I’ll show some examples about images, page breaks and the table of content:
1. Adding an image
2. Adding an image to a table
3. Adding a page break
4. Adding a table of content
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Creating Word documents with Docx4j
Some time ago, I was working for a client who wanted to have reports in Word and in Excel. I’d worked on projects generating PDF files and CSV files, but never docx or xlsx before. Knowing that MS Office is XML based these days, I couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t some library to help me create those files. A quick online search revealed that indeed there was: Docx4j. And so I set out to try this new library and see what it could do.
On their website you can find that Docx4j can read, update and create docx, xlsx and pptx documents. I only needed to generate documents, so I didn’t acutally try to read and update them, but the principles are the same. Docx4j is shipped with quite a few samples already, but I found that some of the samples showed multiple things at the same time or that they didn’t quite show what I needed to know. So there were quite a few things that I had to figure out myself. Fortunately Docx4j closely follows the Office Open XML standard, so it wasn’t too hard. All in all I was really satisfied with the functionality offered by this library.
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Agile Coach Camp Netherlands 2012
Sometime at the end of January I heard about Agile Coach Camp where coaches would teach coaches. So I inquired if wannabe coaches would be welcome too. The response was positive, and thus I registered. I found out that Mary Beijleveld (who was one of the organizers) lives in the same town I do, and asked her if we could travel together. The price I had to pay for that was helping to get the conference location ready for all the participants, but I had already planned to spend the entire Friday on the conference anyway. So on Friday morning Mary came to pick me up and we drove to Vierhouten together.
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Devnology Community Day Review
This year I had finally convinced my partner to join me for the Devnology community day, convincing him that there would be several other C# programmers there. So we set out early, braving the slippery roads (which didn’t turn out all that bad). We arrived just after the building was supposed to be open. Which would have been great if it wasn’t for the fact that it was in fact still closed. There was quite a crowd standing before the gates already. But as it was -15 degrees Celcius, we decided to stay in the car under the emergency blankets we had brought. After about forty minutes, somebody with a key showed up and we went inside. I didn’t take off my coat until after I’d finished my first cup of tea. And so the day started about fifteen minutes late.
How to show code quality – Joost Visser
The session started out well with an open discussion, trying to find out what quality is. According to Joost there are two kinds of quality: funtionality and technical quality. Whereas functional quality (the code does what was specified) is relatively easy to point out, technical quality is less tangible. This lead to a discussion on what makes code beautiful. Some aspects that were pointed out are easy to understand, performance, loosely coupled code, code split according to responsibilities, and compliance to coding standards, to name a few.
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