Disclaimer: At the end of this you will not have learnt to create a deep-fried, sugar-coated ring of bready goodness. Though I may write that one next!

Working at an agency it is often the case that our clients have heard and are enthusiastic about Scrum/Agile, but struggle to move away from what they have been doing before.

One of the biggest problems is that because the business doesn’t understanding everyone’s responsibilities in this ‘new’ Scrum framework, the PO (sometimes plural if you don’t nip that one in the bud), stakeholders and ex-project managers all revert to old, default, behaviours rather then seek to understand their role better. This leads to confusion, mis-communication, pressure, ]over-commitment and conflict. For more info see this blog post about over-commitment by James Scrimmers.

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Our 2nd meetup was held at Skimlinks office.

Special thanks to @CiaranR, and @skimlinks people for providing the venue, pizzas and beers again.

We had 2 speakers, me and Oliver Nightingale both from New Bamboo.

The Joy of d3.js

By @makoto_inoue (me!)

• Introductory blog post
• Hans Rosling's Gampinder video at "The Joy of Stats" Video
• Demo
• Talk Reference Wikis
• Talk screencast

D3 Geo Visualisations

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At the end of last week, it looked like we had made it out of the woods with the Christmas and New Year slowdown, and the unexpected arrival of a Rails security bulletin just a couple of days after all the celebrating was over. It turns out we were wrong.

Yesterday, the Rails security team announced not one but two security issues, one of which affected all versions of Rails. This has kept our current support team very busy with testing, updating, re-testing and deploying our many projects. Within the first 16 hours of the announcement, and within only a few hours of waking up here in the UK, our team had the vast majority of our active projects updated and re-deployed.

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Happy New Year!!

If you are thinking about learning something new in the New Year, how about learning d3.js?

Since organising the Londinium MMXII Hackathon (Video) last year, I have become a big fan of d3.js for data visualisation.

Last year, I organised a few drinkups and meetups, and am now excited to announce my video tutorials called "The Joy of d3.js", a commit-by-commit guide to building Hans Rosling's "GapMinder" data visualisation in d3.js

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We're doing a lot of really good work, but we're not doing a lot of writing about it! Telling the world what we're up to is really important to make sure we keep attracting the sharpest people and the most interesting work, so we're on the lookout for a marketing manager. If that might be you, check out the job description here:

http://new-bamboo.co.uk/jobs/marketing_manager/

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You might say we've been preparing for Christmas for five months, or you might say that good things need time, but we've finally had time to put together the video of the MMXII Hackathon we helped organise.

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Say Cheese is a small library that makes it easier to integrate webcams into your website or app, using the recent getUserMedia API. It opens up a whole range of opportunities for web developers, provided their users run modern and up to date browsers (sorry Safari, IE).

One such opportunity is working with the user's webcam stream on the server side. This could be as simple as sending a single frame (what SayCheese calls a snapshot), or pushing the entire stream itself with, say, websockets. I'll start simple and show how you can send a 'snapshot' to the server via AJAX, and then do something interesting with it.

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After two successful drinkups, we finally held our first london d3.js meetup.

Special thanks to @timruffles, @CiaranR, and Skimlinks people for providing the venue, pizzas, beers and a talk.

Here is the list of topics we mentioned during/after the meetup.

Introduction and Announcement.

• In December, we are going to have a joint Xmas party with other meetup groups.
• Register Google Group or check Lanyard for meetup minutes and future announcements.

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I had a pleasure of giving a presentation about dRuby with Masatoshi Seki, (I call him "Seki san") the author of the library, at this year's RubyConf, and I would like to take you through the journey we've been through.

In this blog post I will talk about

• How to prepare talk proposals
• Being inspired by other speakers to strengthen your talk
• Learning by coding

I hope this blog post gives you an overview of the conference from an angle of "Distributed and Parallel computing in Ruby" and also inspires you to submit a talk proposal of your own at next year's RubyConf in Miami.

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(Co-Authored with Claudio Ortolina.)

Here at New Bamboo no one enforces the use of specific development tools: team members choose their own text editor, shell and whatever else they feel can help them get their job done. Some of us have been working entirely in the shell for quite some time, using tools like Vim, Emacs, Screen and Tmux. We enjoy the freedom and flexibility this offers, but we recognize that switching to a text console can be painful, especially for people who have always used a graphical environment.

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