Tasktop

A room full of developers and students, cans of beer loosely scattered around the room, along with bags of chips, pop and pizza. It’s a setup that would make more sense for a party, were it not for everyone clustering around power cords and loud finger tapping of engineers ripping up their laptops.

Sticking to traditional hackathon culture, there was a whole lot of coding, lots of beer, and happy chit chat mixed with serious faces betraying some heavy problem solving, in a word: hackathon-fun!

In attendence: several experienced Eclipse submitters, students from SFU and UBC, and other Eclipse enthusiasts. Projects hacked on: JDT UI, Scripted, Orion and Mylyn (for project details see the wiki page).

It was great to have Ian Skerrett from the Eclipse Foundataion attend and hack away with all the others. Great many ideas were thrown around and many a bug got fixed. Newbies got to learn a lot about Gerrit & Mylyn and how to contribute to open source. Thanx to all who attended and made the night that much better!

See more photos from the event.

It’s been an exciting time for Tasktop. Our Vancouver Headquarters has moved to a new West Georgia location, overlooking Vancouver’s cool Coal Harbor and beautiful Stanley Park, and sporting a spacious 7,000 square feet runway for us to ‘grow into’.

Our old office has been great but we’ve grown so much over the last year that it just couldn’t hold us any longer. We wanted something in the same part of town, that reflected the kind of company we are and we found it!

We finally moved to our new digs last week and are loving it. We’re especially pleased about the great restaurants on nearby Robson street, beautiful walking areas in Coal Harbour and Stanley Park, and we can’t wait to meet our new neighbours.

See more photos of our new office.

Want a chance to check out our new space and meet some interesting people? Join us for the Eclipse DemoCamp Hackathon on November 13th, held at our new corporate headquarters on 1100-1500 West Georgia Street. If last year’s event is any indication, this year’s Hackathon should be a smashing success.

Expect to meet a bunch of bright, friendly software-oriented folks from all walks of life in a fun and casual atmosphere, get satisfaction from sharing your knowledge and experience, and learn from others. If you’re interested in Open Source and especially Mylyn (Tasks, WikiText, Team/SCM, etc.) you’ll get a lot out of this event.

If you’re an Eclipse committer come and share your expertise and knowledge. Everyone is welcome to attend. Here are last year’s hackers busy at work during last year’s Hackathon.

If you plan on attending please put your name on the Hackathon wiki page. Bring your coding hat, and pizza, snacks and drinks are on us. Thanks to our co-organizers, VMware, for making this event possible.

And now, back to nesting…

Tasktop Technologies, VMware and the Eclipse Foundation co-hosted the Eclipse Juno DemoCamp in Vancouver. The event was a blast with great presentations, cool prizes and lots of opportunities for networking and making new friends. The event started off with an introduction from VMware’s Kris De Volder (seen on the right) and David Green, Tasktop’s VP of Engineering (seen on the left), who recapped Tasktop’s development over the last year since the last Eclipse DemoCamp.

The intro was followed by the main presentations:

		Reverb: Dynamic Bookmarks for Developers (Nick Sawadsky, UBC, Software Practices Lab)
		Collage Framework and Code Markup Tools (Alex Bradley)
		AVA: Assembly Visualization and Analysis. (Jennifer Baldwin & Yvonne Coady, University of Victoria)
		Rigel: A new approach to JavaScript editing based on the Eclipse Orion Editor. (Andrew Eiseneberg, SpringSource a Division of VMWare)
		jimu: Build sophisticated Android apps in minutes, using building blocks. (Linton Ye, jimu Labs)

Seen below is a presentation by Yvonne Coady and Jennifer Baldwin (speaking over Skype) that proved that remote interaction can be engaging and fun:

In this photo, Andrew Eiseneberg of WMware, is introducing Rigel, a new way to do JavaScript editing:

The presentations closed with Linton Ye describing how jimu made Android app development easy:

After the event, the socializing continued at the nearby Library Square Pub. See More Photos from the event…

For many organizations the ability to deliver software is fundamental to business success. New products, services, updates to channels, pricing or promotion require changes to applications and websites. Organizations are now looking to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) to provide visibility into this increasingly core business process.

ALM promises the benefits of business management to the practice of software delivery. ALM2.0+ describes the next generation of practices that broaden the lifecycle to include operations and the business and add functionality for planning and collaboration.

But introducing ALM is difficult, with developers, business analysts, operations, project managers and QA professionals all having their own tools and working practices. Bringing order to this chaos requires a different way of thinking about ALM – one based on stakeholder inclusion and cross-vendor integration.

In this talk, featured speaker Dave West, Vice President, Research Director at Forrester will describe the reality of ALM adoption. West and Mik Kersten, Founder and CEO of Tasktop Technologies will present patterns for successful ALM adoption for mid and large-scale organization, and highlight how organizations can incrementally obtain the benefits of ALM by connecting siloes, one stakeholder at a time.

This talk will:

	Introduce ALM2.0+, its promise and its challenges
	Define a series of ALM integration patterns
	Describe how successful organizations are delivering software more efficiently with ALM2.0+ today

All webinar attendees will be automatically entered in a drawing for a new Apple iPad 3.

This year’s Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit was held in Vegas. What better place to learn both blackjack and IT strategy especially when two of the Tasktopians were on the MIT Blackjack team. We had a cool handout highlighting the pain points that Tasktop Dev and Tasktop Sync help solve, as well as a basic strategy table for Blackjack. Tasktop was a silver sponsor of the event and we had a blast networking and strategizing with fellow innovators and industry leaders.

We had a lot of fun hanging out with our new partners from Borland who attended the show as well. We’re proud to announce that customers of Borland StarTeam can now gain interoperability and integration via Tasktop Dev and Tasktop Sync. The desserts at Serendipity were bigger than Borland product manager Nicole’s head.

Congrats to Naji from California who won a new iPad2 in the Tasktop giveaway draw.