RIC ROBERTS

Last week I took part in the Developing Solutions Camp in Gravesend, Kent, and was delighted to win a prize for the best Mobile App prototype. We worked on a prototype for the Learning Game, one of the ideas that had been proposed before the event, and ended up winning top-prize in the Mobile...

Later this week, I’ll be running another 3-day Ruby on Rails bootcamp at the Madlab in Manchester as part of their Omniversity programme. The last bootcamp was a great success, so we’re using the same formula, with a few minor tweaks based on how the first bootcamp went in August. To...

I’m going to be attending Kent County Council’s Developing Solutions Camp, in a couple of weeks. In my capacity as a Linked Data “mentor” for the event, I posted a guest blog article on the Open Kent website. Studies around open data often focus on the “armchair...

I’m going to be giving a talk tomorrow at the Manchester Free Software Group meetup at the Madlab tomorrow night (Tues, 18th Oct at 7pm). I’ll be exploring the benefits and pitfalls of using free software to build Swirrl‘s Linked Data platform for publishing open data,...

We (Swirrl) were really pleased to hear yesterday that we were the winners of the Talis Award for Linked Data, one of the prizes in the Open Data Challenge, a Europe-wide competition run by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Open Forum Academy. The award was for our Linked Data version of the...

Tekin Suleyman and I will be delivering a 3-day, affordable Ruby on Rails bootcamp at the MadLab in Manchester, on 17th-19th of August, as part of the Omniversity programme. It’s aimed at developers who already know a bit about web development and object oriented programming, but have...

Last weekend, I attended the 2nd Lovely Data Hack Day, part of the 2011 FutureEverything conference and festival in Manchester. As well as getting to meet more people interested in open data, it was good to catch up with people from the previous event, and see what they’d been up to with...

Last weekend I attended Technique Retreat 2011, held in Manchester and organised by the White Room. There were several streams of training available, but I concentrated on mobile and JavaScript. Matt Ryan gave a good introduction to iPhone and Android development, and I thoroughly enjoyed Seb...