This Wednesday I was through to Glasgow for the first west-coast TechMeetup of the year. Free beer and pizza notwithstanding, the two talks were both excellent.
Jamie Boyd (@jamboid) gave a talk on ‘Responsive design’ illustrated with examples from the Macdonald Hotels website showing how combining media queries with specifically-designed CSS can yield dynamic layouts tailored to different device profiles without the use of user-agent sniffing or JavaScript. Sadly he left the visual demo of this until right at the end, whereupon the rest of his presentation clicked into place. Regardless, with me doing some web work at the minute it’s definitely an idea I’ll be returning to in the next few weeks.
Sebastien Lambla (@serialseb), the most energetic and characterful presenter I’ve seen in a long time, presented a deep-dive on HTTP caching and its knock-on effects, and how to combat them (and leverage them) when providing web services.
Besides the talks an interesting aspect for me was the initial welcome section. At the start of each meet-up attendees go round the room introducing themselves, saying what they do or who they work for and what they might be looking to gain from the event. There were perhaps 100 people in the room so the process took maybe half an hour, but what struck me was how many people attending worked for firms actively trying to recruit developers – and how few people attending were actually looking for work.
Technical events like TechMeetup and DDD Scotland are ideal hunting grounds for companies looking to recruit. By attending you gain visibility, you can get to know potential hires in a much more relaxed setting than an interview and you can get a feel for your competition’s hiring needs. You also get broader access to the rumour-mill – who’s planning on setting up shop in your town, who’s about to expand an existing office, who’s about to embark on a new project and who’s in trouble.
What interested me was the strength of the recruitment story for those seeking software development work in Edinburgh and Glasgow. At the Glasgow event there must have been at least 5 firms offering .NET developer opportunities, probably as many again doing Ruby on Rails projects, people after Android and iOS developers… The situation was much the same at the Edinburgh event two weeks previously – of those introducing themselves probably half were working for firms desperately trying to get software resource in the door. In both cases it was clear – developers were in extraordinarily high demand and very short supply.
The broader economy might be in trouble, but in Scotland at least the future seems bright for the developer community.