Following on from the very successful presentation given by Jan and Aleksa at the inaugural Spring User Group (SUG) meeting on Friday, Jan will be presenting a slightly extended version of the same presentation at SpringOne.

SpringOne is being held at MetroPolis Business Center, MetroPolis Antwerp, Groenendaallaan 394 2030, Antwerp, Belgium. More information can be found here.

Jan will be presenting on Thursday 12th June at 14.00 - 15.00 and both he and I will be at the Conference for most of the two days. If you are attending the conference please let me know and we can arrange to meet up over a coffee/beer.

As you may already know the Spring User Group UK is having its first meeting on the afternoon of 30th May at the the Crypt, in St. James Church, next to Skills Matter.

The organisers have put together a very interesting event, with speakers from SpringSource, Cake and UBS. Followed by interactive breakout sessions to chat with the speakers and other User Group members, this is a fantastic opportunity to learn, share your experience, broaden your network and join this community. Come join us and find out about the exciting new developments of the Spring framework and how practitioners are enabling their businesses, by using Spring as a core construct of their solutions.

Event Details What: London Spring User Group : First London Spring User Group Event
Where: The Crypt, St. James Church, Clerkenwell, EC1R
When: This Friday - 30 May 2008 Starts at 12:00

* Dave Syer of Spring Source will be telling us about Spring Batch
* Rob Purcell & Manoj Bajaj of UBS will give a talk on reliable database/messaging transactions without 2PC
* Jan Machacek of Cake will present a case study of a project at Central Government, where Spring was used successfully.

SpringSource, Skills Matter and Cake Solutions! are all sponsors of the event.

Please register here

I hope to see you there.

The beginning of this week saw Ibrahim join Cake, bringing an additional two years Java application development experience to the team. Ibrahim has spent the week setting his machine up and getting use to the Cake systems and tools, on Monday he will begin work on one of our major projects. Monday also sees the arrival of Andrew Chalkley who adds new skills in to the Cake mix. Andrew adds Ajax and Ruby & Rails skills to our toolset as well as adding CSS, and OOP PHP expertise. Andrew will embark on a 4 week Cake internal Java training program before begging work on one of our current projects.

One of the next internal projects I intend to begin today is the updating and redesigning of the Cake website. Our current design has been with us for a couple of years now and although much of the website is current the portfolio section and our service section needs a rewrite. My intention is to update, add and delete some of the current content before looking at the design of the website. Watch this space.

One item on the website “The 30 Second Pitch” has been renamed to “Cake’s Value Proposition” and revised to “Cake Solutions helps companies achieve their business goals. We do this by taking time to understand your business and using our broad technical knowledge and specialist programming skills to produce software that truly helps your organisation.
Cake is made up of a team of talented J2EE and open source software developers and business savvy project management personnel. Members of the Cake team are published authors and Sun certified developers.
A recent system built for a central government agency is being used by 2,500 international users. The application began as a research project, which thanks to its success within the agency has now grown in to a mature, successful and high profile system.
Contact Cake if you know that your current systems are not performing as well as they should or you need an innovative solution to a business problem, on 0161 975 6110.” Let me know what you think?

Finally Ani, Aleksa, Jan and I are all off to visit DeCare on Tuesday & Wednesday to help cement the newly formed partnership and to get a handover for some code that Cake will maintain recently written by DeCare. We are all looking forward to that trip immensely!

Thats it for now, have a great weekend.

I arrived back on Tuesday the 15th after an extended Christmas break (the longest time I have been away from work since I was at school!) and less than 12 hours later arrived for the Spring Exchange 2008 conference in London. This was an important day for Cake for two reasons, so Cake was out in force with Ani, Aleksa and Jan supporting me.

Firstly we officially launched an exciting business partnership with DeCare systems to collaborate on projects in the UK. Combining our skills and geographical locations will enable us to provide the best possible service to our clients. Details of the partnership can be found at Cake/DeCare partnership.

Secondly we used the conference for the launch of a Consortium, Content Unlimlted, of which Cake is a founding member. Ben Whittam-Smith and DeCare make up the rest of the Consortium. Content Unlimited is formed around a jointly developed business information management system, a solution to help enterprises get closer to their customers by taking a unique approach of merging document management with contact management. The establishment of the partnership formalises and expands an earlier initiative in which the members designed and developed this system for the UK Trade & Investment government agency. The custom-built application is used across its network of 2,300 staff and advisors internally (at department level) and externally (by all overseas embassies) to locate up to date, attributable and accurate information. The system facilitates a continuous interaction between content and contacts, to the mutual benefit of both, and to the benefit of the public perception of the organisation. Details of the product can be found at, White Paper.

I also took the opportunity to speak to members of the SpringSource team about certifying the UK Trade and Investment system making it the first SpringSource certified system.

We have said goodbye to Jess who has left to pursue an ambition of working in London and we will be saying hello to Andrew Chalkley who will be joining us us as a Java developer on the 4th of February. Andrew brings a number of additional skills such as Ajax, RubyonRails, expert cc skills and expert OOP PHP skills.

I travel to London tomorrow for my quarterly Strategic Coach course on Friday which I will report on in my next post. One of the Cake’s team New Years resolutions is to make more frequent posts to our blog, it is after all the most viewed area of our website.

Christmas is fast approaching as are a number of important deadlines. Cake is heading up the integration effort involving 3 parties for the beta launch of a central government knowledge base system. This is a culmination of 8 months work building a new platform for the applications to run and some significant new feature modules including Contact Management and Metrics. The new platform will allow us to continue to develop the system to fulfil many additional requests for new functionality to what is already a very useful, widely used system.

December has also seen the relationship between DeCare and Cake enter a new phase. We want to build on the fantastic synergy between the two companies and the now proven working relationship to generate high quality new business for 2008 for both companies. An initial recent meeting allowed us to discuss our ideas and another meeting before Christmas will lead to some tangible plans being put in place to allow us to move forward quickly next year.

Whilst I was down in London I met up with some colleagues from my coaching program, The Strategic Coach. Salli, Brian and I spent a number of hours in the afternoon discussing our businesses, bouncing ideas off each other and reviewing some of the Strategic Coach tools we use and the benefits we get from this. We then headed out to a pub in the evening for a much deserved meal and a few drinks.

Cake closes for two weeks over Christmas to give the team a well earned break beginning Friday 21st December through to Monday 7th January. Before that we have our Christmas party to look forward to, Rock the Kasbah at Old Trafford. For those that are interested here is the link, http://www.the-christmas-company.co.uk/venues/manchester/map.htm.

Des Rafferty from DeCare working out of the States paid Cake a visit recently to talk about potential partnership opportunities between the two companies for next year. The first part of the “business meeting” was to go for a beer a meal and a chat before going to see Man United vs Dynamo Kiev, where we both felt obliged to politely clap when either team scored but refused to stand when the “stand up for the champions” chant erupted! The following day Des visited the Cake office and met the team before we talked more about potential opportunities for the two companies next year. The parity between the two companies is huge and I believe this will allow us to offer a very effective and unique joint service offering, watch this space…………..!!

Cake is running four concurrent sub-projects for the central government system we have been developing for the last year or so. We have a major beta launch in mid-December which we are all working towards. DeCare is working on this project for Cake providing essential resource and expertise to ensure a successful on-time delivery of the system. Jan, Aleksa, Ani and Rick have all been working on this project.

Jan has started work on the architecture of the QFI Consultancy on-line application with Tom Kemp. The aim is to complete the architectural phase of the development by Christmas. This project is slightly unusual as we are working together with Tom who heads up the in-house development team within QFI. This intimate knowledge of the system has a number of benefits for the client such as allowing small changes to the system to be carried out in house. Also new Modules can be designed in-house. Cake will offer on-going expert support and will provide additional resource when required.

Hot off the press; last week we agreed to take on Patricio Periera a graduate of Algarve University, gaining a degree in Systems and Informatics Engineering in 2006. Patricio will be joining us on the 26th November for an 18 month Traineeship as a Java developer with just under two years programming experience. Initially Patricio will undergo a 3 month training program before working on an appropriate Cake Java project.

Tom Kemp from QFI Consultancy has joined us for a couple of days to kick start the QFI project architecture with Jan. Some of the Cake team are being treated to a days training on the “Theory of Constraints” early in November. I will write a detailed blog following this training.

I can’t finish today’s entry without saying well done and hard luck to the England rugby team who have been personally responsible for some great nights watching them prove everyone wrong but also doing untold damage to my now pickled liver. Louis Hamilton also deserves a mention, what a first year! My liver is very grateful for the England football team for making it unlikely that we will doing to much more damage to it during the summer next year with qualification to the European Championship looking unlikely!

I am really pleased to announce an agreement with QFI Consulting to produce an on-line system.

QFI are a consultancy which guarantee businesses see substantial performance increases. QFI use the “Theory of Constraints” to do this which has been developed by the world famous Dr Eli Goldratt, author of the bestseller ‘The Goal’. QFI Consulting are an affiliate company of the Goldratt Group.

We have enlisted the help of Rick Evans, a Spring Framework contributor and well known name in the Java world, presenting at various seminars such as Spring One as well as training many people at the Interface 21/Skills Matter Spring Framework courses. Rick will work alongside Jan, who will architect the system and Tom Kemp, QFI’s own lead developer. This promises to be a really interesting project not least because we will learn all about the “Theory of Constraints” concept.

As promised I said I would talk more about the Strategic Coach programme i have been taking part in for just over a year (http://www.strategiccoach.com/). The Strategic Coach is a programme developed by Dan Sullivan in Canada that helps entrepreneurs to be better equipped to make the most of their personal and business life. I attend a talk four times a year given by Russel who has been on the programme for over 15 years and still attends back in Canada where he runs a highly successful financial services business. At the talk you are given tools which you may find useful to use in life in general and in business as well as the opportunity to spend a day away from e-mail and mobile phones so you can completely focus on what you are doing.

I do feel that the programme has effected me in a positive way which I hope has had a beneficial effect on Cake and my home life. Generally I come away focused having made some decisions and set myself short and longer term targets. I hope that over the next few months/years this will continue. If you would like to have a chat with me about the Strategic Coach I would be only to happy to do so, over a pint!

My first Blog.

Cake received good news today, we have been awarded the contract to build the new National Union of Student Services (NUSSL) centralised billing system. NUSSL has been a client for over 4 years now so we are really pleased that the relationship will hopefully continue for another 4 years. The software will deal with well over 1 million transactions a year from all the student unions around the country, that’s a serious amount of alcohol!

I am off to London tomorrow/Friday for a meeting with a couple of colleagues on the Strategic Coach program which I attend each quarter. I will go in to more detail on the Strategic Coach program in my next Blog. Now its time to go for a “cheeky one” down the pub to celebrate the NUSSL contract with some of the Cake team.