We had a great talk at Leeds Sharp this month. Would love to have seen this in person, but remote Leeds Sharp continues with more great talks.

Clifford Agius showed us what you can acheive with a 3D printer by talking us through his long running project to make a better bionic hand for Hayden, the son of a close friend. As bionic hands are so expensive (currently around £45,000) and children grow out of the quickly, you can't get one from the NHS till you're fully grown. 3D printing and open source plans show a lot of exciting potential to make things better, cheaper and share them with …

Voting is now open for DDD North 2014, which is excitingly going to be in Leeds. There are a lot of good talks to vote for, but my biased opinion is that the following Leeds Sharpers should all have their talks voted for.

Micro Services: conquer monoliths, before they own you - Kiran Singh

BDD, Why you should be doing it - Richard Tasker

Using Xamarin Forms to make a cross platform Agenda App - Richard Garside (AKA me)

So look through all the proposed talks and vote now (voting now closed).

Last night was the first Leeds# Microsoft Developer's User Group. Matt Ross and I have been wondering for a while why there were no .NET user groups near us and we decided to stop wondering and talking about it and just start one.

The idea is that by joining forces with other local developers we can all become smarter and make some new friends. At our first meeting we had an interesting mix of people working on .NET projects involving a range of things from cows to parts for planes. We want to make sure that we respond to what the group wants and that's why we've set up a range of ways to …