Reading Geek Night

Three things have prompted me to change the plans for this month’s Reading Geek Night .

• Because everyone has been busy (plus the whole Christmas and New Year thing), we had fewer talks lined up than usual.
• With the recent weather (apparently it’s been snowing! Who knew?) , a couple of the planned talks for Monday evening have fallen through because there are question marks over speakers being able to travel to Reading.
• I’m expecting that fewer people will want / be able to make the trip into town when the forecast is for more of the white stuff and the roads and pavements are so icy.

Given that, I’ve decided to cancel the ‘formal’ version of Reading Geek Night for January and re-schedule the talks that were lined up for either next time or future events.

However, I’ve also always said that if at least 10 people are willing to turn up, then I would make sure it happened. So with that in mind I will be in Copa (prob upstairs) from 7.30ish on Monday night (even if I have to crawl there on my hands and knees from Caversham!) and would love to see anyone who can make it for a more ‘informal’ version of Reading Geek Night.

Heres the second confirmed talk for Monday 11th January’s Reading Geek Night (7.30pm at Copa).

Dan Moon (@danwtmoon)will be focussing on trends in web based application adoption and questioning the future role of traditional IT departments.

Dans says…

The wealth of 2.0 applications for business poses a real question of the role and value of traditional IT. This will be a short, provocative discussion on who needs IT when you have 2.0?

Hopefully there will be a couple more announcements of talks over the next day or two, but we’re always open to offers of speaking. Its a friendly crowd and we like to see a diverse range of topics. So if you’d be happy to share some knowledge / expertise / opinions  then please get in touch.

Happy New Year!

In true last minute fashion I’m pulling together the speakers for next weeks Reading Geek Night. Its on MONDAY 11th downstairs at Copa. Doors open 7.30pm.

There is still room for more speakers – we’re a bit light on technical content this month, so anyone who can stand up and present a bit of geekery would be more than welcome.

Anyway the first confirmed talk for the first Reading Geek Night of 2010 is from Yad Jaura.

Yad has worked in the enterprise mobile software market for about 17 years for companies including XcelleNet, Sybase, HandStep and most recently Critical Path. His friends call him a ‘gadget man’ but he doesn’t recognise the label
Yad says…

I”m going to spend 15 mins talking about and showing you my top 10 iPhone apps. It’s amazing how much you can do and how much fun you can have with a smartphone these days. I’m going to show you why I love these devices and what my favourite uses for them are.

So hope to see you on the 11th – Tell your friends, drag your colleagues along. Plus look out for more announcements of talks in the next few days.

OK… So I know I said that it would be on the second tuesday of the month… but (mainly due to me not getting off my bottom) Copa is double booked for 12th January.

Therefore, the date for the next Reading Geek Night is MONDAY 11th January 2010.

Here’s the poster for Reading Geek 2. ( A3 PDF 1M here ). Once again it would be great if you could print it out and put it on display somewhere where fellow geeks will see it. Last time, with it being the first event, I didn’t really want to go too mad with the publicity, but I reckon that this time we should be a bit bolder.

We have four top Apress books (2 x Coders at Work, 1 Advanced CSS, 1 Zoho) and a few Apress keyring torches to give away at this months event… To qualify for a freebie you’ll need to put the poster up, take a pic of it in place, add a link to the pic in the comments below (and if you are a twitter type then please tweet it with the #rdggeek tag). On the night, I’ll ask the people doing talks to judge the poster pics that, in their opinion, provided the best publicity for the event. I’ll leave it to the speakers as to the final judging criteria, but I’d imagine that positioning, the number of people who would have seen it, comedic effect,  and artistic merit could all be taken into account!

The final talk I can announce today is from Simon Cobb who will be doing a short talk on “Making It: ideas I’ve stolen from other people”.

It’s a whirlwind tour through my favourite quotes and ideas on how to make almost any kind of stuff, but mostly I use them to build internet stuff.

Theres still room for another one or two five minute slots. So drop me a mail if you want to do one.

Something that came across strongly from the feedback from the first Reading Geek Night was that we should encourage a wide mix of topics – do the deeply geeky stuff, but also tackle some tangential subjects. So, on that note I’m looking forward to hearing Pete Doyle speak. When Pete is not encouraging people to play Rock music, he volunteers in a local autistic school. On Monday night he is going to outline an opportunity for the talented geeks of Reading to put their skills to good use…

Pete says…

Currently it is estimated that 1 in 100 people have autism in the UK..Men are 4 times more likely to show signs of autistic behaviour than women.  Kids on the autism spectrum need specialist care to do everyday things that we take for granted. So why is it then that in some cases autistic people have a superior intellectual skill? The talk will focus on autism, and challenge Reading Geeks to answer two questions… “How could technology make a difference?” and “What can we practically do to make that technology a reality?”

Now if that’s not a thought provoking topic… I don’t know what is. Come prepared to think and act.

I’m pleased to say that Reading Geek Night 2 is coming together very nicely. We’re going to kick off (trains from London willing) with a talk from Luke Smith about “SOLID”. At future events Luke promises to speak about some of his open source projects, but next week he’s going to attempt to get across the 5 principles of SOLID in 20 minutes.

Luke says…

SOLID is a set of principles to guide you in managing the dependencies within your applications. This talk will give a brief introduction to the SOLID principles and how by keeping them in mind when writing OO code, you can make your application more maintainable and flexible.

Hope you agree that its a great subject to kick off Reading Geek Night 2. Starting out with a talk which includes the  ”Liskov Substitution Principle” has to be a winner!! (Disclosure…. I had to look that up on Wikipedia)

With two weeks to go before the second Reading Geek Night (7.30pm Monday 7th December), its time to start putting together the speaker list. (I also want to start getting an idea of speakers for January as Xmas is going to mean that there is less time to sort out arrangements for geek night 3)

A few people have informally said that they would be up for doing either a 15 minute or 5 minute talk, but I guess we need to formalise things so that we can get a December line up out on posters etc early next week.

So.. if you are willing to stand up and talk about something in front of a friendly bunch of fellow geeks then it would be great if you could get in touch – email me at jim at ReadingGeekNight dot com. I’ll need two things, firstly the title of your talk and secondly a couple of sentences describing what you are offering to talk about. (Along the lines of the text on the poster for the last event is all I’m looking for). Don’t worry about polishing it too much at this stage, the important thing is to let me know that you are up for it.

The feedback last time was generally that eclectic and varied is the name of the game, so you can talk deep tech, or frivolous fun stuff, or anything in between. Go on, you know you want to!

Thanks loads in advance.

Seeing as everyone took the time to fill in the (v. low tech) feedback forms at the end of last weeks event, I thought it only fair that I feedback what the feedback was (!)

On the tick boxes it looked like…

• Venue : 18 – Excellent, 10 – Good, 1 – OK, 0 – Rubbish.
• Format : 15 – Excellent, 14 – Good, 0 – OK, 0 – Rubbish
• Talks : 1 – Not geeky enough, 28 – About right, 0 – bit too geeky, 0 – way too geeky

In terms of general feedback the themes were…

• Pretty much everyone was positive about the evening / said they had enjoyed it etc (which was nice).
• On the format front many people said that it worked well to have breaks between the talks, but that they were a bit too long. I think next time we will try and keep the breaks to 20 mins, which leaves enough time to grab a drink & chat to people, plus leaves longer at the end for those who want to stay around and socialise.
• A couple of people thought it would be good to have Q&A after the talks, or maybe a panel discussion or debate about something. My inclination was that people with questions could easily buttonhole the speaker afterwards, but someone made the good point that often people in the ‘audience’ may have points which would be interesting for everyone to hear. I’ll be guided by the group on what approach we should take – perhaps we do need some more interactive sessions?
• One person (who may be called Ben) said “get that handsome Digital Identity guy to talk again”

With respect to the types of talks people would like to see…

• The general consensus was that people wanted a variety of subjects, and not necessarily just topics about computers/tech.
• Specific topics mentioned included – future of web standards / webservices mashups / cloud computing / html5 / open slots /show and tell demos / philosophical / photography / diving / cooking / finding a job in IT / Beginners coding / open source community / hot technologies & trends / Arcane, surprising stuff / snowboarding / presentation skills / front end dev / doc mgmt / e-learning / distributed databases / scala / guest speakers

So thanks to everyone who filled in a form. If you have anything to add then feel free to add your feedback to my feedback about your feedback (I’ll stop there) to the comments section.