Evening topics

[Mike Ellis]

Happy New Year everyone...

I've been pondering over the festive season what kind of shape to give to meetups over the coming months. One thing which I'm pretty sure we could do well is a kind of "single focus" regular evening event where a speaker (or maybe 2-3) gives their perspective or advice on a particular topic or technology.

The kinds of topics I'm pondering are:

- Arduino / circuit bending
- Adobe AIR: what it is, how it works, why it is useful
- Django and Rails: rapid web development comparisons
- .Net as an agile programming environment
- Beginners Open Source
- Communicating technology: how tech people and marketeers could work better together
- Getting started with mobile
- iPhone development
- Bridging real/virtual worlds

...but this is far (far!) from being a full list - it just represents some of the stuff I'm interested in :-)

Please chuck in some thoughts, and also some ideas for possible expert speakers. If you're the "expert" (or even just a passionate advocate!), and are willing to do a brief talk followed by a few questions, great - if you know of someone who would travel to Bath to do a talk, that shouldn't be a problem either - I can go to people about funding this kind of stuff.

I'm working on a venue - currently one of the most promising is the upstairs room at Revolution Bath: they have wifi, sofas, a projector, a bar, food and hopefully it should be quiet enough to do this kind of event. But we can suck it and see. If anyone has ideas for venue, please shout.

Finally - following your feedback, I'm thinking that this would happen monthly or bi-monthly, and would like if possible to get the next 3-4 events booked in.

Gimme your thoughts!

cheers

Mike

[Sam Machin]

Hi MIke,

Sounds good, I'm happy to do a session on Mobile.

I'd quite like a session on AJAX/Javascript/Front End stuff

Monthly is good for me, probabbly better on Weds/Thurs than Mon/Tues
Rgds
Sam

[Giles Turnbull]

Arduino! iPhone dev! yes yes!

I'd be happy to waffle on about something in public, if anyone wants to listen. Understanding the media, or Why Journalism is bollocks, or somesuch.

G

[Mike Ellis]

Cheers Sam. I'll make a note :-)

What kind of mobile-ness would you like to do? Development, UI, strategy...?

Sam Machin said:

Hi MIke,

Sounds good, I'm happy to do a session on Mobile.

I'd quite like a session on AJAX/Javascript/Front End stuff

Monthly is good for me, probabbly better on Weds/Thurs than Mon/Tues
Rgds
Sam

[Mike Ellis]

Thanks Giles. I know a man who does Arduino, and reckon I could rustle up some iPhone experts from somewhere...

Journo stuff would definitely be good, too - cheers

Mike

Giles Turnbull said:

Arduino! iPhone dev! yes yes!

I'd be happy to waffle on about something in public, if anyone wants to listen. Understanding the media, or Why Journalism is bollocks, or somesuch.

G

[Leigh Dodds]

Arduino, iphone dev and bridging real/virtual worlds sounds great.

I'll volunteer to do something on Semantic Web technology if anyone is interested, e.g. techie primer or whatever.

Cheers,

L.

[Mike Ellis]

Hey Leigh - thanks for the offer. I'll make a note :-)

Mike

Leigh Dodds said:

Arduino, iphone dev and bridging real/virtual worlds sounds great.

I'll volunteer to do something on Semantic Web technology if anyone is interested, e.g. techie primer or whatever.

Cheers,

L.

[Stuart Herbert]

Monthly sounds good, and Wednesdays are best for me.

I'd be quite happy to talk about open source in general, Linux, Apache / PHP / web server stuff, virtualised storage, or general (and probably boring!) stuff about project management, systems management, and software engineering processes.

[Tim Beadle]

Monthly's good. No idea what I'd talk about (probably whatever takes my fancy at the precise moment of the session...). Wednesday is a good day if it's not the second one of the month.

[Chris Book]

Hi Mike

Sounds good to me, I like the communicating technology, Semantic Web ideas. I am more interested in business topics rather than dev stuff, but the iPhone dev will be interested.

Happy to do a higher level mobile session (higher than Sam's) business models, messaging, aggregation, impact of data tariffs, mobile internet etc etc - intro to Mobile

Wednesdays and Thursdays best for me.

Cheers Chris

[Matt Johnson]

Hi Mike,

Like the idea; happy to do a talk, but would be more "technical" - i.e. DNS, networking, security, something along those lines - not sure if that fits into the overall theme of these evenings? :)

Cheers,
Matt