Oxford Geek Night 07

Last night I went with Matt Carey to the Jericho Tavern in Oxford for Oxford Geek Night 7! OGN is a regular (every 2 months) meet-up of geeks, in a pub, talking about all things tech.

This was my first time going to OGN, however Matt went to number 6 back in April and assured me I would have a good time. He wasn't wrong!

The night is made up of several talks with two keynotes taking up 15mins each, followed by several, 5min microslots with breaks every couple of talks. All the talks were great, despite technical difficulties during some. Specifically dodgy networking and malfunctioning Wiimotes (steady!). However, we were one keynote short since the speaker went missing, which is a shame as the title "Web 20-20: Architecture for the New Internet" sounded quite interesting.

This OGN's talks were:

Keynote: Delighting with Data: gluing things together for beautiful pointlessness, by Tom Taylor
Killing Servers With Music Graphing, by Andrew Godwin
The Clangers' Guide to Microformats, by Drew McLellan
Advanced Dragon-Slaying with Comet, by Matthew Westcott
Hands-on with App Engine, by Tom Dyson
Rewriting the OSX Address Book: no previous coding experience necessary, by Simon Whitaker
PlanningAlerts, by Duncan Parkes

I really enjoyed Drew McLellan's and Tom Taylor's talks, though they were all pretty good. Each was a good laugh, particularly Simon Whitaker's "My Pimp Address Book" and Matthew Westcott's comparison of "polling" to "kids in a long car journey". There was also a business card, book raffle, which was amusing when no one picked the books on Adobe Flex and AIR until they had no other options.

The night was also an opportunity to meet Rails developer, Alan Bradburn (though, you're probably better going to his twitter which is actually updated ;) ). It was nice to meet him and we all had a good chat about twitter, rails, last.fm and mobile platforms. Plus he can take a short walk to see us at the studio, provided he brings biscuits!

It was a great night and I am looking forward to the next one, which is scheduled for August 27th. I'll probably make a post about it nearer the time. If any readers happen to live in the Oxfordshire/Berkshire area and will be at the next one, get in touch in the comments or via Twitter. I'd be more than happy to arrange to meet-up there!