GeekDinner May reportback

Sometimes things just fall into place.  Almost everyone on your guest list pitches.  The venue delivers.  The laptop connects to the projector first time.  The PA system doesn't have feedback issues all night long.  The presenters are all entertaining and don't go over time enough to be an annoyance.  People are sitting next to friends they haven't met yet, and they're having intense discussions on the vagaries of some piece of technology.

GeekDinner May 2007 certainly sets a high standard for future meetings!

Our venue, The Wild Fig, was brilliant.  The right shape, the right size tables, and great food.  They nominated themselves - Trevor Hughes from The Wild Fig added the restaurant to the wiki, and we can't thank them enough.  We were a bit worried our estimated number of guests would be too high or low relative to the actual turn-out, but we were pretty much spot-on.  We're going to try another venue for our next dinner, but, if they'll have us, The Wild Fig may become a regular venue.  (And I'm definitely adding it to my list of places to eat myself.)

There was a Skyrove hotspot in operation there (not sure if it is there permanently - it's not on their rather impressive map of Skyrove hotspots).  In addition, two of the people behind Skyrove were on hand, handing out Skyrove credits.

GETWINE's wine went down well (although even we couldn't finish the rather generous 36 bottles they sponsored), and I hope I'm not alone in ordering a rather well-priced case and mentioning their Geekdinner sponsorship.

The talks were all very well done.  And I'm not just saying that.

Antoine van Gelder started with an excellent non-presentation about the spirit behind the OLPC, with not a single word spoken (mouth covered with ducktape that just happened to be on hand), emulating how children are expected to behave in their classrooms - listen, but not speak.  Antoine's comments about many of us finding our voices in the 90s with the advent of IRC and mailing lists really struck home for me.

Bryn Divey gave an absolutely hilarious and, to my mind, mostly accurate rip of PHP, and gave reasons why Python is a good alternative to look at.  I don't know if it was the wine (mine, or his), but Bryn's comic timing and delivery couldn't be faulted.  What with all the puppies that PHP kills every time it is used, I'm sure we'll see some converts.

Nick Coyne gave an excellent mostly-non-technical talk that was mostly about Ruby on Rails, with the insights about how important happiness is to productivity getting much support from the crowd.  He also showed a lot of wisdom in two things - listing the downsides ("Life's not all roses and sunshine", or something like that), and in not getting into the Python vs. Ruby fight that some were trying to instigate.  Oh, and in continuing the ripping of PHP, of course!

Tania Melnyczuk mostly delivered on her promise of Project Management in five minutes flat - mostly, since it was closer to ten, but she asked for and got permission to go on longer.

Alan Levin tackled a harder (since geeks often care less about politics than they do about their technology choices) topic - trying to explain where one should be putting pressure to get the best results out of the telecommunications disaster that we have in South Africa.  He highlighted the issue of international connectivity, while others mentioned that things aren't rosy in other places too.  Alan, I think, was trying to say that there's a lot less in the way of people seeking national connectivity than in the way of people seeking international connectivity.

(Alan also showed off two of the greatest things I like about our dinners - that someone can pick up on the list of things people want to hear about, and that the agenda is flexible enough to allow for people to add and remove talks at the last minute smoothly.)

Ian Gilfillan also took a rather interesting tangeant, which I think went down well.  He spoke of mind games (mind sports!) like checkers, chess, and Go, and about the complexity involved in creating computer programs that can fare well against human players.  Hopefully he'll find more members for his regular mind games (mind sports!) evenings in Observatory (at A Touch Of Madness).

We were also blessed by an "open mic" (ie, spur of the moment) talk by Robin Ronne, who talked about the Ripple project.  Ian has an explanation about what it is about.  Robin also got some of the largest laughs of the evening, by lowering his voice and stage-whispering that he's a C# developer.  (I'm fairly certain the laughter was almost entirely at the stage whisper, since we had a rather eclectic group of geeks from all manners of technologies.)

I gave, perhaps, the least responsive talk, announcing that I'd like to have another Geek event - a day or two of full geekery.  Simon, Adrianna, and Neil (the other one) suggested we have a sprint on their (Python) project, and we found a couple of other Python programmers who sounded interested. Of course, this happened after I had absolutely no feedback from the audience.  Thankfully, the interest afterwards was pretty good to see.

Whoever organises the next GeekDinner has got a lot to live up to.  But I hope it's a challenge someone takes up with relish.