I am not a post
Last night I went out to the distant village of Constantia to attend a dinner organised by and for similarly minded individuals in the local IT community. One minute ago I went to let in the plumbers into the house for the umpteenth time. Anyway, I’ve been dancing around naming the event, but I’ll have to let it go now; it was in fact a so-called Geek Dinner. I don’t have any problem with people calling me a geek, but at the same time I think openly labeling the event such is a bit crude. At least BarCamp sounded good.
Unfortunately, whilst the food and some people were good, nothing much else was. I’m saying this from a young developer’s point of view. It’s nice to know what David Jarvis is up to, considering I spent many a year cursing the very connection he (barely) provided me with (*waves*) - but at the same time, I could go read an FAQ on his website. I’m more interested in seeing people passionately talk about something they’ve thought of, or developed, or thought of developing - any time someone like that gives a talk, you’ll find far more people paying attention and taking away something useful from the event. Jonathan’s talk about his restaurant review site was close to what I was expecting on seeing. Teraco’s (no link for them… as in I can’t be bothered to link to them) talk was pretty much a press release, and on top of that, a press release aimed at apparently no one attending the dinner, since I guess the majority of us there did not require their services (and subsequently, could not afford said services). Visit Melissa’s site for additional complaints.
I guess what I’m saying is that I understand to split the already small community, attending events like this, into smaller niche communities is not really plausible, but at the same time there are definitely presentations that do not appeal to everyone. The problem was that there weren’t very many presentations (someone is going to comment and ask why I didn’t give one then), so there wasn’t really that much variety. Also, I have an allergy to business related topics, so anything remotely related already had offended me. Maybe the problem I had with “Geek Dinner” was that I was expecting some in-depth programming discussions, or a talk on cool tricks to do with your phone, but it wasn’t.
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Neil’s OpenID talk was also great, it’s something I’ve been meaning to read up about and he handily saved me the trouble! Despite my negative views above, I’d still like to thank Joe for organising everything; at least someone is trying! Maybe I will speak at the next one, we’ll see.
Neil Blakey-Milner on March 29th, 2007
Hey,
Except on calling it what it’s called (I quite like the name), I think these are good points, and thanks for airing them.
Keep in mind that it’s still early days, and please suggest talks and venues for the next event ( http://wiki.geekdinner.org.za/wiki/Cape_Town_May_2007 ) to improve things to fit your needs more. I’m sure you’re not alone in your views.
And a lot of us haven’t been young developer geeks for a while (Oh, those halcyon days, &c.), so it’s hard for us to remember what we craved for back then. We’d hate to be getting “old” and “out of it” quite so early in our lives, though, so you’ll have to remind us. ;)
I’m going to push my colleague Bryn to give a short presentation on generic functions, which is a lot more meaty. I’m probably going to give another talk, this time on ToscaWidgets and/or simple plugin architectures using pkg_resources in Python. So I’m definitely behind you on making things more geeky.
One thing to keep in mind is that some of the people attending don’t have much time to learn about everything they’re interested in, so running into someone who just tells them something they could have read up about themselves but didn’t, is still quite useful to them. We’ll have to try keep that to a minimum, of course, to avoid boring those people who do have enough time to read a web site.
(As an aside: I think I got more out of the Teraco talk because I’m very familiar with the situation locally and internationally, and with the types of problems that Teraco is trying to solve. It was unfortunate that it came across as a press release to you, because I think it’s of real interest and something that will hopefully improve a lot of things. Perhaps a proper elevator pitch would’ve brought more people in on what’s wrong with the situation now before explaining how it can be solved.)
Neil
Joe on March 29th, 2007
it was in fact a so-called Geek Dinner
Yes. It was a GeekDinner. Happy you figured that out.
labeling the event such is a bit crude
..but you would like the talks to be more geeky?
I’m more interested in seeing people passionately talk about something they’ve thought of, or developed
I think all the talks involved passionate people doing new and interesting things
Have you tried to change the wireless telecoms space?
Have you tried to create the first vendor neutral colo in (South) Africa?
since I guess the majority of us there did not require their services
Wait and see. If you followed the peering discussion you may start to see the value.
someone is going to comment and ask why I didn’t give one then)
Yeah? The wiki was there dude. It was an inclusive process.
I was expecting some in-depth programming discussions
Erlang is pretty damn geeky. The length of the talks were on the wiki.
Start your own even. :-P
Gavin on March 29th, 2007
I am not a comment.
michael on March 30th, 2007
Oops, always forget to check my moderation queue. Unintentional censorship there.
michael on March 30th, 2007
Joe, Neil:
Yep, I completely understand that the talks were interesting to other people - I’m just saying that personally I wasn’t that taken by them.
Neil:
Perhaps if Matt had first introduced what benefits we will actually see coming from Teraco. We hear a lot of things about new and awesome wunderprodukts coming to improve our lives, but the amount of people that actually follow through with their ideas is a bit slim. I know it wasn’t just me who felt that it was a press release, so I think the presentation was definitely lacking something. The feeling I got was, “Oh look at me, I’m some guy who’s going to make lots of money.”
I don’t want to start my own, what a hassle :P But next time I will try help out.
The name is a problem with me because if I try to tell someone non-geek about it they immediately glaze over when I say “GeekDinner” - which makes it a bit hard to convince them it’s actually interesting.
Mike on March 30th, 2007
Joe, I think you should learn to handle constructive criticism with a bit of etiquette and less sarcasm - with an attitude like that you’re going to chase people away no matter what your point is.
Neil Blakey-Milner on March 30th, 2007
With the time available, I think presenters need to focus on a standard elevator pitch approach - identify the problem (who has it, what are the causes, what are the side-effects, &c.), describe how to succeed against the problem, and then follow up with what the benefits of not having the problem anymore are (or what other benefits there are to the solution as presented).
This applies whether we’re talking about programming languages, mobile phone application programming, web application development frameworks, buying telecommunications services, or leasing high-end servers.
Chris M on April 1st, 2007
And I wasn’t invited, because?