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.

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.

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

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