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.