SUMMER OF TECH 2011

USER GROUPS AND VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES - highlights and links!

4 fabulous speakers stepped up to talk on the topic of “Expanding your ‘help’ horizons – plugging into support communities beyond your workplace” at the first instalment of the Xero Summer Seminar Series.  Here’s a quick snapshot of the a-m-a-z-i-n-g opportunities there are to connect with developer communities in Wellington and beyond.   And we learned that pizza & beer are one reason, but there are several other motivations to broaden your networks.

Python (Jonathan Harker)
Wellington Python User Group occurs the first Thursday of every month.  Fantastic catering, connections, networking and learning to be had.  Next week’s Wellington PUG:

6pm Thursday 2 December 2010

• Aaron Morton: “Cassandra storage engine”… more info here: http://nzpug.org/MeetingsWellington

KiwiPyCon2010 just happened in Waitangi… the Wellington group are putting in a bid to host next year’s KiwiPyCon in Wellington, probably during the August/Sept mid-semester break. There will be some awesome opportunities for student & developers to get plugged into Python awesomeness in 2011.

As a bonus, Jonathan talked (and was reminded) about a couple of other User Groups / meetups that happen at Catalyst:

PERL Mongers: (2nd Tuesday of the month) http://wellington.pm.org/

The Functional Programming Group meets on Thursday Dec 9 (and will be followed by curry):
http://groups.google.com/group/wellington-fp/

.NET (Kirk Jackson & Owen Evans)
Co-ordinators of the Wellington .NET user group, Kirk & Owen bring regular installments of pizza, beer and presentations to the .NET community.  All community information can be found at http://dot.net.nz

We heard about the informal job market that these real-life User Groups help to drive, and examples of employment offers growing out of user-group relationships.  Great chance to develop your presentation skills, to keep up with fast-changing technology, and if you manage your diary carefully… very rarely having to cook dinner or buy beer on weeknights.

Next week’s meeting is http://eepurl.com/bJo5H

6pm Monday 1st December

• LINQ to Async: An Introduction to the Reactive Extensions

As a bonus, we heard about the online community Stack Overflow, which is alive with good quality answers to all kinds of help questions.  There’s talk of re-instating a NZ (local time-zone) mailing list.  And the cool stuff that happens at Tech-Ed, and especially the Code Camps before TechED (past ones have been held at Whitireia, would be awesome to see another in 2011).

As a bonus bonus, we heard about the NZ Computer Society, who have a great programme of professional development and certification.  And some cool seminars & networking events happening this summer, too.  Check out their Wellington Events Calendar here.

Rails (Michael “Koz” Koziarski)
We’ve missed out on WellRailed events for 2010, but definitely check out this active user group for 2011! AND don’t miss Railscamp 2011, 18-21 March, 2011

Koz talked about the value of plugging into virtual communities, and the benefits of getting & giving help, and exposing yourself to new ideas.  Expanding your horizons is a huge part of success as a programmer.  Go to user groups that don’t relate to what your’e doing.  Be a sponge and find out what others are doing.

I’m not doing it justice, Koz was very inspirational… here’s the gist of his talk:

Don’t be a leech.  Connect. Contribute.  Get exposed to new ideas.

Snapper Challenge (Roger Brown)
We also had a quick 5 min pitch from Snapper, announcing an API Challenge!  More info up on their website soon, but there’s a MacBook Air and iPhone up for grabs to the person who comes up with the awesomest API plugin.  Snapper is opening up the source code for MySnapper, and its up to YOU to build stuff on it.
We’ll update you with more details as soon as they’re available!  (Watch Snapper on twitter for more on this, too)

And after all that learning & information-sharing we had a well-earned (and abundantly catered) feed.

We’re working on getting the videos uploaded asap, so those of you who weren’t able to be there will get a chance to share the learnings.  Hope to see you ALL next week for XSSS-02, don’t forget to rsvp here!

Thanks to all our speakers, and our fabulous sponsors Xero.
Thanks to Kiwibank (especially the awesome Brenda) for hosting us, too!