Oxford Geek Nights

So that was Oxford Geek Night 2

2007-04-12T19:28:43-05:00

The second Oxford Geek Night last night went well and was by all accounts a success. We came across various hiccups in setting up but several totally ingenious solutions and a few friendly geeks later we were all set.

The talks were great, and in my mind they really made the event what it was. So, a big thank you goes out to all the speakers. Also in my list of thanks is our very generous sponsor Torchbox who kindly funded the event, keeping it free for all to attend.

Most of the slides and links from the talks are up online already and the remainder will follow shortly. Also to come soon are the videocasts and podcasts of the event. I'll keep you posted as to when they are ready.

The photos are now up online too. If you are uploading any then the official Flickr tag is 'oxfordgeeknight2'. If you tag them they will appear on the site for the event.

If you were at the event last night you may have noticed two women with fancy video cameras interviewing and filming, they were from BBC Oxford South Today. The media coverage has all been a bit of a surprise really, I guess when it got picked up by the Oxford Mail after the last one everyone else wanted to have an "and finally, geeks leave the house" type story! :)

Interview with BBC Radio Oxford (Wednesday 11th, 11:30):

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(Download Interview)

Oxford Geek Nights on BBC South Today Oxford (Thursday 12th, 18:30)

See high resolution Quicktime version (4.8 MB)

I am really keen to get other people inspired to organise their own, more specialised events. So if anyone wants to start up, say, a JavaScript meet-up, Oxford Pub Standards, Oxford 2.0 or anything really, then that would be absolutely fantastic! I would be happy to help.

I would really love to hear your feedback on Oxford Geek Nights in general and on the last event. I have set up a (optionally anonymous) feedback form, so you can let us know what you enjoyed or how we can improve the next one.

We have set up an announce only email list as a Google Group for Oxford Geek Nights, or you can use our new Atom feed to keep up with news and information.

The Oxford Geek Nights are every two months so watch this space in June/July for the next event!

Talks for Oxford Geek Nights announced

2007-04-05T17:49:42-05:00

The talks for the forthcoming Oxford Geek Night event have now been announced. You might already know that Jon Hicks and James Webster are lined up for two great looking keynotes on Typography and Amazon web services respectively, which is very exciting. What you might not know yet is the fantastic line-up we have for the microslots …

Jim Purbrick - Second Life Meets The Web
Josh Hart - The making of Diarised
Simon Whitaker - Yahoo Pipes introduction
Mark Norman Francis - Code review processes at Yahoo
Nick Grandy - Semantic Mediawiki and DiscourseDB
Marc Tobias Metten - Geocoding
Matthew Westcott - DIY Javascript effects without Scriptaculous
Dave Sant - Quakr, 3D modeling of the world

Update [07-04-07]: Due to illness, Norm’s talk above has been replaced with Simon Willison talking on ‘Why HTML 5 Matters’

So it looks to be a fun and informative event! I hope to see you there, feel free to sign up on upcoming to give us an idea of numbers.

Oxford Geek Night 2 call for proposals

2007-02-26T17:10:25-06:00

As there are limited places available for microslots and demos at the forthcoming Oxford Geek Night in April, I have set up a wufoo form (I really love wufoo!) to manage talk submissions.

If you have a talk proposal please fill it out the form below or go to the wufoo form:

Fill out my Wufoo form!
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Oxford Geeks hit the media!

2007-02-24T18:54:55-06:00

It looks like the last of the Oxford Geek Nights has caused quite a stir in the media recently. I'm not entirely sure how the Oxford Mail initially came across the story but it got half a page of coverage in last Wednesday's edition (see online version or archived online version)

As a result of this I was contacted by BBC Radio Oxford, BBC South Today and Radio Oxford (Formerly Passion FM) who are all interested in covering the next one. Radio Oxford also interviewed me for about 10 minutes, snippets of which were used in the news every half hour for the next morning.

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(Download News snippet)

Adam from the breakfast show heard the interview I gave to the news team and wanted to interview me live on his breakfast show, although this meant me waking up at 8am on my holiday, I agreed.

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(Download Breakfast snippet)

With all this news coverage and potential publicity for the next event, I decided to start planning for the next one. We are looking at Mid April, likely the 11th of April for the next event.

Consider this a call for participants, I need 2 keynotes of 15 minutes and 8 Demos or lightning talks of 5 minutes each. Let me know if you are interested - nat@natbat.net

First Oxford Geek Night a success!

2007-02-08T16:25:45-06:00

Thanks to everyone who came last night. I really hope everyone had a fantastic evening, we had some interesting talks and some cool demos. It was pretty tricky to judge numbers from where I was sat, but I have been told that we had over 100 people at one point, which is great!

The running order of the night went as follows …

Keynotes

Simon Willison - An introduction to OpenID
Olly Willans - Demonstration of Photoshop CS3

Microslot set one

Tom Dyson - Peastat
Jonathan Leighton - Ruby on Rails Migrations
Tim Almond - Wordpress as a CMS
Gemma Hentsch - Concatenating forms, a Django extension
Garrett Coakley - Drupal 5
JP Stacey - Building an ultra thin CMS with XSL and Atom

Microslot set two

Nick Birch - New Popular Edition Maps
Artem Pavlenko - Mapnik, a map rendering engine
Matthew Westcott - London Underground Tube map demonstration
Bryan Gullan - Avoiding accessibility pitfalls
James Wheare - Live bus times, a Google maps mashup

The photos from last night are online and can be found on flickr, the slides, links and hopefully audio of the talks will be available soon.

A big thank you to the fantastic speakers yesterday, to Torchbox for their generous sponsorship and to all the wonderful people who helped me out on the night.

We’re planning to organise a second Oxford Geek Night in a few months time.

Line-up for Oxford Geek Night

2007-02-05T18:19:47-06:00

The debut event for Oxfordshire based geeks draws ever closer, this coming Wednesday at the Jericho Tavern! As you may have already read, the doors to the upstairs bar will open at 8pm and the talks will then start at about 8:30.

We now have a fantastic line-up for the evening, starting with two 15 minute keynotes on very different subjects. Simon Willison gives an introduction to OpenID followed by Olly Willans demonstrating the latest version of Photoshop - Photoshop CS3.

The set of 5 minute microslots cover a wide range of exciting topics. The first 6 cover content management, frameworks and statistics, the second set explores maps, mashups, JavaScript and accessibility.

Microslot set one

Tom Dyson - Peastat
Jonathan Leighton - Ruby On Rails Migrations
Tim Almond - Wordpress as a CMS
Gemma Hentsch - Concatenating forms, a Django extension
Garrett Coakley - Drupal 5
JP Stacey - Building an ultra thin CMS with XSL and Atom

Microslot set two

Nick Birch - New Popular Edition Maps
Artem Pavlenko - Map rendering engine
Natalie Downe - The importance of permalinks in unobtrusive JavaScript
Bryan Gullan - Avoiding accessibility pitfalls
James Wheare - Oxford bus times, a Google maps mashup

There will also be plenty of time in between the talks for socialising and drinking at the upstairs bar.

Look forward to seeing you on Wednesday!

Oxford Geek Nights

2007-01-27T18:12:01-06:00

A note to anyone in or around the Oxford area on Wednesday the 7th February, or even to those willing to travel …. The first Oxford Geek Night will be held at 8pm upstairs in Oxfordshire’s fine venue of “The Jericho Tavern”.

For more information of the event and directions, please see the official site

Oxford Geek Nights offer a chance for web developers and designers in the local area to get together, share their skills and talk about new ideas, techniques and technologies.

The format of the night will include two or three keynote talks of 15 minutes each, followed after a healthy period of socialising with a set of open microslot sessions.

I personally believe that Oxford has a thriving, talented and enthusiastic geek community. This event is a chance for everyone to finally meet up and share their skills and ideas.