Geek Meet March 2007 summary

Last Thursday we had another Geek Meet, and as always these days, it was a fair amount of people showing up. This time, for the majority of the people present, it was actually their first Geek Meet. It’s great to see new faces, and the same time, I hope that the bunch of regulars who had to cancel this meeting will be back at the next one, providing to an even bigger group!

To give you a rough number: Thursday we had somewhere between 30 and 35 persons present, and my Geek Meet mailing list consists of over 70 (and those are only first-hand basis; many people seem to bring a friend or two as well, which, of course, is great!).

The meeting and presentations were all done in Swedish, which was probably the first time for almost a year. The simple reason it has been in English before is that a number of the people partaking haven’t been speaking Swedish, but this time, everyone did. My personal take is that people seem to be more prone to discuss and voice their opinion a bit more if it’s their native tongue, so I’ll have to ponder about this for the upcoming meetings. Anyone have any opinion/preference?

The presentations

I was very pleased to see two great presentations by Jim Carlberg and Joachim Dageroth! Jim spoke about Flash, and that it is not necessarily always a bad thing to use, but then in a proper manner, of course. He also gave examples of good libraries and tools for using Flash in different contexts. The beginning of his talk was extra fun for an “old” geezer like me, since he talked about the history of Flash, and how it came to take the position it holds today.

Joachim’s talk was a bit more challenging, questioning usage of web standards just for the sake of it. He compared it to pragmatic factors like money (ROI, if you want to be fancy), time, maintenance of existing applications and also ventilated his opinions on external web sites compared to Intranets. Naturally, in such a group, it sparkled some heavy discussions, but I think no one was more pleased than me to see people strongly fighting for their view in a civilized and respectful way. That is what Geek Meet is about! Different opinions are fine, no, rather necessary, for us all to learn from each other and to understand different points of view.

Presentations online

The presentations are available online for anyone interested:

There was also another initiative to have the speakers wear a microphone, to record their presentations. While I’m not personally a big fan of podcasts, since I think they usually lose context, and also, to get a good balance with the audience and the speaker, some heavily editing has to be done. Nevertheless, that’s just me. The two recordings are also available for download:

Next meeting

Next Geek Meet will presumably take place at the end of May, and it will contain two very interesting talks about XHTML and HTML 5. Please stay tuned for more information.

Thanks to Trig

I would also like to extend my gratitude to adocca, the company behind Trig, for being kind enough to sponsor the event. A cool place to be, beer and lots of pizza is always nice! πŸ™‚

One Comment

  • Stijn says:

    Whoa, a new layout. Or have I just missed the change because I read this site via my aggregator? I like it, though I prefer the navigation on the left and the content on the right πŸ˜‰

    As a Dutchman I'd obviously prefer English as language for such meetings, but as attending one will unfortunately not be possible within the next… year? you can safely disregard my opinion. I'd love to attend one eventually though πŸ™‚

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