On Tuesday night I attended a “Geekup” in Manchester. Geekup.org describes a geekup as:
“GeekUp is a community of web designers, web developers, and other tech-minded folk from the UK. It's a grassroots knowledge sharing and networking social for folks involved or interested in the web and technology industry.”
That sounded my kind of thing, so I headed along. The geekup was held at Rain Bar in Manchester, and during the time I was there, was attended by somewhere around 15 people. I’d had some reservations about how I would identify my fellow geeks, but our general adherence to stereotypes about appearance didn’t fail me - the guys in the corner with beards, long hair and scruffy t-shirts were the guys I was looking for. In a further conformance to type, I do with one exception mean guys. It was a good evening. I had some very interesting discussions with a number of different people, on topics ranging from Google+, to developing for android in ARM assembly, to pro’s con’s and perceptions of html5 et al. One particularly interesting discussion I got into with a couple of guys was about differences in working style and resultant code between dynamic and static languages. As we were all grown up and sober this fortunately didn't devolve into a “my team is better” argument, but meandered through some interesting areas and practical differences, not least of which was a discussion about how the resulting code differs due to the inherent strengths and weaknesses of each. I think the discussion warrants it’s own blog post, so I’ll not get into the ins and outs of it now. My overall opinion though is that it was an interesting and useful evening, I’m keen to go again and would recommend anyone in range of one to check it out. Details of the growing number of places hosting them are on geekup.org.