What I learned at Nerd Dinner

1. Nerd dinner organizers like to wear orange shirts (strange)

2. K Scott is actually awake during Herding Code podcasts despite the evidence to the contrary.

3. Paul just released a neat 3D iPhone game. Peril Canyon

4. When pair programming the key is gain the trust of the person you are pairing with, otherwise you are fighting a losing battle. To chemically induce trust you can use Oxytocin apparently. Thank you Llewellyn

5. Web Metrics is doing some really interesting things with web site testing / monitoring and load testing. Particularly around cloud based (EC2 I believe) load testing.

6. Agile Open sounds like a killer “conference.” September 13-14 at UC Irvine.

7. Lynn and Llewellyn and putting together a “Code Retreat” event at the Hive in downtown SD on September 19th. It should be a great way to learn new languages and experience pair programming.

8. Startup Weekend San Diego is this weekend. Thanks again to John for putting on the dinner and buying beer. You can catch him and his company Twillio at the Startup weekend

9. The Ignite Talk from the recent San Diego Ignite event titled “Your Chair Is Killing You” by Ernesto Ramirez was actually impactful enough to make some stand more this week instead of sitting while working. I am very interested to hear this talk. I can’t find a link to it online. If anybody has one please leave a comment and I will update.

10. The Mono project farther along then I thought. Getting close to .NET 4.0 parity. Thanks Arne

I am sure there is more things I have already forgotten or just simply missed. There were a few groups of people I didn’t get the chance to talk with. Hopefully everyone can make it out to next months nerd dinner. Stay tuned for an update on the date and location (I will blog the details when they are finalized or you can follow me on twitter to get updates)

If anyone has other interesting things they heard about at the dinner please do leave a comment.