Nerd Dinner was a hit!

A big thanks to the people who came out to the inaugural San Diego Nerd Dinner event. We had a great time and chatted about a really diverse set of topics from the rock and roll school in Vista  to DVCS systems like Git and mercurial.

I am going to keep these events going on a monthly basis so please feel free to come to one in the future and bring anyone who might be interested along. I will post and update when the next event is planned.

There was so much content covered at this first one that I wanted to post a quick list of links to the things we chatted about (mainly for my own knowledge). I am sure I missed some things and this is only a condensed slice of what we discussed.

First (and really most importantly):

Kimchi HotDogs

IoC Stuff

Unity OR MEF or Unity AND MEF?
Autofac now in Mindtouch

Parallel / Async stuff

Reactive Extensions (Rx)
ThreadPool in .NET 3.5 sucks but not in .NET 4.0?
IsAsync for WPF bindings rocks

Database / NoSQL stuff

Good uses for Key / Value stores like mongo or Firkin?
When is a relational data store (SQL Server) appropriate? required?
Oracle sucks… period.

Open Source Web stuff

The state of .NET open source is painfully inept currently. Looking for good, open source shopping cart code is a losing effort. Switching to ruby for the vibrant open source community. .NET, from a language perspective, is suited for this type of code (shopping cart) obviously, the problem is the community is lacking. 

Version Control / Project Management Tools

Rally
Agilezen
TFS
Perforce
Git (TortiseGit and gitorious)
Mecurial (TortiseHg and VisualHG)
SVN

Podcasts

Herding Code
Stanford course on cuda development (taught by nvidia employees)

 

I hope to see everyone again next month and hopefully some new faces. Stay tuned for an update with the details for next months get together.

Hosting a nerd dinner event in San Diego

If you are in the San Diego area (or will be on May 13th) and want to geek out with total strangers then you should come to my nerd dinner event.

The idea is to get a group of nerds in a casual setting to chat about anything and everything. Some things I am interested in chatting about are NoSQL, Natural Language Processing, SaaS (especially cloud based ideas), C# 4.0 Parallel computing etc. So you can see, it is really all over the map. In general I think it will lean towards the .NET side as most of the people in my network that I am inviting are .NET guys but really I would love to get people from other areas to come out and share their ideas and experiences. 

To RSVP for the event go here: http://nrddnr.com/2159

Hope to see you there.