November Nerd Dinner

Just a quick note. The November nerd dinner is this Thursday (November 11th) at 6pm. Once again I moved the location, I am still trying to find the ideal spot that can accommodate people from both ends of county, has enough parking, and is easy to get to off the freeway.  For this month we are meeting near the Champagne Bakery in Del Mar, 12955 El Camino Real San Diego, CA 92130, USA (Map). There are a couple other food choices in the same center as well if you would like something else.

This will probably be the last Nerd Dinner this year since we are getting into the holiday season and it will be difficult to schedule one over the next few months.

If you are in the area feel free to come by and nerd out with us. Everyone is welcome and it is FREE! 

If you are planning on attending please RSVP with the nerd dinner site: http://nerddinner.com/3621. It helps me to gauge how many people will be attending so I can secure enough seating.

Hope to see you there.

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.

Nerd Dinner Part II

We had a lot fun doing the first event and we all wanted to do it on a monthly basis. So here is part two (Revenge of the Nerds part II if you will).

Same place and same time as last month. I am still thinking about switching up the location (somewhere with alcohol seems to be a preference) but for now I will keep it at the same location.  If the location changes I will post an update so everyone is aware.

http://www.nerddinner.com/2379 

Feel free to bring friends and colleagues that you think would be interested. To find out about what we talked about before see the other posts under the Nerd Dinner category on my blog.

Hope to see you there.

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.