Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2006-11-28 00:23:11 - Graham Ellis
A big "Thank You" to everyone who came along to Geekmas over the weekend - a good time, a great night at the hotel, and a fantastic curry had by all!
Code quality, testing and maintainability turned out to be a major theme that ran through the weekend - with topics ranging from Rasmus Lerdorf's 4 layer PHP model through the doctest module in Python - and that's a pretty wide range.
The scheme for a campaigning web site (Neuroblastoma) that I posted up here yesterday was something that we worked out on the tail end of Sunday, and I wish Dan all the best with his work on that site.
Even with Melksham loosing all its useful trains in a couple of weeks, a half of the people who stayed overnight actually arrived by rail. Alas, the train turned into a bus (again) for their Sunday return journey... and in two weeks time there won't even be a daytime Sunday bus to Chippenham and Swindon
People travelled from the South Coast, from the Netherlands, and from London and Harrogate to attend (and that is NOT intended to be a complete list!). We were also delighted to welcome the partner of one of the originators of HTML, who worked alongside Tim Berners-Lee at Cern. A really interesting insight into the life and times around then; and I'm not name-dropping to respect privacy.
We've intentionally got cycle and motor cycle space, under cover, at Well House Manor and indeed we welcomed one of our delegates as our first cycling guest. He happened to be collapsible (you know what I mean!) but I'm cheerfully saying "yes, that's a sensible provision" to myself.
Do we do Geekmas again next year? Yes - we probably do, although there are elements of it that are starting to happen year and weekend round... technical people in at other weekends, and all that sort of thing.
In fact, Bruce and Lika have invited us all to come down to New Milton (I think he said tents in the garden as he doesn't have a hotel like us ;-)) and I understand that Lika makes an excellent Lamb Shaslik. Just don't tell my friends on the left!
A big "Thank You" to everyone who came along to Geekmas over the weekend - a good time, a great night at the hotel, and a fantastic curry had by all!
Code quality, testing and maintainability turned out to be a major theme that ran through the weekend - with topics ranging from Rasmus Lerdorf's 4 layer PHP model through the doctest module in Python - and that's a pretty wide range.
The scheme for a campaigning web site (Neuroblastoma) that I posted up here yesterday was something that we worked out on the tail end of Sunday, and I wish Dan all the best with his work on that site.
Even with Melksham loosing all its useful trains in a couple of weeks, a half of the people who stayed overnight actually arrived by rail. Alas, the train turned into a bus (again) for their Sunday return journey... and in two weeks time there won't even be a daytime Sunday bus to Chippenham and Swindon
People travelled from the South Coast, from the Netherlands, and from London and Harrogate to attend (and that is NOT intended to be a complete list!). We were also delighted to welcome the partner of one of the originators of HTML, who worked alongside Tim Berners-Lee at Cern. A really interesting insight into the life and times around then; and I'm not name-dropping to respect privacy.
We've intentionally got cycle and motor cycle space, under cover, at Well House Manor and indeed we welcomed one of our delegates as our first cycling guest. He happened to be collapsible (you know what I mean!) but I'm cheerfully saying "yes, that's a sensible provision" to myself.
In fact, Bruce and Lika have invited us all to come down to New Milton (I think he said tents in the garden as he doesn't have a hotel like us ;-)) and I understand that Lika makes an excellent Lamb Shaslik. Just don't tell my friends on the left!