It's the morning after the night before - The night of the first ever TechMeetup in Aberdeen.
TechMeetup is a no bullsh*t get-together of people interested in Technology. It's about sharing knowledge. And it's about networking. But it doesn't feel like your typical business networking event. There's no name tags, suits, sales pitches or posh nibbles. But there is free beer and pizza! You can read more about the ideas behind TechMeetup on the TechMeetup Website.
TechMeetup has been running in Edinburgh and Glasgow for some time and a couple of months ago we got together with John Eddie, Bruce Scharlau, Alan Gardner and Jim Emerson to see if we could get an Aberdeen TechMeetup off the ground. And last night we held our first meeting. And it wasn't a total train wreck!
About 30 people braved a rather harsh October night to get themselves to Aberdeen University. Sam Collins and Marius Ciocanel, organisers from the Edinburgh TechMeetup, were also present to help us kick things off. The format of the meeting was pretty relaxed - there was hour or so of mingling and chatting during which time the beer and pizza arrived (with many thanks to our benevolent sponsor - Aberdeen University). Then John led a round of introductions where we all introduced ourselves before heading through to the lecture theatre for the main part of the evening - the presentations.
Sam Collins, who founded TechMeetup in Edinburgh, was the first to speak. He gave a great background into why he started TechMeetup and why it is the way it is. The first technical speaker was our very own Gavin MacLean, who spoke about OpenCL. The content from his talk will appear here on the Open Planet Software blog very soon. The final speaker of the evening was James Littlejohn who talked about http://mepath.com. Essentially, the idea behind mepath is to provide its users with relevant links to blogs that will interest them without having to search for them. He spoke about using the 'wisdom of the crowd' and explained the architecture of the mepath engine. Slides from his presentation are online here.
The presentations were recorded to video and will be online in a few days. I will post a link once they are live.
Aberdeen TechMeetup is going to be a monthly event - running on the third Wednesday of each month. If you're in the Aberdeen area and are interested in technology, I would encourage you to come along.
The next meeting will be on the 18th November in the Meston Building at Aberdeen University where one of the presentations will be on developing for the Microsoft Surface. More details will be on the TechMeetup site nearer the time.
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