Another Thursday, another lunch with geeks in wellington.

We decided to move the lunch to be on tuesdays. This will allow for Tim Haines to join the discussions.

Today the attendees were Simone, JD, Andrew Peters, Kirk Jackson and yours truly.
We touched a broad range of topics in our talks which went from Google Gears to Linux vs. Windows to everybody has a killer idea for a website to microsoft surface and we also touched briefly on database servers.

We started out discussing  offline storage for web apps, because Google announced it’s gears plugin today. The opinions in our discussion leaned more towards nobody really liking the idea of offline storage for webapps except me.  According to Simone this introduced an unnecessary layer of complexity.  JD quoted DHH on why offline storage doesn’t really matter, the internet is everywhere.
Kirk doesn’t see the point. I tend to think that there has to be some middle ground.

Next I uttered my frustrations about the ongoing vs. debates and we picked windows vs. linux. The problem in this sentence is clearly the vs.  Instead of beating the other people to death the energy would be better used by finding some sort of compromise. Andrew said he’d love to see a world where there was a choice between multiple OS’es and everything would just work on all of them.. I too would like to see that day.

From there we moved on to the fact that every Joe Schmo has a killer idea to build but they often don’t realise that the development is only a small part of a bigger picture. After development a lot more money needs to be spent on marketing, sales and support.

JD put our attention onto Microsoft surface for which most of us got links etc yesterday. Bottom line it looks really cool but the team seems relatively small according to Kirk. JD then explained us why it could be such a small team and that we might be able to get some preview of it before the end of the year.
We had a bit of fun by coming up with ways to use this device which go from gaming to having a digital tv-guide,….

JD then asked me about the CRM I’m building in rails for when he could get some preview or test of it. The reply to this was a little bit more complicated but it brought us to our next point of discussion. Andrew asked me if I had used postgres because I was saying that we are moving this crm now to mysql so it can run on dreamhost.  He went on about running the unit tests for lightspeed and their different database providers. It turns out that postgres performs better than all the other databases they support on windows in their unit tests. (this hasn’t been benchmarked in an official lab or anything)

This concluded our discussions. If I forgot something please email me or add them in the comments.

After Alex James setting an example with the Architects chats in Auckland, I decided we needed the same thing in Wellington.

I called it Lunch with geeks, more because I don’t try to label developers and IT people.
Anyway our first meeting was a successful one And the turnout was quite impressive. There is a lot of talent in Wellington.  The people that joined our first meeting were JB (Jeremy Boyd), JD (John-Daniel Trask), Andrew Peters, James Hippolite, Simone Chiaretta, Adam Burmister

We had some interesting discussions and tried to limit the session to one hour, seen as we all have jobs to go to etc. 
Of course we couldn’t resist to have a discussion about the americas cup: Team New Zealand vs Italian Luna Rossa.  Next on the agenda came a discussion on subtext vs. nblogr which is not a comparison really because subtext is going on v.2.0 and nblogr is going for v0.19 alpha. In the end it turns out that if you want to start blogging today you probably should go with subtext. And by the time they release 2.0 nblogr should be completely on par with them regarding features and released as v1.0.

The next point of discussion was the DLR with IronRuby and IronPython, where Andrew P. took the lead in the discussion.  From the DLR the discussion moved onto Silverlight and what it exactly is. The guys from Mindscape obviously had a more in depth play with it than the rest of us which was pretty enlightening for me. And it put a couple of concerns to rest. Adam was concerned about the fact that you wouldn’t be able to do view source on an application so you could learn from other peoples work. This issue is solved with a new reflector application that downloads the silverlight app and shows you the source.  My concern was that search engines would face the same problem to index silverlight as they have with indexing a flash application. 

James wanted to know if silverlight was going to be the flash killer and we agreed that it would be more an html killer than it would be a flash killer. Andrew explained how nicely silverlight plays with the DOM to such a degree that you can manipulate the DOM from within the silverlight app and you can control the silverlight app from javascript.  All of these things are nice to have and things that were missing really from flash in the days that I was working with flash.

JD mentioned that there was a benchmark on a demo he saw where there was a chess game that calculated the next possible moves. On 1 side there was a javascript app and on the other side a silverlight app. The javascript app could calculate something like 10000 new moves and the silverlight app would do millions in the same timeframe.

Next week we doing the lunch again.. Come along if you like.

UPDATE: To be clear Subtext is already at 1.0 and will go to 2.0. It’s nblogr that will be going 1.0