This week we had another lunch with geeks.  The attendance was good and we talked about a number of things. The first thing we talked about was broadening the scope of this group to other technologies. We are looking for people from RoR community and the Java community. We do have 1 java person that attends our meetings regularly but we'd like to get some more. So if you're in Wellington and you do development these lunches may be something for you.   Another thing we talked about was: What's ...

Last week there was no lunch with geeks because of Tech Ed.  Naturally we started our session rehashing what we thought were the highlights of Tech Ed NZ. In general everybody really liked the keynote by Lou Carbone and we were definitely not the only ones, mauricio has a more detailed post on the keynote.  Anyway it was really entertaining and educational at the same time, I couldn't believe some of the things hotels do with towels and toilet rolls.  Designing for to trigger emotions instead...

We had another geeks lunch on tuesday. We discussed a number of topics but focussed mainly on design patterns. Some of the observations we made are the following. The most overused design pattern : Singleton. With the remark that a singleton should only be used when you need to keep state in your object internally. You shouldn't care about design patterns until you figured out a couple yourself. This is a bit the chicken or the egg question because you would have to know the design patterns in o...

I didn't put the minutes up from last week because we had too many people there and we didn't get a real group conversation going.. It was mostly little separated groups so I don't really know what has been talked about.  I also have a deadline for a client rapidly approaching so I didn't really find the time to add this to my blog. But I would like to thank everybody that was there last week for attending. Anyway today we had another Geek lunch and the topic of discussion was: What will you do...

We had another lunch session yesterday. It was a quiet session probably because of the Wellington weather, there were 7 people attending. The first topic we discussed was mobilizing your application. The first issue that was raised around this subject what usability issues have you got to tackle around mobile applications.  Like navigation should be vastly different because of the lack of screen real estate. navigation is mostly done with a joystick or keypad there is no mouse which in itsel...

Another week, another lunch. This lunch had the biggest attendance yet.  I won't be putting up all the names because I can't remember them all :-$. We had about 20 people showing up, most of them were new faces. It was very good to see that Tim Haines could make it as well as Owen Evans. Another new addition was John Rusk and a couple of people from the TradeMe development team. With lots of people it becomes a lot more difficult to follow all the conversations at once. I'll do my best t...

Another week, another lunch. The attendees this week were JD (Mindscape), Andrew Peters (Mindscape), Adam Burmister (Xero), Fletch Brown (Xero), Simone Charietta (Calcium), James Hippolite (Telecom), Martin Harris (Telecom) and me (Xero).  Our meetings used to be on a thursday but we moved them to Tuesday in the hope that more people would be able to make it (Tim wink wink) We started out with the OR mapper of mindscape: Lightspeed.  JD and Andrew were pretty quick to point out that Lightspeed...