Hacker News London meetup was excellent | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News London meetup was excellent

alanhollis.com

89 pointsAlan0125228 comments

Yes, it was cool. When it goes up on Vimeo I highly recommend that people listen not to my talk, but to Linda Sandvik's heartfelt and inspirational talk called "Getting Better". Amongst many things she's behind Code Club: http://codeclub.org.uk

Very modest of you John. I personally found your talk great, and I came away from the event with a crazy idea which I'm going to pursue. ;)

Do you have a link to previous talks on Vimeo? Thanks!

http://vimeo.com/hnlondon

I really enjoyed your talk, particularly the part about building the Analytical Engine and how Babbage thought about instruction pipelining, in cogs! Can't wait to see this machine built.

I really enjoyed all the talks and will be watching them again! I very much appreciate you and others giving up your time to help others who are just starting out

I'd recommend watching both. John's talk was really enjoyable, his point about charm was a really really good one.

Someone asked a question at the end about how to get charming. It's the same answer for everything: practice.

I’d like to thank Dimitiri Grabov, and Steve Buckley for organizing Hacker News London

Dmitri deserves 99% of the gratitude. I only play a very small part at the moment!

I've been to two of these already and they're absolutely fantastic. 500 people regularly show up and it usually fills up pretty quickly. Thanks to Dimitri and Steve for continuing to put this on. Also, a big thanks to the sponsors who provide beer and pizza!

P.S. - I've thought about asking to give a talk about start-ups in the enterprise since I'm probably one of the few here that works in that industry. I'm in the process of finishing up a long blog post on the topic. As it's something most people don't necessarily talk about here on HN, I thought I'd gauge some interest first.

Do you mean startups targeting enterprises as customers? If so then yes I'd be interested.

Yes.

You might be interested in http://www.meetup.com/unsexystartups/ which focuses on B2B and enterprise startups.

Nice, I'll check it out! Thanks!

Thanks for the write-up. The next event will be on 22nd Nov, join the meetup group http://www.meetup.com/hnlondon/ to be notified when registrations open. We also post the videos of the talks online at http://vimeo.com/hnlondon . Last night's videos should be up some time next week.

I've studied last year in London and attended nearly every Hacker News Meetup there. It is a very nice cross-section of the tech scene and can purely recommend these meetups!

Apart from the woman briefly getting trapped in the toilets, everything went swimmingly.

We try to attend as often as we can, it's a seriously great event and our thanks goes out to the organisers!

I did my first public talk there (we're Scirra). Although I found it quite frightening (the last time I spoke to more than a few people at once was back at school!) it was very rewarding and everyone was very supportive.

If you get a chance to attend/speak, definitely head on down! If you take away the free beer and pizza, I'd still go - it's that good!

Damn, foldable.me (mentioned in the OP) is absolutely brilliant. Such a simple concept but executed perfectly, and so much value created from almost nothing.

Oh the Oxford comma, how I have missed thee. On the other hand, gret post and interesting to see such a quality turnaround.

So it's more like a sit-down to listen other people talk or is there still a place for meeting others in the crowd?

It's a little bit of A, a little bit of B. The start of the night was very much a mingle, networking opportunity before the talks started.

After the talks there was a gathering in the pub around the corner, which I'd of loved to of gone to, but unfortunately the last train home was calling me.

There's a mix.

The previous meetup was down the pub.

It depends, I usually listen to a couple of talks and go outside to chat to some people. There's also half an hour at the start to just talk to people and eat pizza.

I went to the pub after and it turns into a slightly more one-on-one setting as only 30 people or so will go. I've been going for a year and a bit and it's definitely worth it.

Is there somewhere where I could find a list of HNMeetups? I've always wanted to attend something like this.

"...having a disastrous experience at PHP London"

Oh, do tell

It was a complete failure on my part, I had/have an inability to talk/approach groups of people and ended up sitting on my own guzzling cans of sprite before making a hasty and rather embarrassingly early exist.

I have a rather crippling social anxiety, which is usually circumvented by doing a short of vodka just before getting into such situations..

What I don't understand is how a room packed with 600+ people all noisily engaging in social interaction was any more manageable last night.

I found it almost overwhelmingly intense. I did stay to the end though.

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