Last week I happened to be in Dallas for a client and was invited along to the Dallas Geeknight held at the ThoughtWorks offices there.
The Dallas Geeknight is ‘oldschool’ which is not surprising since Paul Hammant informed me he formed the original Geeknight in the UK. The primary driver is producing code and committing that code to a repository.
At the start of the evening people offered up their current open source projects elevator pitch style. I pitched two projects bvira and Intercept. There was interest in both but as most people have their own web frameworks the consensus was to work on Intercept.
After some initial hiccups around the IDE files for the project we were up and running. For most of the evening we worked as a group of 3 or 4 on a single laptop. The discussion and engagement was great and I am deeply thankful for the interest in my pet project. A lot of my work at the moment is around talking, writing and generally I don’t spend enough time working with code to satisfy the geek side of my nature. It was a truly refreshing experience to spend a few hours having fantastic technical conversations — at the end of the evening I could not believe how great I felt about what had been achieved.
A big thank you to everyone who was there but especially those who gave their time to work on Intercept.
Dallas Geeknight is definitely an event I will be attending again when I am next in Dallas.