I just want to learn something new

See you at the next one!

Ian: I dropped you an email but got an autoreply.

Cheers,
Pierre

London Flash Platform User Group

Not living in London, and always being busy, it takes a lot of time and energy to attend events/meets/conferences. In general I avoid most of them as they do not inspire me and are not really worth the effort, often being too soft on focus or business related (with no tangible and realistic implementation paths) to be useful.

However, I do like the Hacker meets Ian has organised as it provides good insight into building web-apps, something I am learning to do. It is very cool to see what people are doing and how they are doing it.

To really benefit, it does help if you are working on a project/startup/web-app or seriously thinking of doing one as the advice and feedback is very great and the event is really geared towards that.

Thanks to everyone at Songkick et al for their efforts, especially Ian, Pete, Phil, and (the elusive) Michelle.

It’s not a straight Hacker meet, as there’s a certain amount of discussion of business/entrepreneurship, but that often seems to go hand-in-hand anyway.

I’m going ahead with the meetup in Edinburgh – had a chat around and everyone is really keen to see something like that. Not only on a local basis but the ability to connect with you guys in London is a huge appeal as well. As goes for any other city that can organise them. It’s massively valuable to have a bunch of different meetups connected – but it has to be an easy and effective connection. What I liked about your London meetups was that it was really relaxed and everyone could just chat. Ideally I’d like to see that if you’re in a city on the 4th of a month (or whatever) you can pop into the hacker meetup there and you’ll have already chatted to some of the people at it.

I think those are both great ideas man. Can you help get the IRC channel started? Will follow up with you by email.

Think it’s also a smart move to try to sync up hacker meetups in other cities around the UK. Sam Collins up in Edinburgh is planning to organise one up there so perhaps we should try to schedule them on the 4th September to coincide? In a similar way to Open Coffee, Meetup.com looks like the easiest way to synchronise.

Cambridge doesnt have any hacker meet ups (there is Refresh Cambridge, an an annual barcamp) – I’m suprised, Cambridge really suits that environment. Maybe.

Startups in the UK don’t get as much exposure as their US counterparts, TechCrunch UK is a bit pants, ycombinator is US focussed and so on. Create a good community of startups and the social bits will come with it.

The Register ran a list of the top 25 startups in the UK and it pretty underwhelming, I can’t believe there isn’t a facebook or a twitter or a reddit growing in someones head and it just needs exposure to british people (and investors).

So – to fix it, step up TechCrunch UK and actually update this blog constantly – surely you get a ton of email from british startups?

One problem I see is that we don’t have critical mass of hackers around the country, apart from London. In London, there are enough hackers to support a regular meet-up. In Cambridge where I am? Maybe – I don’t know. Oxford? In Leeds? Or Edinburgh? Who knows.

I think we can try two things:

1. Set up an IRC (or other virtual) meet up once a week. Stick with it and keep it regular come rain or shine. This way people don’t have to travel and can dedicate some time to it.

2. set up an orchestrated series of meetings (every major town holds a meeting at the same day and time). The publicity of such a massive nation-wide drive would be great enough to kick start things and also gauge if there is interest in the UK or not.

BTW, if you need to get in touch with me, you know my email address (search for our brief conversation on April 15th) and I’ll try to come on September 4th.

Cheers,
Pierre