Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

This month we have three excellent speakers:

• Richard Powell – Running Workshops: The Benefits, How To and Get Involved
• Ryan Foster – Lean eCommerce, Using Shopify and Working Internationally from the North East
• Andrew Westgarth – Stories from the User Group Frontline

Janet E Davis wrote an excellent event report here:
http://janetdavistheperson.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/supermondays-july-2012/

Richard Powell also wrote an excellent event report here:
http://www.byrichardpowell.co.uk/post/28897424231/ryan-foster-lean-ecommerce-at-super-mondays

Here at the SuperMondays HQ we are constantly interested in what we call the ‘because of effect’. This is the very powerful and often intangible benefit that people get by bovvering to attend events like ours.

This month we asked people to tell us something that happened because of their attendance at a previous event. We were really impressed with what people had to say, some of these are listed here:

• Gained confidence in public speaking. Since my talk at Super Mondays I have gone on to talk at a local seminar helping businesses
• I’ve found some contract work probably/possibly because of knowing people through SuperMondays.
• Connected with other developers in NE.
• After a talk in the pub got a job with a company and went on to develop an application for them – would not have got that without SuperMondays!
• SM gave me my first experience of public speaking, because of this I realised it was both nothing to fear and something I actually enjoy, and have gone on to give more talks & presentations since.
• visited other user groups in the north east, woken up to the NE tech community, there’s lots going on.
• learnt lots of interesting stuff and met lots of interesting people
• met some very interesting people;
• attended jboss and drupal groups
• Met lots of cool tech people. Got my new job.
• I became active in more local IT user groups eg JBOSS user group, Drupal user group, and events like Dorkbot, Datarama, Geekiest drink, Howduino by hearing about them through Supermondays contacts or forum. Some of the events have contained ideas I can put into practice immediately eg UX, messaging, freelancing, whereas others have either been thought provoking or caused me to find out more about the subject eg Software Testing, the Difference Engine. I stimulated the local economy by spending more money in the bar at the Trent pub than I otherwise would The payoff was some high quality technical discussion with like minded people.
• Kept in touch with local friends and tech industry players; kept up-to-date with key trends; had my eyes opened to new topics; met new people

The results show that people benefited by meeting like-minded people who  introduced them to new technologies, job prospects and other user groups. We were very happy to hear this….long may it continue.

This month we have really pushed the boat out and invited some excellent speakers from all around the world. Our topic was ‘Application development for the enterprise’ and focused on some of the lessons that our speakers have learnt while writing mission critical code for some of the worlds largest companies.

Our speaker presentations are:

The event took place at the Baltic Campus of Gateshead College. We are very grateful to Gateshead College for the help in hosting this event.

On Tuesday 26th April we held another of our Ligntning Talks events. This was attended by around 70 people who heard the following speakers:

• Ian Oxley: HTML5 form validation
• Michael Peacock: Jenkins Continuous Integration tool
• Alex Kavanagh: A whirlwind history of copyright and what it means for the 21st century
• Jonathan Dixon: web sockets and Web Data Storage
• Gregory Marler: OpenStreetMap.org: Not just a pretty web map, using the raw data. Featuring elephants, table tennis, and toilets.
• Mark Stairmand: UX challenges for application developers
• Ross Cooney: Messaging idioms.
• Richard Powell: HTML5 Canvas
• Matthew Peacock: Scala

Stuart Holmes wrote the following review:
http://www.xero-g.co.uk/trubru/2011/05/supermondays-lightning-talks-a-review/

This month we had a capacity crowd to hear our 8 speakers. The speakers were:

1. Peter Bull — Developing ZuneCardr, a Windows 7 mobile app
2. Sam Harrison — Mapping a different way
3. Audrius Jankauskas – web CMSs and related technologies
4. Ross Dargan — An introduction to Flex-Raid
5. Aidan Garnish — An introduction to the concept of time banking
6. Bobby Patterson — happiest
7. Adrià Mercader — Customised web maps
8. Derek Frost — Development using the Spring framework

Oli and James from Memory Merge have written this excellent review of the evening:
http://blog.memorymerge.com/post/3047211319/supermondays-reflash-talks

Stuart Holmes also wrote this excellent review:
http://www.xero-g.co.uk/trubru/

Paul from Web Design Futures wrote these words:
http://paul.webdesignfutures.co.uk/2011/02/super-mondays/

We want to thank our sponsors, Newcastle University and Codeworks Connect.