A strong and vibrant IT community based in the North East Of England

Archive for August, 2011

Am I Bovvered? (the because of effect)

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.

From design to design, and everything in between

Our last event on July 25th was held at the Beehive Research Facility at Newcastle University with three talks on the subject of designing for the web. Our speaker presentations were:
  • Call me Delia: A tale of good design – Leanne Johnson
  • HTML5 apps for iOS (and probably beyond) – Andy Far
  • CMS design integration/theming – Richard Carter

The slides are also available from Slideshare:

Reviews

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