My first HNLondon meetup

by mywintermute

I was apprehensive.  Sure my friend was late, again.  But I was also concerned – it being my first ever meetup.

I kept worrying some over zealous programmer might start throwing programming questions at me to test my mettle.

I walked down a short dark street in the middle of a very lovely part of london and was surprised to find myself infront of the venue within 20 meters of the Underground Station.  Ofcourse instead of going through the main doors, I noticed the occasional person nip into a dark side passage around what seemed the side of the building. I instinctively followed them to find myself lost in a court yard.  Ho hum. However the chap next to me and another couple of stragglers were quick to respond to my greeting and soon I found myself following them up some steps to be asked for a ticket.

Again worrying I was going to get interrogated about how many ping pong balls could fit into a bus I started losing my calm and talked the poor girls ear off.  Eventually I realised noone really cared that much about my surname or my bio, so I headed in past the friendly ticket checker.

Inside, a large room full of programmers.  To be expected really.  To the left a couple crates of beer and soft drinks. To the right stacks, and I mean STACKS of pizza boxes (empty).  It was impressive.  I was already liking the venue.

(this photo was taken off twitpic after searching for hnlondon pizza)

That being said the seats are jammed together, so bear that in mind, no room for laptops.

7pm on the dot, the show began and it was a show.  They had a lovely girl girl called  Andrea Hubert making explicit flirtatious jokes and even one to do with throttling children… which was extreme, shocking, yet surprisingly funny.  I have to say I loved her, not just because she was pretty much the only girl in a room of around 265 male HNers, but because she was genuinely funny and very quick to react to the audience, including the odd hitch.

After the delightful surprise of attending a free comedy night, the talks got on the way.  I am less qualified to talk about the technical aspects than most of you but Ill give you my perception of them

The first was about Docker – (talk by Harry Marr), a deployment application – I think for Heroku.  Good speech, could have done with more in depth answers in the Q&A session.  However it was interesting and relevant.  Slides:  https://speakerdeck.com/hmarr/build-your-own-heroku

The second was about Python Profilers, which I found pretty fascinating.  Quick and eloquent-  the slides can be found here:  https://speakerdeck.com/ianozsvald/high-performance-python-hacker-news-london-oct-2013  (Ian Ozsvald: High Performance Python: Techniques for achieving C and Fortran speeds when number crunching )

The third was about StackOverflow.  I was underwhelmed, for it lacked technical depth.  A big deal about caching, only they went on to say they don’t really use it much.  I was also sad they didnt go into more technical details about their architecture.  It was basically a short overview of the company and not much else 😦  I wanted more ! Your site rocks guys.. cmon…. (also no slides that I can find – but there werent many.  Just one with the word cache everywhere).  However the speaker – Marco Cecconi – was positive, clear and at times funny too.

The fourth was about managing people and relationships in the office.  An excellent speaker, and relevant material, just not really suited to me, being more into the programming side of things.

After that it was rounded off by the comedian, and around 1/5 went onto the pub, the rest left.

The pub was a little small, not very cosy, but fine.  Again people there were very friendly and interesting.  I can see it would be the perfect venue for networking.  The pub is about 3 minutes away from the main venue.

In summary.  I loved it.  The people were bloody great.   It was a very enjoyable evening, interesting and was of great value, you cannot really ask for more.  If you are concerned about whether the talks will be of interest, just check them out before going online.

I give it a great thumbs up.  The organisers did an absolutely great job.  Keep it up, I look forward to the next one!