This wiki is about GeekNights held in Manchester, organised by ThoughtWorks. We hope to provide a forum for discussion and dissemination of ideas, technologies and techniques in the field of software development. These events are open to the public, but the venue does require a list of names in advance, so please register for each event you'd like to come to.

Thanks to the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, for allowing us to use their facilities to hold the event.

ThoughtWorks also runs GeekNights in our London office.

News

• We plan to have a full programme of events in 2010 starting with Chris read on 21st January. Watch this space for the programme early in the New Year.
  

Upcoming Events The Cloud Silver Bullet: which calibre is right for me? with Chris Read Kilburn building, 21st January 2010 at 6.45pm There is a lot of buzz, confusion and FUD around the subject of clouds these days. Each of the vendors is trying to tell you why their solution is best. Architects and others who don't understand it cry "Beware the Vendor Lock In!". CEO's are saying strange things like "We must move to the cloud so we can reduce our capex.". In this talk you'll learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the various cloud types and understand what questions to ask when deciding which one of them, if any, is right for the problem you're trying to solve. This talk will interest anyone who is confused by what the real difference is between the various cloud types or is curious about how "the cloud" can help them. Chris Read is a Principal Consultant and Infrastructure Specialist at ThoughtWorks Inc., where he helps clients design and impliment their production infrastructure, and make the process of deploying their software as painless as possible.

Suggestions for topics that we've had recently are:

• functionaly programming - haskell, erlang
• Open/UP
• Amazon Web Services
  

Other TW events in Manchester

ThoughtWorks host frequent technology briefings in Manchester - more aimed at the business side of IT rather than the techie side. For a list of current events please take a look here. Previous topics have included Enterprise Agile in Practice; Guerilla SOA; Lean Techniques for IT; and How To Sell Agile To Your Boss..

Previous Geek Nights

August 6, 2009: Agile Systems Administration with Paul Nasrat
June 4, 2009:Soft Skills for a Learning Organisation with Chris Morris
January 22, 2009: Save the Videogame with Francisco Trindade, Iain Simons, & James Newman
October 23, 2008: Usability Testing with Luke Barrett
August 27, 2008: Techiques for Producing Quality Software with Andrew Stopford and Chris Morris
July 21, 2008: The Agile Primer, with Pat Kua
June 4, 2008: The 5Ws of DSLs with Jay Fields
May 7, 2008: Domain Driven Design with James Lewis and Alistair Jones
April 8, 2008: Synthesised Testing with Stuart Caborn and George Malamidis

Other events and groups

Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club - a monthly gathering of IT professionals in and around Yorkshire that meet to discuss extreme programming and agile methods amongst a host of other IT issues
NorthWest Ruby Users Group - a group of people in the North West of England, with an interest in all things Ruby or Rails
GeekUp - a community of web designers, web developers, and other tech-minded folk from the North West