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.

If you'd like to here about future events, please subscribe to our (new) mailing list.

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

• There is a Thoughtworks quarterly briefing "Business Architecture Foundations of IT" on Tuesday 16th February.
  
• Thanks to everyone who attended Chris's talk on cloud computing last week; it was a good evening. Chris wants to keep the slides under wraps until after QCon, but I should be able to publish them in March.
  
• Looking forward we'll try and get a few dates in the diary rather than just the next one, but speakers can be hard to tie down...
  

Upcoming Events The secret art of agile javascript Kilburn building, Wednesday 24th February 2010 with Luca Grulla and Brian Blignaut In the last few years the web has moved away from displaying static content towards being a platform for delivering rich client applications. Extensive DOM manipulation and AJAX callbacks are now fundamental to every Web 2.0 application. Javascript is the language that has allowed this change to happen yet it rarely receives the level of attention that it requires. This results in a risk that can jeopardise the delivery of projects. In this talk we will describe our approach to Javascript development with an emphasis on writing maintainable and testable code.

Suggestions for topics

If you'd like to suggest a topic, please let us know, and we'll see if we can find a speaker. Previously suggested topics:

• 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

January 21, 2010: The cloud sliver bullet with Chris Read
October 21, 2009: Languages on the Java VM with Sam Newman
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