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

• The next ThoughtWorks Geek Night will be on Wednesday 21st October. The topic is Languages on the Java VM.
  
• The slides from Jim Webber's talk on Web Based Integration have now been uploaded. Enjoy...

• The slides from Luke's talk Usability Testing have now been uploaded as requested
  
• Alex and Pat will be at AgileNorth 2008. We'll be facilitating a group session on the State of the Art in Acceptance Testing.
  
• The video of Pat's session "The Agile Primer" is now up on Vimeo. Thanks Paul for the encoding tips. Unfortunately the video freezes a couple of times - I think it's a problem somewhere in the multiple stages of conversion/encoding - but the audio, the important bit really, carries on.
• Images and data from Chris Morris' session on eliciting quality policies are now up on the site. Thanks Chris for the data.
  

Upcoming Events * Languages on the Java VM with Sam Newman, Wednesday 21st October,October 2009, 6.45pm Watch this space... or even better, Suggest a new topic and we'll see if we can drum up an appropriate speaker... Suggestions for topics that we've had recently are: functional programming - haskell, erlang Open/UP If you've got something you'd like to share then please get in touch.

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