“Getting together with real people in real life makes powerful things happen,” proclaims the Meetup.com website.
All of us at Hamilton software specialist Company-X know the power of collaboration. When the right people get in the room or join a conference call, amazing things happen. We experience this every day as we meet with clients or put our collective heads together to solve someone’s business problems by designing and developing bespoke software for them.
“Side hustles become careers, ideas become movements, and chance encounters become lifelong connections,” Meetup says. Meetup brings people together to create thriving communities.
With this in mind and armed with the knowledge that the University of Waikato’s Computer Science department produces graduates of world-class talent, Company-X is supporting monthly developer meetups at Wintec’s CBD campus by buying attendees that favourite developer staple pizza and beer.
The idea is to host a meeting of minds that benefits everyone in the room. The software development space is full of experts in specific technologies who are keen to share their expertise with their peers. This is done in the spirit of mentorship.
The group is being led by Company-X solutions architect and developer Luke McGregor, who started the /dev/talk Meetup in February with a developer’s guide to microservices. Luke talked about some of the most important lessons he had learned about microservices during his career at the first event. Approximately 40 Information Technology professionals attended the Meetup including one who joined via video conferencing from Australia.
“For a long time, I have felt that we need to do better at getting developers in Hamilton together as a community,” McGregor said. “We have plenty of awesome people doing really great work around the city and region but haven’t had a good meet up to share ideas and experiences before. I want to change that, and especially bring people together that come from different programming backgrounds.”
McGregor also delivered June’s talk on some of the most common web vulnerabilities and how to avoid them.
Troy Mare gave a talk, in March, about moving from hosting applications on traditional servers to going serverless.
Daniel Tebbutt gave a talk in May about dead programming languages and why people used to think they were awesome.
The next /dev/talk Meetup, hosted by Company-X developer Marcel van de Steeg, will be held on July 24 at The Long Room, Wintec.
The /dev/talk Meetups are also being supported by business incubator Soda which is providing the meeting space. All are welcome. Register your interest at meetup.com and search for “dev/talk”.