For our February .NET Oxford meetup, we definitely had a bit of a food theme going on! With Gary Ewan Park talking about the Cake build system; our primary sponsors Corriculo Recruitment providing the food variety; and if that wasn't enough, the topic of Chocolatey also came up! Is anyone getting hungry yet?

A few years ago, there was a regular very popular tech event in Oxford called Oxford Geek Nights. Aimed at developers and designers and organised by a company called Torchbox. Obviously a regular event of this size requires a lot of commitment, and unfortunately there hasn't been one for a couple of years now. Up until now that is!!

Last week, I finally managed to get down to visit fellow .NET User Group .NET South East in Brighton. I'd chatted with organiser Steve Gordon quite a bit online, but hadn't yet had the pleasure of meeting him in person. He first got in touch with me last year after seeing my blog posts about .NET Oxford as he was thinking about starting his own .NET user group in his area.

Last week, was our first .NET Oxford of 2018, which now marks our second year! Our first one being January last year, meaning that we've now had over a full year of .NET goodness!

UPDATE: Since doing this lightning talk, I have also done an extended hour-long version at a couple of the DDD conferences. The full blog post about the hour-long version of the talk can be found here. That includes everything that is in this post, plus a lot more. So probably worth reading that one instead of this!

It's close to the end of another year already! And whilst in some ways, it feels like it has flown by - in other ways, an awful lot has happened! The main thing this year has definitely been .NET Oxford. Our first meetup was only in January, which is a very short amount of time really. It feels like it's been around for much longer!

Every so often I get the urge to find a new programming font. The pattern tends to be... I look for a bit, can't find anything I really like, then go back to the stock Consolas. About a year later, the same thing happens again. Then back to Consolas. And so on.

To-do lists are something I use very heavily. Without them, I wouldn't be able to do a fraction of what I currently manage to get done.

On Tuesday, it was our last .NET Oxford of the year! And given that our first ever meetup was in January, this now marks our first whole year!

One of my recent blog posts - "Git GUIs versus the CLI", discussed why I think that a GUI is far better suited for source control than the CLI. However ... being a big command line fan (albeit, perhaps not always for source control!), the last thing I wanted was to come across as anti-CLI! Far from it! So I thought a post about the CLI, together with a few tips to help you get the most out of it was in order!