Our First .NET Oxford Meetup!!

It was our very first .NET Oxford event on Tuesday night - and wow, what an incredible turnout! Before the event, we were amazed by how many people RSVP'd on Meetup.com - with the final figure being 93 people! We knew that not everyone who RSVP'd would come along, but we still hit a pretty impressive 65-70 people! Not bad for a first meetup!

The feedback we received afterwards was incredible, with many people saying that they can't wait for the next event, and plenty of suggestions for future topics.

I'd like to say a massive thank you to all involved, helping make our first event such a huge success. With a special thanks to our speakers, sponsors, and also co-founder Matt Nield.

The Talks

Stuart Leeks was first up talking about "DevOps'ing Containers", starting off with .NET Core, quickly creating an MVC app using the Yeoman tooling, and showing off the new dotnet CLI. Then hooking it up all to Docker containers, and delving even further talking about both Swarm and DC/OS - updating a published Chess application on the fly.

Oh, and I did I mention this was all from Linux?!

Here's is a link to Stuart's slides from his talk

Next up was Anže Vodovnik talking about Architecting for high availability in Azure. "Everything will fail" according to Anže, and the sooner we accept that, the sooner we can learn to deal with it. Whilst very educational, it was also rather scary to see how many things you need to think about when dealing with high availability in the cloud!

My Intro

Whilst I didn't do an actual 'talk' myself, I did do the initial introduction talk. This is the first time (excluding my wedding speech) that I've ever attempted public speaking. Beforehand, I didn't feel nervous at all - I had practiced what I was going to say, so it would be simple, right?

Then people started arriving. Then the nerves kicked in!

When practicing at home, I was using emotion in my voice, arm gestures, etc. On stage though, I froze. Okay, maybe I didn't freeze, but I certainly felt like there was none of the emotion that I had when rehearsing at home. I'm fairly sure I remembered most of it, so at least that's something!

It definitely gave me an even greater respect for how amazing and natural the speakers were.

The strange thing is though, that I also found that I wanted to do it again! I'm now starting to see why people say it's addictive! At least I can only get better!

Sponsors

Finally, I'd also like to give a massive thank you to our sponsors, Corriculo Recruitment!! They not only covered the venue hire cost, but also provided A LOT of refreshments - especially of the liquid variety! They were a huge help at the event, welcoming guests as they came in, and generally making everyone feel very welcome and at home.

The Next Steps

So now the first event has passed, it's time to start looking to our next meetup. We're already getting lots of positive feedback, and even suggestions and offers for talks for future events! It makes me wonder now if we need to be having them more frequently than our initial quarterly plan!

Here are a few ideas of talks that we're looking at for upcoming events ...

• Xamarin
• Machine Learning
• SOLID Principles and Automated testing
• CAKE Build system
• Grok your tools to become more productive!
• Understanding Async / Await
• Windows Containers
• Learning Vi

Please do get in touch if you have other ideas of talks that you'd like to hear! Or even if you'd like to do a talk yourself!

If you're interested in being notified about our next event, then you can subscribe to our Meetup.com group to receive notifications. We're also active on our @dotnetoxford Twitter account.

Looking forward to seeing you at the next .NET Oxford! ...