I really enjoyed the Geek Dinner in London last night. Guest of honour was Dave Shea who has been over here recently speaking at a Carson workshop.
It was good to met up with a few of the people I know, Andy, Chris, Zach and Shannon. After a short while the room was so full that the noise of 70 geeks in full chat mode was almost deafening. To be heard it got to the point that you had to shout. That combined with the alcohol really screwed my throat, but it was worth it as the conversation was really enjoyable.
Halfway through the evening Dave Shea was introduced by Ian to say a few words. Dave called up a few notes from his Treo and talked about the things he is currently excited about such as Ajax and unobtrusive DOM scripting, through to Web 2.0 and how all those technologies fit together with CSS. He went on to take a few questions from the assembled geeks which quickly descended into a lively dicussion between the attendees and Dave suggested that the conversations continue over a beer. For the complete lowdown Ian Smith has written up a full transcript from his minidisc recording. Good work!
As the evening went on I spoke a little to Chris Heilmann and Emmanuel Idé of Jazar about Sajax. (At the time we couldn't remember the name of the library that is used for PHP integration and we thought it was Sarissa. In actual fact I was thinking of Sajax) I was saying that having tried Sajax I came to the conclusion that you are better off learning how to set-up XMLHttpRequest yourself as it really isn't that complicated.
Just before I left I took a moment to talk to Dave Shea and I asked him how the Carson workshops went and we talked a bit about SXSW and what to expect to get out of it. Dave's really down to earth and I hope I'll get a chance to talk for longer in the future.
Well done Ian for another successful night, and I'll be keeping my eye on geekdinner.co.uk for the next one.