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UK Geek Events

23 January 2007

There are a couple of grass-roots geek events coming up that are worth mentioning for those based in the UK.

Following on fromt he success of the first London BarCamp, a second, larger event has been organised for February 17-18th, this time sponsored by BT. BarCampLondon2 (Upcoming) has already had an initial sign-up round of 100 people, but I hear is to be accepting more shortly. Worth keeping an eye on as the first event was great. BarCamps would seem to work best with a mixture of people from all sorts of backgrounds, so if you’re not a techy or if you didn’t make it along before, it’s worth trying to make it.

The second event I wanted to mention is taking place outside of London (hooray!). Oxford Geek Night (Upcoming) is a new event taking place in the centre on Oxford on Februrary 7th, aimed at both sharing knowledge and socialising. The format is two or three keynote talks of about 15 minutes, followed by open microslot sessions and, I’m sure, much geeking out and supping of ale. It’s really great to see more events spring up outside London, and if you’re based in the Oxfordshire area I really encourage you to support it if you can.

Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to attend either event as I’m in the throes of moving house and all that entails (wish me luck!). However, come April I’ll be out and about in Scotland at the first Highland Fling one-day conference, speaking on microformats. If you’re anywhere near Edinburgh (or even just fancy a jaunt) that one’s worth checking out too.

- Drew McLellan

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  1. § Rick Hurst:

    Bristol has it’s own grass-roots geek/new media/ web gatherings, going under the name of SkillSwap (after the now defunct Brighton events of the same name).

    See here for more details:-

    http://groups-beta.google.com/group/bristolskillswap/

  2. § Drew McLellan:

    Thanks Rick!

  3. § Alan:

    Hi Drew… I’m really glad you are taking the time out to come up to Scotland, it looks like you have a busy schedule!

    Everyone up here is looking forward to it!

  4. § Lionel:

    Nooo!! :( I lost the Highland Fling :( Can’t believe I was less than 10 miles from there, but couldn’t be :(

    Drew… are you planning another speech soon?

    _____________________
    Lionel – http://www.silverlight.com.ar

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Caburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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