Well it's taken a couple of days for me to get round to writing this post up, so for that I have to apologise! I know some of the London 2.0 guys have been looking for this post for a while... well here it is...
The venue - The Old Bank of England was a pretty cool venue. Very old fashioned but with plenty of room. Unfortunately they put us upstairs in a small narrow area with a couple of tables, but it worked... everyone was forced to mingle coz they didn't have a choice.
I expected the event to be a bit more hands on techie than the London Girl geek Dinners, and rightly so by the look of things... the first thing I came across was 4 guys crammed around a Linux laptop programming in some random language... I have no idea which one of the many languages they were playing with: Java/ Groovy/ CherryPy/ TurboGears/ Python/ Django/ Ruby/ Rails/ Perl/Catalyst/ Maypole/ Grails. What I do know for definate was that it definately wasn't .Net and it didn't look like Java (but I've not played with that for a little while... surely it's not regressed that much!)
After the initial tech shock I got to actually talk to some interesting people and there were heated discussions on languages, platforms, phones, operators and a whole lot more. We even had one guy on his PDA remoting into his home pc using putty... I didn't even know you could get putty on a PDA... but now i do and I want to play with it. I also downloaded IronPython today so they may even have made me look into something new. Now all I need to do is find out how to program in Python and what the benefits of using it are... where is it most useful etc!
In case you are wondering what the hell IronPython is, it's a new Python implementation targeting the .NET and Mono platforms. (not exactly new... created in 2004...) However you need the .Net framework 1.1 on your pc and I haven't seen a version for it targetted at .Net 2.0 so I don't quite know how it will cope with that! (to be experimented with at some point!) So my first point of call is to now learn Python... then at least I will have something amusing to talk about with those guys again.
All in all a fun evening, with a little too much alcohol and a lot of real tech talk! (but you could avoid it if you got onto the right subject... or should I say wrong subject!)