Next Meeting September 8
posted: August 27th, 2008
Our next meeting will be September 8. RSVP on upcoming. Agenda will include yours truly giving a presentation on Wordpress basics and theming. I’d like someone else to lead the second-half discussion. I’m sure if no one volunteers beforehand someone will step up that evening. If not I’ll find some vacation photo slideshows to go through and we know no one wants that.
Something new at this next meeting will be a call for some outreach by the group members. Don’t worry it’s nothing to painful, I’m just asking you to bring a used web, development, design or other technical book to donate to a good local cause. So grab a dusty book from your shelves and drop it off for students of the Des Moines Public Schools’ evening Intro to HTML classes.
August 25th Meeting on Upcoming
posted: August 19th, 2008
Our next meeting has been added to Upcoming.org. RSVP and share with any groups you think may be interested. We’ve tried another day of the week to hopefully accommodate some of the folks left out by a Thursday meeting.
Next Meeting - August 25th
posted: August 18th, 2008
***UPDATED*** I screwed up this should have been Monday AUGUST, 25th per the discussion at the meeting
I’m looking at Monday, August 25th for the next meeting. We had a lot of people volunteer and I failed to adequately get everyone’s contact info. So if you or someone you know spoke up I’d love to hear from you. Here’s a list of topics, feel free to leave a comment, I’d like to have a plan in place by te end of the week so speakers can have a chance to prepare. Be advised I’ll try and pair ‘like’ topics (1 presentation and 1 discussion). Someone also mentioned breakouts as needed as well, we’ll see if we have a critical mass to support this for any super basic or super advanced topics - I’m not an expert in everything so I’ll rely on the wisdom of the audience to guide this.
Possible topics (presentations):
* jQuery Overview (Matt Nuzum)
* Web Basics/CSS Intro (Rob Glazebrook)
* User Interface Design for Today’s Web (Jeremy Harrington)
* Ruby on Rails - I’d like to hold off a meeting or two but definitely want to have some RoR-based topic soon
* ???
Possible discussion forum points:
* Project Show & tell (any)
* Rich Internet Apps/Strategies (Dan Shipton)
* Usability Testing, Analysis and Requirements Gathering (Jeremy Harrington)
* ???
New Member Signup Form
posted: August 18th, 2008
I’ve added a quick signup form to try and stay organized. Please take a moment and fill out the form. I promise no spam, no shenanigans.
First Meeting Was a A Hit - Now What
posted: August 16th, 2008
The first Des Moines Web Geeks meeting was a success. We had around 22 people in attendance from a variety of backgrounds, all coming together to discuss all things ‘web’. We had a development focus for this first discussion, my friend and former colleague Justin Gruca gave an excellent overview of Djangom with some great group sparring and discussion about various other MVC-ish framework, most notably Rails.
Daniel was gracious enough to offer Improptu Studio as a venue for this group and it was a perfect fit. Thanks to Dan and Abbie and the other coworkers for their preparation. Dan has a post on their site about the event as well. Also thanks to Chris Punke for recording the event, the plan going forward is to likely stream these, however we’d prefer to have you come down and check it out live if you’re able, the exchanges after the cameras were off was great.
So moving forward I think we’ll continue to find a balance between tech and development discussion as well as moving in to areas like usability, interface + visual design, css and the like. The format seemed to work so we’ll stick with that for now, basically a prepared presentation for the first half, and a more open roundtable and show and tell for the second half. I’ll be posting the next proposed meeting time and agenda. I’d really appreciate it if those in attendance could email me or comment here so I can contact you, particularly those who were willing to present. Keep an eye out for the followup post for the next event, should be early next week.
August 14th Kickoff - Django Presentation
Live TV by Ustream
Say What?
Des Moines Web Geeks is a group of web professionals and enthusiasts looking to meet, share ideas and have some fun. Everyone is welcome to join and participate. Have an idea for a session? contact me.
