Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products. More about Ian here.
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products.
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3rd £5 App – Dan Glegg and The Pitches
John and I held another great £5 App meet last night (previous event). Even though we had to limit numbers on Upcoming we still had our regular 20-or-so turn-out. John made more Ginger Cake and I bought some better beer for this event.
First half – the talk:
Dan Glegg (angryamoeba) gave another great talk (he spoke last week at the Sussex Geek Dinner). For us he spoke about his development of Tails, a bug-tracking tool for small-team.
Over a year’s worth of work has gone into this product and Dan was proud to announce the launch of Tails this week. This is great stuff Dan – it was very cool to have you announce the product at our event.
It was good also to hear your thoughts on developing a product on the side of client-consultancy, something that several of us are doing now it seems. I’m not sure I agree that commodity hosting is a bad thing (ShowMeDo has always done just fine on a commodity shared hosting account) but otherwise I thought your comments were spot-on. I wish you every success with Tails!
Fingers crossed we’ll have a web-friendly presentation from Dan and perhaps a podcast of the event too. Anyone got photos?
Second half – the Pitches:
At John’s suggestion we tried a new format last night – 3 people stood up and made a 10-minute Pitch for an idea. Two of the ideas were requests for feedback, one has already been developed to v1.
Neil presented Art-Hole, he’s aiming to build a Brighton-artists site by stealing leveraging other frameworks and APIs (flickr et al.). He’s trying to solve the problem of finding and talking to other artists in Brighton who aren’t necessarily web-savvy or monied. He wants feedback and collaborators (about, contact: shardcore AT shardcore.org)
Stuart has an idea for a copyright protection search-engine. Stuart – would you comment and give some background to your idea and say what you’re after from the Pitch? I don’t think I can summarise your idea in one sentence!
Danny posted an idea a while back for StripMe.org to strip comments from CSS. Dave went and built the idea and Danny put it on-line. Danny presented the site just to spread the word.
Thunderbird videos on ShowMeDo
Lucas and Marius – two of our ShowMeDo authors – have created a great 3-part video introduction to Mozilla Thunderbird entitled: ‘Being Productive with Mozilla Thunderbird‘.
I’m always impressed by the quality of the tutorial videos that our users submit – these three Thunderbird videos deserve the attention of Mozilla.org…and that gives me an idea.
Danny proposes a possible £5 App discussion
Danny (of HoboInternet) has just posted about a idea he’s proposing for the intriguingly-named stripme.org [no site yet] service.
The idea is simple – a RESTful site which can strip comments out of CSS, so you don’t have to serve comment-heavy CSS in day-to-day operations but you can preserve comments for development.
Perhaps the idea can be extended to auto-compress CSS and JavaScript files in a service which takes care of caching? At ShowMeDo we still use raw CSS and JavaScript (it gets piped as gzip-compressed, but the original files are heavy on spaces and formatting) because it is a faff to remember to strip/compress the files for release.
Would a handy service which does this easily (free for low volume, low-cost if you go over a sensible limit?) make for a nice app?
Danny – this sounds like an ideal talking point for the next £5 App!
£5 App – Job Board
John and I announced our ‘Job Board’ idea at the second £5 App meet. We want to make the board useful for Jobs, Requests and Announces for geeks in Brighton.
If you want something added, just post a comment on this post. To get in the picture you’ll need to attend and stick something on the board.
Here’s a photo of the board – if you follow the link to Flickr you’ll find that it has clickable hot-spots (thanks Jane for doing this!):
From top to bottom the links are for:
Second £5 App Write-up – Social Start-ups
Tuesday night saw another very successful £5 App meet where Alan Newman and Raj Anand spoke on their startups (html-slides below).
Alan discussed the rocky road to building a stable development company (SensibleDevelopment.com) and his effeffelle.com social footy site. Raj gave a very interesting talk on ‘how to start a start-up’, a subject he blogs about occasionally on the Kwiqq blog.
See their web-friendly slides here:
This is our second event (earlier announce) which follows our first event the previous month.
[Update – Dan Glegg, speaker for the next event, has a write-up of this evening and talks about his subject for the third event]
As before – feedback was great, Clive has a write-up and it seems that our free beer and cake is appreciated 🙂 Thanks again to Danny and Ben of HoboInternet for providing such a great venue and to Jane for once again taking an excellent set of photographs.
We also introduced our new Job/Skills/Announce Board which was quickly filled (see picture and web-links on the linked post) – we’ll want it crammed next time! This is a great opportunity for you to post about jobs, available-skills and event announces.
The third £5 App will take place on June 12th (Upcoming announce to follow) and we’ll have a new format. Dan Glegg will be the only speaker – he’ll talk about his Ruby tools and consulting (Dan – could you Comment about this?) and may be making an Announce on the night.
£5 App co-founder John is keen to get some geeky discussions going to balance out the business-founder-stories – so rather than have a second speaker we’ll probably open the floor to several proposed £5-apps. A speaker will introduce an idea and the group can discuss it and maybe a new project or two will be born there and then. We’re keen to experiment and see what format(s) work best for everyone, so do ping us feedback!
Mailing list: Are you on the mailing list? If not then leave a comment below and I’ll add you to the list – I make an Announce every month about the upcoming event.
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