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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My first paid-for ShowMeDo series – woot!
Earlier in the week I launched Python Newbies on XP – my first paid-for series at ShowMeDo. The two-hours of material will get a new coder comfortably writing Python code using a choice of IDE. I’m rather happy to have distilled so much knowledge into 9 short videos and making the 3 exercises was rather fun too.
There’s a detailed announce over on the ShowMeDo blog: Python Newbies on XP – almost 2 hours of tutorial videos (paid-for series).
One of the interesting bits of feedback on our series is that users like the idea of exercises which test their knowledge and get them trying simple new bits of Python. I need to think on this – perhaps there is a new series of Python Challenges here?
Now to get on with planning the second series…
£5 App Meet – March 27th Brighton
We have a date for the event, now listed in Upcoming for Tuesday, March 27, 2007 at 13 Brunswick Square (thanks Danny!).
The first speakers will be John on his Chrss and myself on ShowMeDo. I plan to cover something like the following:
- How we started
- How, in a year, we grew to 1,000 visitors a day in just evenings with £0 spent on marketing
- Why we are supporting Python and Open Source
- How easy it is to start an income stream (not based on Advertising!) without ‘real investment’
2nd Girl Geek Dinner
I attended my first Girl Geek Dinner on Monday (thank Manuela!), their 2nd-ever event down here. Niqui gave an interesting talk about accessibility using Flash.
I’ve never worried about Accessibility before but Niqui said that 1 in 8 people in the UK have some sort of accessibility requirement (poor sight, preference not to use mouse, RSI, hearing impairment etc) which is quite a sobering statistic. Not that I have the resources to worry about this with our ShowMeDo but, in an ideal world (with a bit more time to spare)…
I caught up with the usual crowd (Jane, Simon, Danny) and met a bunch of new people – Alan (who may be our 6th £5 App speaker), Matt Weston and Gemma of Midnight Communications.
Kudos to Niqui for the talk and roll on future events 🙂
Geek Dinner, $5 Apps
Last night’s Geek Dinner went very well and numbers were obviously from the last one. Kudo’s to Simon for organising again.
John and I stood-up and asked about our $5 App Meetup proposal. We received a grand response and now we have 20 people interested (and I have quite a few ears to bend yet). I guess we’ll have 20-30 people along for the first meet.
More details will be announced over the coming weeks, we’ll aim for the first event to take place nearer the end of March.
$5 Apps – a new geek meet
Quoting from The Five Buck Idea:
“Face it, startups are cool”
“You aren’t looking to build a service that solves world hunger, or manages the schedules of entire companies, or does anything really that complicated sounding.
You want something simple, almost to the point of ridiculousness, and heck, worth probably about five dollars. Extra points if someone under 20 scoffs and says,
‘Shit man, I can code that up in a weekend.'”
John and I are organising a series of geek nights, along the lines of the Sussex Geek Dinners, Girl Geek Dinners, and the Ruby Meet, aimed at those of us who like ‘$5 Apps’. The notion being that the value is in the sweat-and-tears of the implementation rather than in the original idea.
The nights will be themed around:
- One or two man bands writing apps and making them work
- Agile development
- Little or no conventional marketing
- Taking a simple idea and just getting on and doing it
The first night will see me and John talking about ShowMeDo and Chrss, with a few more speakers already planned.
More details to come, drop me a comment if you want a notification.
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Oreilly High Performance Python by Micha Gorelick & Ian Ozsvald AI Consulting
Mor Consulting Ltd. is an A.I. focused consultancy offering strategic research and development owned by Ian Ozsvald, based in London (UK).
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