The way forward for zhgeeks

[Thomas Kappler]

Hey everyone!

Last Tuesday, June 18, we had a very productive zhgeeks organizers meeting. We have plenty of ideas and plans for the rest of the year and beyond, and we think zhgeeks will stay a fun and interesting group.

Muharem, the groups founder, has done an amazing job at running zhgeeks and finding great speakers so far. Here's a public thank you, Muharem! In order to reduce his workload, however, and to make the group even more diverse, zhgeeks will now be co-organized by a team.

The initial organizers team will be the ones who were present at the organizers meeting, and you can see us on the meetup page as co-organizers. However, zhgeeks is definitely open for more people to get involved! All you need is a little time to spare and the motivation to promote learning, networking and the exchange of experience in the Zurich tech scene.

With regards to the way forward, we will take a summer break in July and August. Starting September, we will have about one meetup a month. We have a some great topics lined up, and more in the pipeline. Some of our future meetups will likely be joint meetups with other Zurich tech meetups when topics overlap. This will promote even more cross-pollination of ideas and contacts.

Some of the talks planned for this year are:

  - Luke Gorrie about his networking project Snabb Switch and/or LuaJIT.

  - Muharem presenting Elixir, the new language on top of the Erlang VM. Possible joint meetup with the Erlang group.

  - Alexander showing Raspberri Pi, with real hardware.

There are lots more ideas and plans in an earlier stage. Here are just some of them:

  - A report fresh from the annual OpenStack summit in HongKong in November.

  - asm.js, assembly for the web, joint with JSZurich and/or WebTuesday.

  - A career meetup with practical advice on networking, job hunting, and interviewing for techies.

  - Networking topics such as DNS + DNSSEC.

  - Continuous Integration.

  - A report on migrating a code base from Python to Haskell.

  - An intro to Lisp with an experience report, possibly joint with ClojureZH.

  - VPNs and how to stop Big Brother from listening.

We encourage everyone to propose their ideas for a meetup topic, or to collaborate on the ones listed above. Even better if you can propose a speaker, and extra geek points for contacting said speaker about their ability and willingness to come to zhgeeks! Please use this list to get involved.

We're looking forward to seeing you at one of our next meetups!

The zhgeeks organizers

[Martin N.]

I could help out with a talk about continuous integration.

We're running a pretty interesting setup with Github, Puppet, Jenkins and some additional sauces.

If you'd like we can totally setup a session about it. I could also provide a location :)

[Thomas Kappler]

On Thursday, June 20, 2013 9:42:10 AM UTC+2, Martin N. wrote:

I could help out with a talk about continuous integration.

We're running a pretty interesting setup with Github, Puppet, Jenkins and some additional sauces.

If you'd like we can totally setup a session about it. I could also provide a location :)

Thanks Martin, that sounds just perfect! Interesting topic, real-world experience and a location. Doesn't get better than that.

Let's get in touch during the next few weeks w.r.t. scheduling.

-- Thomas