Happy Holidays

[perthdotnet]

Hey all, 

DevJam was last Thursday night and it was a huge success and a great way to end 2014. I want to take a moment to say a huge thanks to a few people and groups.

Firstly to our speakers: Gregory James, Rob Powers-Martin, Cameron MacFarland, Eric Winkler, and Ivon Robson. It takes a fair amount of courage to stand in front of your peers (especially after they've had a few beers) and all five gave high quality presentations that fit neatly into the 10 minute window. I hope we see all five of these guys back on stage for some longer presentations in 2015.

Next up I want to thank a few of our sponsors.

* Microsoft provided the major speaker prize (a one year MSDN subscription) and without them we wouldn't have such a great platform to gather around and talk about.

* PluralSight has always been a good supporter of the community and they provided prizes (subscriptions to their services) as well. Getting good training in Perth on current topics can be a pain but having a video on demand service stuffed with great content certainly eases that.

* And BankWest. Carl, Simon and Sean from BankWest have been very supportive of the user group. There was a time when our venue suddenly disappeared and these guys came to the rescue and have provided us with a room ever since. They also celebrated the end of the year with us by providing the drinks and food on Thursday night which was really appreciated. 

I'd like to thank Piers Williams who really stepped up and organized DevJam while I was busy not doing that. We would not have had DevJam without Piers. 

And finally, I want to thank you for turning up. So much of what makes a user group great is the people that attend. I hope you all had a great 2014 and I look forward to exploring some of the exciting things coming in 2015 (new VS! new C#! new ASP.NET!).

Remember that there is no session in January so our next meeting will be February 5th. If you find yourself hankerin' for refactorin' before then I suggest you check out http://www.meetup.com/Perth-Code-Dojo/ which has a meeting in January.

Have a safe holiday and I'll see you next year,

Mike