Our good friends in the UK TechDays team have announced another raft of events in their fantastic IT Camps series. I’m hoping to be there for at least on of them and if you’re at all interested in Windows 8 or System Center 2012 I cant recommend them highly enough.
No slides, no marketing – just technical content, demo driven with as much audience participation as they can manage. Everyone I’ve spoken to at previous camps has enjoyed them and learned a great deal.
It’s the start of a new year and my engagement diary is filling rapidly. Once again I am covering a wide range of topics for an equally broad audience which is something I really enjoy.
Also this year Black Marble are pleased to be involved with the Microsoft Imagine Cup once more. Teaming up with Andy Westgarth and our friends in Sunderland, we are running an Imagine Cup Hackathon on Friday 1st and Saturday 2nd February, where a number of us will be on hand to give teams from the region help and advice on development and technical matters, but also presentation techniques, business plan and other areas important to success.
Find out more on the Imagine Cup site.
Yesterday was great fun and I was really pleased to see so many Black Marble event regulars at the IT Camp. It was great to hear so many requests for more events like it in Leeds. We’re all keen to run more, but we need people to attend and give us feedback in order to be able to do that.
I hope those of you who were there took away useful knowledge from the event. Andy and Simon were very keen that it should not be a day of PowerPoint and canned demos and we certainly delivered that. Did we have technical issues that meant we had to change plans on the fly? Sure! Certainly nobody we spoke to seemed to mind. All of us from Black Marble thought the concept for the day – one of interaction, audience participation and trying to build systems on the fly – should be fun and we thought it was.
Andy and I are really pleased to be able to help our friends at Microsoft with their latest idea for engaging with IT Professionals. Next week (Tuesday 28th February) sees the first in a series of new IT Camps taking place in Leeds. The idea is to run a full day event that is very light on PowerPoint and heavy on the hands-on, roll up your sleeves and install things as a group.
