Melbourne Geek Night

October 15, 2011

Last month saw us at Thirst Studios curate and host the inaugural Melbourne Geek Night. It was great fun to organise and seems to have been very well received by all who attended.

During the evening we heard from four guest speakers about a variety of ‘webby’ subjects, including one that I gave about Responsive Web Design – a relatively new technique that I think is going to change they way we approach designing, developing and delivering web content across multiple devices in the future.

You can see the slides from my talk below, but I’m conscious they might not be entirely comprehensible out of the context of my presentation…

The other fantastic speakers on the night were Jussi, Ben and Sally who gave great talks on Wirify, ‘Injecting personality to interface designs’ and ‘connected experiences’ respectively. I know Jussi has put his slides online already but I’ll organise getting the others’ uploaded to the Melbourne Geek Night site soon too, when we change the content over to reflect the second event.

The Melbourne Geek Night idea came about as a ‘scratch your own itch’ thing, having spoken to a few fellow designers and developers around Melbourne who, like me were keen to get together for a social, skills-sharing event of sorts. Inspiration for the night came from hearing about a similar thing that runs in my home town of Oxford, UK, from a couple of friends over there. Thanks in particular to Matt and JP for tips and encouragement!

The plan is to continue running Melbourne Geek Night every couple of months. We’re currently working on organising the next one for mid/late November and already have a couple of speakers lined-up. The first event was quite UX heavy (probably due to company I keep), but that wasn’t particularly intentional. We’re anticipating a variety of subjects from now on about anything ‘webby’ really.

If you’re keen to get involved by speaking or have a particular subject you’d like to hear about, feel free to contact us with your ideas and feedback.