South Melbourne Informal Night

If you ask anybody behind the bar "Have you seen that American couple that comes in here all the time and talks about computers?" they will point you in the right direction. :-)

Failing that, there's a room right off the main bar with a fireplace which faces Ferarrs street. Should be easy to spot us.

Australian Scuba Diver? Visit http://scubalot.com

Yeah, it was good to see what y'all are up to. Maybe motiviate me to actually commit my modules! Well, the mythtv one anyway.

Yes, had a great time and it was great meeting everybody.

Just for those who weren't there...

A total of 10 people showed up and we all gathered in the "big back room" at the Railway. Some food, plenty of drink, and good Drupal/IT discussion. Everybody seemed to like the venue and the time of the week. A few people suggested we do it again at the same time next month. I'll probably schedule another one at the same time next month unless there are any comments or suggestions otherwise.

Though most discussion was informal, there were a few topics of interest that got a lot of attention:

• Lots of curiosity about Drupal HEAD and what's going on with changes.
• Lots of discussion about Drupal internals and how much we all love how clean and well-done it is. Many nightmares about previous CMS headaches. Russell Porteous had some especially hair-raising tales of how their original Mambo homepage got hacked, and there was no way to salvage it despite many attempts, and since then Drupal has been running beautifully and "seems much more secure". I think it's just good code, eh?
• Talked about training a bit and how useful it would be. That topic's going on strong in another thread so if you're interested in training, join in over there.
• Everyone gave a bit on in-depth discussion about some of their problems and talked about the sites they're working on. Everybody except one person had some Drupal experience and there were a few "module-writing" discussions. Most of the people there had live Drupal sites and we surfed about on our laptops to take a look.
• Grace and I talked about the possibility of offering Drupal-aware hosting as part of our Hostbuds platform. We were concerned that there was no way to really compete with US pricing, but we gave a little demo of how we're using Plesk+Drupal and how well they work, and there was more interest than we expected. We'll follow up with that soon. Also, in the future, if anybody has anything to demo or show off, it would be very welcome. I'll make a reminder when I post the next meeting.
• Everyone appreciated the Railway's WiFi and the laptops were humming later in the evening with lots of mysterious stuff going in in separate groups.

I'll keep you posted on the next informal night.

Thanks again! It was great.

Australian Scuba Diver? Visit http://scubalot.com