May 2011 Technical (Manchester).
Thursday 19th May 2011
MadLab, Manchester
The March 2011 technical meeting will be at MadLab, the Manchester Digital Laboratory.
Title: I <3 My Community
By Mark Keating (mdk) from northwestengland.pm
Duration: 20 minutes (approx)
Target audience: Any
Imagine a big chocolate cake full of yummy ingredients and you have "ma kommunitae" A personal look at some of the people in the Perl community who both impress and inspire me. So this is a slice of that cake, not literally even though it is a metaphorical cake. Also contains anecdotes from the back end of a conference Cthulu attempted to destroy (next year we sacrifice 2 virgins to him). This is a personal tribute and tale of an organiser in the wild, it may be useful, it will at least have slides.
Title: Euclid, Socrates and Mill - Quality in Documentation
By Matt S. Trout (mst) from northwestengland.pm
Duration: 40 minutes (approx)
Target audience: Any
Earlier this year, your presenter made the choice (mistake?) to finally read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a decision which set off a long chain of thought about how to introduce and elucidate both concepts of programming and the details of libraries and languages.
We'll talk about Euclid's Elements, the Socratic Dialogue style, and Mill's work both on utilitarianism and libertarianism and how they relate to different styles of learning and of teaching.
Then by the power of interstitial puns, we'll digress entirely into the origins and anatomy of potential and existing users' perceptions of quality in both documentation and the presentation of a project as a whole.
Some time after that, there may be a point.
Or not. Philosophy can be like that sometimes.