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JAOO Nights ~ Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne
By Lisa | March 30, 2009
JAOO Nights have come and gone in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. What we noticed straight away was the difference in the crowd in each of the cities. In Brisbane we held the meeting at the Microsoft Offices, a more casual atmosphere with pizza and beer during the break. The crowd was a 50/50 mix of Java and .NET people, which was surprising considering it was held at Microsoft! It just goes to show that when we have good speakers, everyone benefits.
JAOO Nights -Sydney was held at the Convention Centre in the same space as the actual conference will be held. This was a good ‘dry run’ for JAOO coming up in 6 weeks time. Erik was on first covering TDD, which garnered several Q & A after his session. Joel from MS flew in just for the event, gave his talk on F# and had a band of people following him out to the taxi asking questions as he just managed to make the last fight out. We were very lucky to have him, even for just a few short hours.
In Melbourne we held the JAOO Night at the Victorian University, great venue! Steve Hayes was up first and had the audience’s attention from the outset. The crowd must have tired him out as he pulled up a chair for the Q & A session which lasted quite awhile. I think we learned from the Melbourne JAOO Night that Agile is a hot topic, and with a great speaker like Steve we should have covered this at each of the JAOO NIghts!
If all goes well we’d like to see these happen quarterly with a range of JAOO speakers on various topics. Thanks again to everyone who helped make this happen, especially the girls from QUT, Jorke at MS, and Martin Paulo for setting us up with the great venue in Melbourne.
If you’d like to see more JAOO Nights, let us know, and in particular, what speakers and topics would YOU like to see covered?
