Yesterday was PlugLondon – a developer meetup held at Skype’s offices in London.
It was different to the geek meetings I’ve been to before… for one thing, I didn’t bring a laptop or write a line of code!
The focus was slightly different – the idea seemed to be to bring together developers with companies who produce API’s. People came from a variety of tech companies (such as PayPal, eBay, skype, BBC, Yahoo!) to give presentations on the API’s that they are responsible for, either to introduce it or explain some interesting or novel technical aspect. I’ve played with many web services and APIs, but I definitely learnt a few things.
It was a chance for them to get feedback on their API’s from the developers that they’re trying to encourage to use them. It was very interactive – they seemed keen to find out who had tried the API’s, what people thought of them, what people would like to see added or changed, and so on.
There was a interesting focus from some on interoperability between API’s from different companies – talking about how events such as this could help to drive interoperability from the developers who implement the API’s, rather than relying on it to be dictated top-down from corporate strategy. It’d be very cool if that could work.
The event was more presentation-heavy than other meetups I’ve been to, but I think that was probably a result of trying to fit into a single afternoon rather than having a whole weekend. It wasn’t that there were more presentations than I was interested in listening to, but I just didn’t get to talk to as many people as I normally would.
Either way, it was a fun afternoon with free beer and pizza a-plenty, so I’ll definitely be coming to the next one.
Tags: backstage, bbc, ebay, paypal, pluglondon, skype, yahoo
Good to hear that you had a good time. I agree with the presentation heavy, but in essence we said we’ll make PlugLondon what you guys want it to be, and as a lot of people had good stuff to show, it was an evening of demos and chatting about them. Later on in the pub we had some more talks, and I guess for the subsequent plugs we should enforce a time restraint.
That’s true – I should’ve mentioned that… meeting up in the pub afterwards was good. Even though I only stayed for a couple of pints, I still got to chat to a few interesting people – including a guy from mysociety.org which made for a chance to hear more background that he didn’t get to cover in his talk.
While that aspect of the format (more presentations than coding) was perhaps not what I expected, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I learnt a lot and I enjoyed it – I can’t remember the last time I sat listening to people talk for a few hours without getting bored! 🙂
Thanks again for organising it – I’m looking forward to the next one!