Dublin GTUG

So last night I spoke at the Dublin Google Development Group, which is held in the Google Offices in Barrow Street. For all the times I've passed those offices, either by foot or train, I've never actually been in there and usually looked enviously upon their facilities (I believe they've now got a 25m pool, which for me would be, well, awesome). I was invited by Eoin Bailey (from Trinity), who up until last night (I believe), has been running the group and interestingly, the "head" of the group cannot be a Google employee. Apart from the slick, professional set-up there's also food and non-alcoholic drinks beforehand with a potential retirement to the Schoolhouse afterwards.

The facilities were obviously excellent, sweet theatre ("What's up Doc" was the name I believe) with excellent seating, screens etc as you'd expect. The group were seemed interested in my talk but I think I lost most folk when I began talking about sharding, possibly my fault :( Working the bank holiday as the only person in EMEA and having a crazy day on Tuesday, due to the effects of Hurricane Sandy on my NYC colleagues, meant that I turned up knackered and with essentially little prep done. Far from ideal and a big no-no for me usually but as the invite had been agreed a long time ago, plus it's always good to spread the word of "MongoDB" and challenge oneself (I think). I think one of the great challenges is to stand up and try to explain technical stuff that you think you know, the trick is not to do it tired but all the same, I definitely learnt a lot last night from standing up there. My slides can be found here (bear in mind, that many of these slides were actually cut from the deck that I presented, due to time constraints and the difficulty of deciding "what constitutes an introduction").

The presentation seemed to have gone done well, there were some questions (whilst the books, mugs and stickers SWAG went pretty fast) and people said nice things, though they could have been being just polite :)

The second talk of the night was by Chris Woods. I've previously chatted and worked a little with Chris on MongoDB so it was good to see a familiar face. Chris is a very clever guy, totally gets "MongoDB" and had a really interesting presentation with some funny war stories. His web app is called Voczie, can be visited here and in his words -

VocZie combines RSS feeds with Twitter to let you see and participate in the conversations which happen around the news stories we all read every day... 

Chris isactively looking for more traffic to his site so that he has to deal with "scaling out" and is very excited about "sharding" so I strongly encourage you to visit his site :) Chris has a short write-up here on the perils of standing up to talk in front of random strangers and his slide can be found here.

I really enjoyed my visit to the GTUG and I think it's easily one of the cooler and more technical user groups I've seen in Dublin. I went home knackered but it was good evening, meeting new folk and seeing Chris's cool use case.

I hope to come back as an attendee, if I'm allowed back in :)

Thanks to Eoin, Raphael and Jean (hopefully I haven't forgotten anyone) for their hospitality, Chris for talking eloquently about MongoDB and Gianfranco for his moral support!!!!