LShift Ltd.

London 2.0

September 6th, 2006 mikeb

I went to London 2.0 last night, a short bus ride and walk away in Fleet Street. It’s a gathering of the kind becoming more popular — there was XP enthusiasts on the other side of the pub — involving techy chat and a few pints.

The main event was Jason Huggins demonstrating some work-in-progress involving Selenium. He’s intending to show it at the Google Automated Testing conference later this week. If he achieves his ambition, it’ll be impressive as well as very useful.

The nominal topic of the evening was Web 2.0, but the general chat was pretty eclectic:

• Functional programming (lots of “I’ve been wanting to try ..”), and especially functional programming for the Web (I was able to mention our efforts with Icing and AJAXy Haskell)
• Languages on the CLR: SML.NET, IronPython, F#
• Experiences with virtualisation software
• Books: “Freedom Evolves”, by Dan C. Dennett, and those perennial favourites, “Goedel Escher Bach”, and “The Emperor’s New Mind”

If you’re inclined to geekery and optionally beer, it’s a great way to spend a weekday evening.

Entry Filed under: Technology, Water cooler