I'm starting writing this blog post on the train ride home from yet another amazing DDD event! This variant being DDD South West in Bristol! For those that haven't heard of DDD - there are various DDD conferences throughout the world - with quite a few in the UK. They are always free, and always on a Saturday. This means that it tends to attract developers who are genuinely passionate about software development, and more than happy to give up their weekend to be part of this awesome community.

One of my goals this year was to do a talk at a developer conference. I did a few talks at .NET Oxford last year, and wanted to take my public speaking a little bit further, and the fantastic Developer Developer Developer conferences gave the perfect opportunity! For those that haven't heard of these conferences - there are a number of them throughout the year at different locations. They're always free to attend, and always on a Saturday. This means that most of the attendees are there because they want to be there, not just because they've being sent and paid for by their work. I've been to a few now, and there's always a really great community vibe.

A few years ago, there was a regular very popular tech event in Oxford called Oxford Geek Nights. Aimed at developers and designers and organised by a company called Torchbox. Obviously a regular event of this size requires a lot of commitment, and unfortunately there hasn't been one for a couple of years now. Up until now that is!!

UPDATE: Since doing this lightning talk, I have also done an extended hour-long version at a couple of the DDD conferences. The full blog post about the hour-long version of the talk can be found here. That includes everything that is in this post, plus a lot more. So probably worth reading that one instead of this!

On Tuesday, it was our last .NET Oxford of the year! And given that our first ever meetup was in January, this now marks our first whole year!

After the success of our last lightning talk event in July - we decided that it was about time for another one - proving that lightning most certainly does strike twice! And like the last one, it was fantastic seeing the variation and community-feel that the lightning talk format brings.

On Tuesday it was our fourth .NET Oxford, and this time we had a slightly different format ... In order to give more people the opportunity to get up and talk, we decided to go with a lightning / grok talk event. There was actually quite a lot of interest, and the speaker slots filled up very quickly with a really good line-up ...