My first meetup: London .NET User Group, August 2019
I managed to work in this industry for 5 years without going to any meet-ups, or being in touch with others in the developer community. I prefer watching tech-talks and read blogs, articles etc. and Video tutorials has been my primary source of learning new technologies. As for why I don't prefer meet-ups, live tech-talks? here are the reasons I can think of
- Lacks the comfort of my sofa and shorts,
- Run by humans - they can't be paused, re-winded or fast-forwarded.
- Lacks giant subtitles underneath the speaker's face, it's important depending on what accent the speaker use.
However, I decided to become more active in the community and part of that was to attend meet-ups regularly.
London .NET User Group Meetup, August 2019
I have been to my first meetup recently. This was hosted by London .NET User Group in CodeNode in Central London and was run by two amazing speakers Mark and Willow Rendle.
The first speaker was Willow, Mark's 13yo daughter who is making a game using Unity3D and C#. She started with some basics of Unity3D development using C# and the eventually dived deep into game logic and some implementation details of one of her ongoing game development project. They both also talked bit about allocations, how it can crop-up in a game when the game-loop is run 60 times per second. It was amazing to see how a 13yo can turn their love of game into the passion of game development.
Next was Mark Rendle of RendleLabs - his topic revolved around a InfluxDb client (RendleLabs.InfluxDB) he wrote that was order of magnitude faster and efficient compared to exiting solution for .NET. He explained the use of Span<T>, Memory<T>, Syste.Threading.Channel and System.IO.Pipeline to achieve near allocation-less (1.5kb if I remember correctly) high performance (300k/s ingestion). This talk was so much insightful that I decided to attend any meet-ups like this.
SIGTERM
It was a coincidence that the first meetup was about performance, micro-optimisations that I deeply care about. This made it even more exciting. overall it was a positive one and hopefully first of many meetups I am about to attend in the future. 🤞