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Welcome!

This is the website for the Western Massachusetts Developers' Group. We meet up twice every month (every other Thursday). Our meetings are pretty casual, if you're involved in any kind of development and are in our area, stop by our next meeting and join our e-mail list, we also have a Facebook group. You might also catch us on IRC (niven.freenode.net) in the #wmassdevs channel.


Meeting this Week: Wednesday June 17

15-Jun-09

That’s right, we have another meeting coming up this week. We’ll be
meeting in our usual location at the Snowtide Offices in
Northampton, they’re located in the Potpourri Plaza on King Street
(across the street from the Stop & Shop). We will be shopping for
snacks, if you could post to our mailing list to let us know your
coming, we’ll be sure to have enough eats for all. Attendance has been
light lately now that summer is setting in, letting us know you’re
coming is a huge help!

Topics

We’ll be sticking with the unconference format, it’s been working
well and people have been coming up with some great topics. The
discussion has been lively and we don’t want to mess with that. If you
have a topic you want to speak on, post it to our topics wiki and
let people know. I don’t know about anyone else, but when I see some
interesting topics on the wiki, it encourages me to both attend the
meeting and come up with a topic of my own.

Speaking of topics, I haven’t been doing anything that exciting
lately; it’s all wedding stuff all the time for me. That said, I have
been spending a lot of time using Emacs (I used to be all about
the Textmate) and I’m thinking about trying out a polyphasic
sleep schedule
. Is anyone interested in either of these? I think I
can work up five minutes of substance.

Schedule

Lastly, here’s a rough outline of our schedule…

  • 6:45 - 7:00 — room and food setup (let Chas know via the list
    if you can help setup)
  • 07:00 - 07:30 — eat, meet and mingle
  • 07:30 - 08:15 — first time slot for topics
  • 08:15 - 09:00 — second time slot for topics
  • 09:00 - 10:00 — more time to mingle and clean-up (everyone has been
    great about cleanup and the help is really appreciated)

Tonight’s Meeting Moved to Packards!

03-Jun-09

Clearly, the summer doldrums have set in, and everyone is busy with enjoying the outdoors, family stuff, etc. That’s good and all, but given the count so far, we are moving tonight’s meeting to the back room at Packard’s:

http://www.yelp.com/map/packards-northampton

We did this a couple of summers ago when attendance was in a trough then, and it seemed to work out. See you there!

Meeting: Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

02-Jun-09

Our next meeting is this Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009!

If you plan on coming tomorrow, please “register” here, so we know how much food to get, etc.

Please make sure you head over to the meeting topic wiki and post some ideas for talks, discussion topics, etc, if you have them.

Location
——–

We’ll be meeting up at the Snowtide offices. It’s located in the Potpourri Plaza in Northampton, across the street from the Stop and Shop.

Format
——

We’re going to stick with the unconference format. We’d like you to think about a topic that you would be interested in talking about and then post it to our “Suggested Topic” wiki page. Any topic you might be interested in talking about is great and don’t worry about having a formal presentation; if you can talk about the topic for five minutes, you’re all set. You’ll talk about your topic and then let people ask questions and start talking to each other. Think of it as a way to get a conversation started.

Food
—-

We’ll be ordering a party platter from D’Angelo’s, probably two pizzas, and there’ll be a pile of soda, tea, and bottled water. A suggested donation of $8 will cover the snacks and drinks. We’ll be putting any money above and beyond the cost of the food towards future meeting costs.

If anyone has any particular dietary needs or requirements, let us know. We’ll do what we can to get something for everyone.

Schedule
——–

Our schedule is…

* 6:45 - 7:00 — room & food setup (let me know if you can help setup)
* 7:00 - 7:30 — time to eat and mingle
* 7:30 - 8:15 — first time slot for defined topics
* 8:15 - 9:00 — second time slot for defined topics
* 9:00 - 10:00 — time to mingle and chatter some more + cleanup (help
appreciated here as well)

See you there…

- Chas

Meeting: Wednesday, May 20th @ 7PM

19-May-09

Our next meeting is this Wednesday, May 20, 2009!

Please make sure you head over to the meeting topic wiki and post some ideas for talks, discussion topics, etc, if you have them. It’s been a full month since our last “regular” meeting (due to the Ben Fry talk that took over my meetup-hosting bandwidth two weeks ago), so I’ll bet everyone has a lot to talk about.

Location
——–

We’ll be meeting up at the Snowtide offices. It’s located in the Potpourri Plaza in Northampton, across the street from the Stop and Shop.

Format
——

We’re going to stick with the unconference format. We’d like you to think about a topic that you would be interested in talking about and then post it to our “Suggested Topic” wiki page. Any topic you might be interested in talking about is great and don’t worry about having a formal presentation; if you can talk about the topic for five minutes, you’re all set. You’ll talk about your topic and then let people ask questions and start talking to each other. Think of it as a way to get a conversation started.

Food
—-

We’ll be ordering a party platter from D’Angelo’s, probably two pizzas, and there’ll be a pile of soda, tea, and bottled water. A suggested donation of $8 will cover the snacks and drinks. We’ll be putting any money above and beyond the cost of the food towards future meeting costs.

If anyone has any particular dietary needs or requirements, let us know. We’ll do what we can to get something for everyone.

Schedule
——–

Our schedule is…

* 6:45 - 7:00 — room & food setup (let me know if you can help setup)
* 7:00 - 7:30 — time to eat and mingle
* 7:30 - 8:15 — first time slot for defined topics
* 8:15 - 9:00 — second time slot for defined topics
* 9:00 - 10:00 — time to mingle and chatter some more + cleanup (help
appreciated here as well)

See you there…

- Chas

Our next meeting is this Wednesday, April 22, 2009!

21-Apr-09

As discussed (and voted on) over the last week or so on the list, we’re meeting on Wednesday this week, primarily so that we can spread out in the larger conference room space we have available. If people enjoy the additional space (can’t think of why we wouldn’t!), then Wednesday meetings will likely become our new normal, at least for a while.

Location

We’ll be meeting up at the Snowtide offices. It’s located in the Potpourri Plaza in Northampton, across the street from the Stop and Shop.

Format

We’re going to stick with the unconference format. We’d like you to think about a topic that you would be interested in talking about and then post it to our “Suggested Topic” wiki page. Any topic you might be interested in talking about is great and don’t worry about having a formal presentation; if you can talk about the topic for five minutes, you’re all set. You’ll talk about your topic and then let people ask questions and start talking to each other. Think of it as a way to get a conversation started.

Food

We’ll be ordering a party platter from D’Angelo’s, probably two pizzas, and there’ll be a pile of soda, tea, and bottled water. A suggested donation of $8 will cover the snacks and drinks. We’ll be putting any money above and beyond the cost of the food towards future meeting costs.

If anyone has any particular dietary needs or requirements, let us know. We’ll do what we can to get something for everyone.

Schedule

Our schedule is…

  • 6:45 - 7:00 — room & food setup (let me know if you can help setup)
  • 7:00 - 7:30 — time to eat and mingle
  • 7:30 - 8:15 — first time slot for defined topics
  • 8:15 - 9:00 — second time slot for defined topics
  • 9:00 - 10:00 — time to mingle and chatter some more + cleanup (help
    appreciated here as well)

Ben Fry Presenting “Computational Information Design” on May 5th

20-Apr-09

Author Ben Fry will be presenting “Computational Information Design” –a mix of his work in visualization and coding plus a quick introduction to Processing. We are very excited to talk to Mr. Fry and our thanks go out to this event’s sponsors: Atalasoft and Snowtide Informatics.

He will be presenting to the Western MA Developers Group on Tuesday, May 5th at 6:30pm at 243 King String, Poutpourri Plaza in Northampton, MA. This event will be hosted by Snowtide Informatics, beverages and snacks will be available.

About Ben Fry

Ben Fry is director of Seed Visualization and its Phyllotaxis Lab, a design laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts focused on understanding complex data. He also develops the Processing programming environment with Casey Reas.

Next Meeting 3/26/2009

26-Mar-09


View Larger Map

We have a meeting coming up this week (Thursday the 29th).:) Last
meeting’s format went over well, we’re going to try that again this
week.

Location

We’ll be meeting up at the Snowtide office where Chas works. They have a couple of office that they are willing to share, we’ll be breaking up into groups and meeting there. It’s located in the Potpourri Plaza in
Northampton
, across the street from the Stop and Shop.

Food

Chas and Miles will be providing some snacks (including coffee) for this meeting. There will be a box at the door, please donate some money to cover the snacks. We’ll be taking any money above and beyond the cost of the snacks and putting it towards food for the next meeting.

If anyone has any particular dietary needs or requirements, let us know.
We’ll do what we can to get something for everyone.

Format

We’re going to stick with the unconference format from last meeting.
We’d like you to think about a topic that you would be interested in talking
about and then post it to our “Suggested Topic” wiki page (thank
you, Doug). Any topic you might be interested in talking about is great
and don’t worry about having a formal presentation; if you can talk
about the topic for five minutes, you’re all set. You’ll talk about your
topic and then let people ask questions and start talking to each other.
Think of it as a way to get a conversation started. I think this is
going to be a lot of fun.

Schedule

Our proposed schedule is…

  • 7:00 - 7:30 — time to eat and mingle — maybe a quick intro to the
    “process” we’re going to try
  • 7:30 - 8:15 — first time slot for defined topics
  • 8:15 - 9:00 — second time slot for defined topics
  • 9:00 - 10:00 — time to mingle and chatter some more + cleanup (help
    appreciated here as well)

Technology and Healthcare at Cooley Dickinson Hospital

11-Mar-09

When: Thursday, March 19,2009…
5:30 to 7:30 PM
5:30 to 6:00 PM Networking and munchies
6:00 to 7:30 PM Program

Where: Cooley Dickinson Hospital, Northampton, Mass. Living Room B, 1st floor, McAllum Building (the old brick building just left of the Main Entrance of the Hospital)

Cost: NO CHARGE, by special arrangement with Cooley Dickinson Hospital

Refreshments: Munchies provided

Information Systems at Cooley Dickinson Hospital and Hidden Tech will be presenting a primer on the emerging trends in healthcare technology including the most in demand skills and how to do business with hospitals and clinicians in the Pioneer Valley. Cooley Dickinson Hospital’s Chief Information Officer, Wayne Freeberg, and his colleagues will lead an interactive discussion with the Hidden-Tech community on the ins and outs and do’s and don’ts of doing business in the healthcare arena.

Learn who gets on preferred vendor lists and how, where to look for RFPs, what skills are most in demand and why. Understand how trends in electronic medical record-keeping and Web-based applications spell opportunity for technology professionals with the right skill sets.

Next Meeting 3/12/2009, New Venue, New Format

09-Mar-09

We have a meeting coming up this week (Thursday the 12th). :) We’re also going to be meeting in a different place and we’ll be trying out an entirely new format!

Location

We’ll be meeting up at the Snowtide office where Chas works. They have access to a good sized meeting room and Chas has been kind enough to volunteer it. It’s located in the Potpourri Plaza in Northampton, across the street from the Stop and Shop.

Food

Chas will be ordering up a party platter from D’Aneglo’s! I was very pleased last time we ate this and I am looking forward to it. There will be a box at the door, please donate some money to cover the snacks. We’ll be taking any money above and beyond the cost of the platter and putting it towards food for the next meeting.

Format

We’re going to be trying out a new format: the unconference! We’d like you to think about a topic that you would be interested in talking about and then posting it to our “Suggested Topic” wiki page (thank you, Doug). Any topic you might be interested in talking about is great and don’t worry about having a formal presentation; if you can talk about the topic for five minutes, you’re all set. You’ll talk about your topic and then let people ask questions and start talking to each other. Think of it as a way to get a conversation started. I think this is going to be a lot of fun. :)

Schedule

Our proposed schedule is…

  • 6:00 - 7:00 — room & food setup
  • 7:00 - 7:30 — time to eat and mingle — maybe a quick intro to the “process” we’re going to try
  • 7:30 - 8:15 — first time slot for defined topics
  • 8:15 - 9:00 — second time slot for defined topics
  • 9:00 - 10:00 — time to mingle and chatter some more + cleanup (help appreciated here as well)

This is going to be a lot fun! See you there. :)


Next Meeting: Februrary 26th, 2009

23-Feb-09

We have a meeting scheduled for this week on Thursday (February 26th). We’ll be meeting up at Panera Bread in Hadley at 7:00pm, we’ll be gathering towards the back.

Also, Addison Wesley has sent us some books on Python. I’ll be bringing them to the meeting and putting them up for grabs.

See you there!