Glasgow has a vibrant community of developers who like to get together and discuss about technology. For a city of its size, I would say that the technology sector is pretty big and there are lots of different user groups that one can join and find like-minded people to share ideas, have a friendly chat, make some friends and, maybe, learn something new.
In the past we had excellent speakers visiting our city, such as Scott Gu and Scott Hanselman and lots others that I haven't had the fortune to meet in person. I would like to see more of this happening and unfortunately, unless you are in London, the chances are fairly slim.
The good news is that we can change this. We can get speakers to come to our lovely city and speak to our enthusiastic and knowledge thirsty developer community. As the new organiser of the GlasgowMobile user group, I plan on keeping that promise and my goal is to get as many prominent speakers as I can to speak and share their knowledge and experience.
However this is a task that requires plenty of time and organisation and most of all help and support by the development community itself. The more member we have, the more organised we can be and the better speakers we can attract. If you haven't done it yet, please follow @glasgowmobile on twitter and show us your support by tweeting and spreading the word.
Our goal is to have a regular monthly meetings from now on. The biggest challenge is finding a space (for free) or someone to sponsor the event. I am doing my best to get in touch with the right people to help in this process so hopefully this issue will not be as big a struggle as it is now. I'm also hoping for some great swag/giveaways by sponsors such as Teleric, Plurasight, Xamarin (of course), O'Reilly, DevExpress, MindScape etc.
We also have a shiny new website: http://glasgowmobile.net courtesy of Azure Websites, Wordpress and GoDaddy. This setup wasn't free, but I think in the long term it will pay off as it will establish our presence and will help spread the word online. The first event is already posted and available to register though there may be a date change depending on what people vote here. - Did you cast your vote?
This is an open invitation to all the Glasgow developers who wish to get involved with cross platform application development using modern tools, frameworks and techniques. Feel free to join our group and we look forward to some feedback and suggestions on how we can make this better.
PS - Make sure you follow me on Twitter @christosmatskas for more up-to-date news, articles and tips.
PPS - And don't forget to follow @glasgowmobile for the latest news and event updates