The London Force.com Developers group is now on meetup.com and has a new name - London Salesforce Developers. The inaugural meeting of this new look group took place on 10th October 2012 at a new location - the London Offices of 10 Gen. A further change is that Wes Nolte now has some Salesforce assistance to organise these events, in the shape of Developer Evangelist John Stevenson.
The subject for the meetup was a "Teardown of what happened at DFX", attempting to bring some of the excitement of Dreamforce 2012 to those who were unfortunately unable to attend, via a panel guided discussion session. Although I'd volunteered for the panel, I hadn't actually participated in one of these before so wasn't 100% sure what to expect.
This also featured a special guest from Salesforce.com - Adam Seligman, Vice President of Developer Relations for Salesforce.com and Heroku. If you've seen the Developer Keynote from Dreamforce 2012, Adam was the speaker opening and closing it. There was an additional, unexpected guest from Salesforce.com - Peter Coffee - which I'm pretty sure is the first time we've had someone with their own wikipedia page at one of these events. The fact that we are seeing some of the senior executives from the US attending these events shows how important these meetups are.
The evening was compered by Wes Nolte and the panel consisted of myself, Andy Mahood, John Stevenson and Adam Seligman - here we are in all our glory:
I now know that a session of this nature consists of the panel arranged in front of the audience, each responding to questions posed by the audience. Imagine Question Time with and for geeks :)
The first question was put by Wes to get the ball rolling, and asked what inspired us most about DFX. Predictably there was plenty of reference to the Dev Zone, as this had an incredible amount of attendance, excitement and energy around it. The questions were then opened up to the audience where, after a slightly slow start the questions came thick and fast.
Another advantage to Salesforce involvement is increased levels of schwag, including the ever popular Force.com baseball caps and copies of Dan Appleman's Advanced Apex Programming book. Some of the goodies were handed out for the best questions during the Q&A, while the rest were handed to the panel to award for the correct answers to trivia questions. As many of my readers will know, I've been building an online testing system in Force.com and had recently released a workflow test, so unsurprisingly my question was on workflow actions.
That concluded the organised part of the evening, so we then made our way to The Fox to continue the networking and discussions late into the night.
For those that couldn't attend, there's a highlights reel available on youtube courtesy of @Sarah_tquila - make sure you get yourself along to the next one!
Nice one! Looks like it was a good meet-up. Must get myself along to the next one.
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