Nicholas Tollervey: Developing Developers

This is the January monthly meeting. Normally some of us go on to the pub afterwards.

I am very pleased to say that Nicholas Tollervey has volunteered to give a talk called "Developing Developers", followed by a practical workshop on some the topics from the talk - in particular, simple cross platform (including mobile) GUI-based apps.

Please bring a laptop with Python 3 installed on it.

It's hard to summarise how much Nicholas has contributed to the world of Python, but he is responsible for the Mu editor (https://codewith.mu/) and he's why we have Python on the BBC micro:bit, to name just two things. See http://ntoll.org/cv/ for more information.

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**How CamPUG uses meetup.com**

We mainly use meetup as a way of publicising meetings, at which it is very good. We also use the RSVP mechanism to get some idea of how many people will turn up to a meeting, but this is very inaccurate - at best, we normally get between half and two-thirds of the "yes" numbers attending.

We do not require people to pay for meetings, or acquire tickets, and we do not "take a register" of who actually turns up. We don't even insist that people have to use meetup to indicate they're coming. It is important to me that this be a free and open meeting.

(Meetup have recently made some confusing announcements about how they might change their fee structure in the future. They have not contacted me about any changes for CamPUG, and it sounds as if this is only a limited experiment for the moment. We are keeping an eye on the situation, and will let people know if anything changes.)

This does mean that we could have a problem when a meeting is very popular and reaches the practical room size - i.e., how many will safely fit in our meeting room. Given our new venue, we don't think that is likely to happen in the near future, but we have put a limit on the number of "yes" RSVP replies: larger than we think might be comfortable in the room, but hopefully not too large.