A big "Thank You" to everyone who came along to Geekmas over the weekend - a good time, a great night at the hotel, and a fantastic curry had by all!
Code quality, testing and maintainability turned out to be a major theme that ran through the weekend - with topics ranging from Rasmus Lerdorf's 4 layer PHP model through the doctest module in Python - and that's a pretty wide range.
The scheme for a campaigning web site (Neuroblastoma) that I posted up here yesterday was something that we worked out on the tail end of Sunday, and I wish Dan all the best with his work on that site.
Even with Melksham loosing all its useful trains in a couple of weeks, a half of the people who stayed overnight actually arrived by rail. Alas, the train turned into a bus (again) for their Sunday return journey... and in two weeks time there won't even be a daytime Sunday bus to Chippenham and Swindon
People travelled from the South Coast, from the Netherlands, and from London and Harrogate to attend (and that is NOT intended to be a complete list!). We were also delighted to welcome the partner of one of the originators of HTML, who worked alongside Tim Berners-Lee at Cern. A really interesting insight into the life and times around then; and I'm not name-dropping to respect privacy.
We've intentionally got cycle and motor cycle space, under cover, at Well House Manor and indeed we welcomed one of our delegates as our first cycling guest. He happened to be collapsible (you know what I mean!) but I'm cheerfully saying "yes, that's a sensible provision" to myself.
Do we do Geekmas again next year? Yes - we probably do, although there are elements of it that are starting to happen year and weekend round... technical people in at other weekends, and all that sort of thing.
In fact, Bruce and Lika have invited us all to come down to New Milton (I think he said tents in the garden as he doesn't have a hotel like us ;-)) and I understand that Lika makes an excellent Lamb Shaslik. Just don't tell my friends on the left!
(written 2006-11-28, updated 2013-02-23)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
M300 - Well House Manor - Behind the scenes [203] Holes in on line information - (2005-02-05)
[677] Sympathetic development - (2006-04-09)
[742] A visit from the solicitor - (2006-06-03)
[769] King Edward VII - days of empire - (2006-06-20)
[813] Monday Morning at Well House Consultants Melksham - (2006-07-24)
[868] Smoking, or no - (2006-09-16)
[897] Too much for the National Trust - (2006-10-18)
[927] Hotel door furniture - (2006-11-15)
[931] Before and After - Well House Manor - (2006-11-18)
[939] Swipe cards for hotel rooms - Security issues - (2006-11-23)
[1000] One Thousand Posts and still going strong - (2006-12-18)
[1083] Behind the scenes - (2007-02-17)
[1105] A week is a long time in the life of a conference centre - (2007-03-10)
[1159] It can take more that one plus one to get two. - (2007-04-22)
[1179] Sizing sheets and other domestic issues - (2007-05-07)
[1189] Meet, greet and welcome - (2007-05-16)
[1285] In the army, or in civvie street? - (2007-07-31)
[1311] What do people look for on a hotel web site? - (2007-08-20)
[1319] Customer feedback - lifeblood of a business - (2007-08-25)
[1369] One business, four different angles! - (2007-09-28)
[1371] Hotel in Melksham at Christmas - (2007-09-29)
[1441] On cancellations, rebooking, and pricing schemes - (2007-11-22)
[1490] Software to record day to day events and keep an action list - (2007-12-31)
[1515] Keeping staff up to date on hotel room status - (2008-01-22)
[1520] Terms and Conditions - Hotel, England - plain English - (2008-01-26)
[1571] Await guests in the early hours - (2008-03-12)
[1637] Providing exceptional service - and carrying on doing so. - (2008-05-09)
[1854] Three Seasonal Pictures - (2008-10-25)
[1900] Table Topics - (2008-11-22)
[1904] Ruby, Perl, Linux, MySQL - some training notes - (2008-11-23)
[1948] Blame Culture - (2008-12-17)
[1957] Why are cooks bad tempered? - (2008-12-22)
[1973] Required Request - (2009-01-03)
[1991] Rules for a King - (2009-01-13)
[2125] We have lost a regular business guest - (2009-04-10)
[2247] A day in the life of a hotelier - (2009-06-18)
[2396] Easing off in our 50s? - (2009-09-06)
[2910] Robust - testing the system - (2010-08-09)
[2916] Testing the robustness of our hotel and training systems - holiday and sickness times - (2010-08-11)
[2960] The Well House team - September 2010 - (2010-09-19)
[2961] Initial handling of phone calls and walk in visitors - (2010-09-19)
[3093] How many toilet rolls - hotel inventory and useage - (2010-12-18)
[3743] Sunday - no longer a day of rest - (2012-05-28)
[3844] Rooms ready for guests - each time, every time, thanks to good system design - (2012-08-20)
[3961] Well House Staff Party - (2012-12-22)
[4302] Sunday is never quiet at Well House Manor - (2014-09-21)
[4365] The changing face of Christmas - (2014-12-26)
G102 - Well House Consultants - Things to do in Melksham [5] Driving in the UK for new arrivals from the USA - (2004-08-07)
[51] Gym and swimming - Melksham Blue Pool - (2004-09-16)
[266] A beautiful place to live and learn - (2005-04-04)
[298] Sharing pictures of Wiltshire - (2005-05-02)
[305] Within about an hour - (2005-05-08)
[312] Maud Heath - (2005-05-15)
[325] Gone Racing - Larkhill, Wiltshire - (2005-05-26)
[329] the Stately Homes of England - (2005-05-29)
[342] The evening after the course - (2005-06-09)
[344] Walk in Bath - (2005-06-11)
[354] Ballooning from Bath - (2005-06-21)
[488] Looking for railway groups and users - Swindon, Salisbury, Southampton - (2005-11-06)
[500] Bowerhill, Melksham, 2006 Calendar - (2005-11-19)
[524] Santa comes to Melksham - (2005-12-11)
[670] Architectural Heritage - Devizes - (2006-04-04)
[829] Where to go within 30 minutes of Melksham - (2006-08-11)
[929] Presenting Melksham - for a weekend away in Wiltshire - (2006-11-17)
[957] Improving the historic town of Melksham - (2006-11-30)
[977] Melksham and Norwich - (2006-12-10)
[989] Melksham Quiz - (2006-12-15)
[1330] While waiting for Melksham Post Office - (2007-09-02)
[1452] Santa on the train to Melksham - (2007-12-01)
[1894] Shopping in Melksham - (2008-11-19)
[1928] Melksham Oak Community School, Melksham, Wiltshire - (2008-12-07)
[2141] Town Crier competiton - (2009-04-25)
[2175] Melksham in pictures - (2009-05-11)
[2656] Melksham Carnival - (2010-02-28)
[2716] Melksham in Pictures - (2010-04-10)
[3062] Melksham Carnival - getting ready for 2011 - (2010-11-20)
[3229] Coincidence, or naturally repeating event? - (2011-04-03)
[3230] Whaddon - near us and yet so remote from us - (2011-04-03)
[3239] TrainWest, 2011 in pictures - Christie Miller, Bowerhill, Melksham - (2011-04-09)
[3284] What to do in the evening during a Tcl course - (2011-05-10)
[3531] Blowing our trumpet about Melksham - (2011-11-28)
Some other Articles
Python collections - mutable and imutableSplitting Pythons in BradfordChristmas in NovemberComing from London to Melksham by train for a courseWhat happened at GeekmasPython and the Magic RoundaboutSludge off the mountain, and Python and PHPRunning an on line campaignWhat is an SQL injection attack?Look around this mouth.