Our inaugural meeting was held on Monday 25th September in the Beehive Inn on the Grassmarket in Edinburgh. It’s a cracking pub with two decent-sized rooms upstairs.
People arrived in dribs and drabs, and we had a great turnout, especially when you consider how badly we publicised this event – meetup.com is a great resource for finding an audience for events like this! We spent a bit of time mingling and saying hello, starting only a few minutes late.
With one speaker today, Charlie introduced… himself and gave everyone a quick rundown of our objectives and respect policy.
Then we got wired into the real stuff with Charlie’s talk, “Inside the Black Box: A behind-the-scenes guide to UK Telecoms” [slides]
Charlie took us through what the internet actually is: namely manholes and cables in the ground, under the sea and near other crucial infrastructure.
Then we wrapped everything up with a handful of questions. A decent number of folks stayed around at the end to chat, exchange business cards and war stories.
It felt like we struck a decent balance between content and socialising, and will definitely consider doing one-talk events in future depending on the length; our planned format was to have two talks per meetup, however with the success of the evening, we’ll definitely consider single talks in future!
Huge thanks to everyone who attended, and made this thing happen. If you’ve got a talk in mind, we’d love to hear from you. Send us an email or a DM (@netmeetup_scot).