We had our first Central Arkansas Refresh Group Meetup last night at Starbucks on Rodney Parham Road last night and close to 20 programmers, bloggers, and all around tech folks showed up. It was a lot of fun, we had a blast! After the wall to wall introductions were made it was apparent that the group was extremely diverse.
While we had a lot of developers in the house representing a wide variety of languages (java, php, .net, and coldfusion) we also had a good representation of bloggers and media folks in attendance as well that kind of gave the group some balance. It made for some awesome conversation.
Some of the things we discussed last night, and forgive me if I leave off a few because I got so wrapped up at times that I failed to take notes, were twitter, facebook, wordpress, frameworks, and of course widgets (insert group giggle here). We also talked about video, blogs, monetization, and high-speed internet.
The conversations went on for close to three hours or so, I think a few of us hung out in the parking lot for another 30 minutes or so afterwards and discussed video cameras. I would like to thank those of you that were able to attend, I think that this group is going to take off in a big way. If you were unable to attend, stay tuned to our Facebook Group Page for future meeting notifications, we decided to hold our meetings on the last Tuesday of each month at a location soon to be announced. Also, special thanks to David Kincade at The Arkansas Project for helping to promote the event, he and I went back and forth during the week in hopes that we would have at least 10 or so folks show up, and the group almost doubled that, so I think it’s safe to say it was a success.
I am already looking forward to the next meetup, if anyone has any suggestions for locations, etc., post it to the facebook group page. Also, be sure to post your Twitter accounts to the group page as well so we can stay connected. I think that there is also some talk about setting up a website and discussion area in the near future so stay tuned for all of that.
One other note in closing, Nick had a great idea of using the hashtag, #refreshca for announcements about our group, it doesn’t appear to be in use by anyone yet, http://hashtags.org/search?query=refreshca&submit=Search.
Thanks for coming, tell a friend.
Looking forward to hooking up again soon!!!
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