I'm currently travelling back from the Chicago Developer Meetup, on the heels of wrapping up the Boston Developer Meetup, and with all this travelling now have a fantastic travelling tune from Johnny Cash and Lynn Anderson stuck in my head. (Click that link - it'll get stuck in your head -- "I've been to Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota, Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota, Wichita, Tulsa, Ottawa, Oklahoma, Tampa, Panama, Mattawa, La Paloma, Bangor. Baltimore, Salvador, Amarillo").

Sidenote: If it isn't obvious I'm a Johnny Cash fan, it'll become so if you ever hear my youngest, who's just learning to string full sentences together, sing "Wing O' Fiyo" (...and that's "Ring of Fire" in Toddler-ese, of course).

What are Ektron Developer Meetups?

Ektron Developer Meetups are informal events that happen in restaurants, pubs, cafes worldwide, where Ektron developers from various organizations (interactive agencies, higher education, and the like) come together to network, learn from one another, see what's new, and take a moment to sharpen up the saws.

Given the release of v8.5, and its focus on the developer experience, we're celebrating by treating developers to dinner & drinks at great restaurants throughout the world. Here are some of the topics we covered during the meetup.

The Ektron Developer Program

I kicked off the Chicago meeting with a presentation on the Ektron Developer Program that's been running for a few months now. It's a program focused on delivering high quality developer material, such as technical webinars, best practice documents, podcasts, blog posts, etc., each and every month. And there's a lot available.

To keep developers aware of all the technical material we're creating, I encouraged everyone (and now encourage you too!) to subscribe to the Developer Alerts monthly newsletter.

Presentations from Peers

Chicago based Ektron partners were present en force, with developers participating from three agencies: iCrossing, Rightpoint, WSOL. James Coleman from iCrossing gave an interesting "choose your own adventure" style presentation, asking developers to choose the direction based on their interests, which led him down a path of discussing Agile Development Practices in Ektron web projects.

Release Overview & Roadmap Insights

I followed Jame's presentation with an overview of the 8.5 release, highlighting features of interest to developers, then focused in on the Framework API and the 3-Tier architecture. The slides I worked through largely came from the webinars I gave on each of those topics, and you can find those available here:

• Framework API - Webinar
• 3-Tier Architecture - Webinar

Survey Says...

Our goal for the evening is to have developers going home having had great conversations, made some new connections, and pumped about something new they learned. Based on the feedback I got, I think I we can call our recent meetups a success. Here's some comments I received from developers:

• "It was great to spend one-on-one time with Bill Cava talking about very complex 3 tier architectures. You can't beat a face to face conversation."
• "I liked getting an inside look at Ektron’s developer and feature roadmap for the upcoming releases."
• "The meetup was a great opportunity to meet with local developers using ektron to speak openly and help address specific programming questions we had."

Join (or Request) a Developer Meetup Near You!

Upcoming developer meetups are happening in the following areas. If you're near by, please get in touch and join us for a great evening. If you're looking to join a developer meetup in your area, let us know that too -- tell us where you'd like to have a meetup in the future, and based on interest, we can get something going there as well.