According to Wikipedia The word geek is a slang term, noting individuals as “One who is perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things including those of intellectuality, electronics, etc.”

Last night I went to the ‘.NET London User Group’. Now you are probably imagining groups of nerdy-looking people drooling over the latest Windows 7 phone. I’m embarrassed to say that was exactly what I expected too- it surely could be geek heaven and, potentially, my hell.

To give you some background, my main aim for going was a recruitment drive- I’m Head of Development at Adgistics. We’re always looking for good developers and what better place to find them? (There was also free beer, so who am I to refuse?).

Anyway, the night started with a drink or two- courtesy of EMC Consulting, the hosts for the night. We then went upstairs and had five 10-15 minute talks, all of which were really interesting. My role is hands-off these days but getting an overview of new technologies, what’s current and what’s exciting the development world is invaluable… and it wasn’t all techy either!

First, James Knowles kicked off with a talk on the Do’s and Don’ts of setting up your own software company (see, not geeky at all). This was followed by Adgistics’ own Garry Shutler talking about the benefits of SASS, a more structured and formatted version of CSS (admittedly, slightly more geeky). Next up Robin Minto took us through some of the cool features of HTML 5 and finally Matt Lacey talked us through Phonegap, a cross mobile application platform- all very cool stuff.

The stars of the ‘show’ for me were Sara Stephens and Rachael Laycock who took the clever approach of doing a sketch to explain the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of pair programming, very engaging, fun and informative at the same time.

What is a geek? Well, from what I’ve seen, it’s simply someone who is passionate about what he or she does, whether it’s the job or the outside interests. In the development world it’s someone who gives a crap, who cares where the industry is heading next, cares about quality code and takes pride in their work. One thing I definitely know is that we’re a lot better off at Adgistics for having them and they certainly make my job a lot easier.

Am I a geek? Well, it might be about snowboarding or about agile software development (my own personal geekdom) but, hell, yes I am! I’m a geek and proud of it!