I really should have done this post last month as that was the first Tuesday Club’s 20th anniversary and I have been going for the full 20 years, The event should really have been a big song and dance, but as always with the first Tuesday club, everything is subtle.
However, I’m glad I’m doing my periodic post for this particular meetup. It was at a new venue and with a new sponsor 1, and it was a particularly good one. Not only was there a number of new people there that had never been before, but they all had a far better time than they expected. of particular note was a conversation with one new attendee who was coming because their office is moving back to full time in the city, and therefore these kinds of social events suddenly leap back to their old prominence.
The vendor Checkmarx did a particularly excellent job. They were in evidence and we’re working the floor as any good vendor would, but only in a very social aspect. The rule of no hard sell was very much kept. I met three people from the vendors team, who were genuinely fun people to chat to and very knowledgeable, Good contacts to know. One of them particularly was very, very funny, despite the fact he was a salesperson dropped into a room full of security techs.
Conversations as always varied hugely from serious ones on how politics effects security implementation in corporations, through to the daftest travel stories
The highlight conversation of the night for me was a very involved one on exactly how vector databases work.2 How these worked in their base form, as well as how their search associations functioned. this sounds boring unless you were watching us do it , because we commandeered a chunk of the bar and watched by a number of very, very patient bar staff were trying to explain Euclidean distance and dot product by using wine and beer glasses.
The venue was the Hispania Restaurant, a new one on me, and particularly fine, when I mentioned it to a colleague it turned out that it was their favourite restaurant, and they were very jealous that I was getting to spend the evening there for free, the facilities were perfect with a steady flow of drinks and food all night.
All in all it turned out to be one of the most pleasant work evenings I have had in ages, my Linkedin has more contacts than it did yesterday, and all the people I met were keen to come back next month.
