This week in NOCO, FortCO, GIS Alley, or whatever you wish to call it, the Esri EDN DevMeetUp team made a stop in Old Town at the Rustic Oven for a laid-back, Geo Geek filled evening of Geo discussion, developer tips, and #GeoGlobaldomination… you’ll need to search that Twitter hash tag for more on that topic! 

Hosted by Andy Gup (@agup) and crew from Esri’s developer group (think EDN) the evening was a community  meetup, somewhat of a mini un-conference, where the local GIS developer community, about 60 of them) convened to share their stories, tips, and tricks with their friends and colleagues.

Several local speakers volunteered to share their knowledge including, the “keynote” presentation by Dave Bouwman of DTSGIS.com… Dave discussed developing for the Esri platform, the cloud, web services, and related topics and shared the following… “This is a good time to be a geo developer working on the Esri platform”. What Dave was getting at was that for developers, there’s an entire ecosystem of different  things you can use to develop your apps and services. We are no longer constrained to a specific technology, now you can chose your weapon of choice. What this means is you can go from idea, and very rapidly get to a working application. What used to take 6 months to a year, now with your weapon of choice (Ruby or ??) , and get it done much faster. Always entertaining, Dave discussed his ideas for about 25 minutes - the highlight of the night indeed.

Following Dave’s session, several NOCO community Geo professionals (aka GeoGeeks) took to the stage with 8 minute lightning talks. These included stories shared by:  Kevin Kaier, Clearpath Labs, Bryan Noyle DTSgis.com, Brian Sullivan City of Greeley, CO,  Chris Erickson - cartopac field solutions (sorry, I didn’t catch the name of the gent from USDA)

It was great to hear what/how people are doing things with their enterprise GIS and same great tips were shared. Some notable quotable take aways included:

• Always optimize every place that you can…
• Use Dropbox
• Geogeeks are now hero’s thanks to ubiquitous location based information
• Good design is innovative…
• Good design is aesthetic
• Good design makes a product understandable
• Good design is unobtrusive
• Good design is honest - don’t try to make it something its not
• Good design is environmentally friendly
• Good design has as little design as possible… keep it simple
• No SQL + ArcSDE = WTF?
• Buy your local EDN guru a beer and get to know him/her - they can be invaluable for information!

Last nights DevMeetUp carries on south along I-25 into LODO Denver at The Rock Bottom Brewery at 5 PM... see you there! Follow along with the Twitter hashtag #DevMeetUp. 

See details of all the DevMeetup events at http://www.esri.com/events/dev-meetup/index.html

Photos from DevMeetUp Fort Collins, CO - See also this cool, Pegshot social Checkin event page for the Meetup