I’ve just heard that this year’s miniSPA event is fully booked, although there is a waiting list for the event in case people have to drop out.

The event showcases six of the best sessions from the 2007 BCS Software Practice Advancement conference.

ACCU Cambridge got off to a good start last week with its first meeting titled ‘Code Monkeys’.

Pete Goodliffe was the speaker and the talk drew around 30 people to the meeting, several of whom were familiar faces from the Cambridge programming scence (yes, such a thing does exist).

Pete’s talk was based around the different types of programmer (monkey) you could expect to encounter in daily (programming) life. These included The Guru - a recognised expert who you may not understand, the demi-Guru - a self-proclaimed Guru, who isn’t in fact a Guru, The Slacker - doesn’t do much work but it’s hard to prove this, The Planner - likes to get a detailed schedule in place before doing any work but may run out of project time etc. etc. Armed with this knowledge we should all be able to cope better when we encounter particularly difficult monkeys.

We were also encouraged to reflect on what type of monkey we were and to learn from this by working on our weak points. It was a fun talk with a serious message. Afterwards most people headed down the pub but I’d had a late night the night before so discretion suggested a return home instead…

The next talk will probably take place in September, watch this space.

BTW, did I mention Pete had a new book out - Code Craft: The Practice of Writing Excellent Code.