Atley Hunter’s Fredericton adventure and the talk “A Lap Around WP7 Mango”.

I still have my iPhone and I love that device but who knew my dream phone would become a Window Phone Mango on this 14 of December 2011 in beautiful Fredericton.  It all started around 12:30, where Atley Hunter (@atleyhunter) landed in Fredericton and met some of the members at the Garrison Ale District Ale House (@garrisonale) for a pre-meeting “FDUG Coffee & Code – WP7 Chat with Atley Hunter”. This was one of our first organized coffee and code and turned out to be a success. I really liked this type of event and I was enjoying seeing the one-on-one conversation and interaction while ordering food/and or coffee and drinks. I really think that we should always set a MAXIMUM of 10 members as this allowed to get the table with the TV (Where Atley hooked his laptop) and keeping it small allows for following most of the conversations at the table.  The following pic is about Atley using the @GarrisonAle TV  for showing us how to pre-populate database for #mango phone (This is one of his tips and tricks he learned after spending many hours of troubleshooting!)

The next picture shows the crowd (we only had one seat left)

After the pre-meeting was over, I took him to one of the city’s hidden gem for lattes and coffees, Jonnie Java where we experienced the best latte in town: The Maple Latte . With our Lattes, we headed to one of our Gold Sponsor, Peter Roberts for Men (@prformen) and he discovered a great product called “Beard Lube” that he plans to use to keep shaving his head! After this, we went to visit another gold sponsor, the geek chic boutique . Atley realized the meter had expired for his parking so we then rushed back to his car to find this on the windshield:

Finally the talk “FDUG December – A Lap Around WP7 Mango” started at 18h30 at the ITC building UNB Campus. Atley claims that his talk can be more than 5 hours but since we gave him a two hour limit, he was very clever in delivering the talk. He engaged with the audience and figured out what people wanted to hear, what was the level of experience in the crowd, etc.  I appreciated the way he did it because he shaped a unique presentation for us.  My only suggestion would be to allow two breaks for allowing people to network with Atley and also for those who prefer asking question privately.

I now have seen the phone, I know what it is capable of and I would love to have one. However we cannot get them in Fredericton!

My personal rating for this talk is 9/10. It was fun, I learned and met a guy who knows mobile phone development inside and out, not only Mango!. If this guy is in your town, DO NOT miss going to see him because he is so passionate and I think that leads to great talks and conversations.

I now have a new connection in my network! I hope you enjoyed my blog and do not miss our next talk on HTML5 by Susan Ibach (A developer evangelist at Microsoft Canada)

By Gaetan Savoie

Speaker Bio:

Atley has been a developer for more than 15 years and a mobile developer since way before it was cool. A MVP for Windows Phone Development with over 30 apps under his belt and numerous talks, blog postings and HackFests, he is always working to expand his development knowledge and share it to anyone who wants to know. Active on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/AtleyHunter), Twitter (http://twitter.com/AtleyHunter) and on his blog (www.atleyhunter.com), he is never far from reach and always happy to help.