GuruStop.NET

How It Started

It was a great night for me yesterday. It all started when I woke up at 2 or 3 AM Abu Dhabi time, to find a link to a Tiny Chat conversation including many Egyptian .NET geeks (Tiny chat is a website that uses flash to allow you to have a conversation with any number of people, using text, voice or video). They were trying to plan for an offline gathering today, as easter vacation.

Soon we found the website not suitable for some guys with slower connections. We decided to move on to Skype instead.

We had Ramy Mahrous, Mohamed Gamal, Emad Mokhtar, Ayman Al Hattab, Amr El Dib, and few others on voice, and Nashwa (I don’t recall the full name) and Doha El Sayed on text

It was a great talk and we really enjoyed it.

Scheduling the Gatherings

The atmosphere and how it started reminded me with the weekly conversation Sara Chipps used to have on Tiny Chat with many well known geeks., which involved open talks about various technical topics. Why don’t we get something like that?

Everybody seemed to like the idea of a weekly conversation. Some guys didn’t really like the open talk style instead of a formal session style (fearing time waste on side talks maybe). To try both, we agreed on having half an hour on specific topic (an online session, using Skype  Desktop Sharing feature), and half an hour as open talk on a pre-defined topic.

Next Online Gathering

So, it’s going to be from this wek on. We’ll have our first scheduled conversation this Friday April 9 at 11:59 PM (Cairo Time, GMT+2). Here’s the deal: Ayman will give a demo showing SharePoint No-Code Solutions in the first half hour (He is a SharePoint MVP), then we’ll have an open talk by everybody about ODATA for the next half hour (I quoted this from Sara since her last gathering was mostly about ODATA().

If you want to join us, just add "mohamed.meligy", "rmahrous", "emad.mokhtar.habib", “aymanelhattab” or "gamalilio" on Skype and we’ll add you to the conversation.

We also are using a twitter hash tag “#EgyGeeksOnSkype” to announce all updates related to this gathering and next gatherings later, so, keep an eye on it, and use it to spread the word!

Although the hash tag specifies Egypt, everybody is welcome to join the conversation wherever there are from (The conversation is going to be in Arabic).

See you on Friday :)

P.S.

• Ayman also blogged about this.