#apiconuk

Sitting at the keyboard building the future is all well and good, but there comes a time when it's important to take a break, get out of the office, reflect on our progress, learn from the hard work of others (and show off a bit of our own), and meet up with likeminded doers. In this spirit I am pleased to announce the events season is well and truly upon us. Here at Lokku we're throwing ourselves into the mix, we'll be attending, sponsoring, and indeed even organizing several different events over the coming months.

As I mentioned a while back in my post on giving back to the tech community we like to sponsor relevant events. Our main rule is this: we only sponsor events we will also attend. One such event took place this past weekend as several members of the Nestoria team ventured to Sofia for YAPC::EU. Alex summarizes things nicely in his post over on the Nestoria devblog, and I'm proud to say we were able to keep our streak of sponsoring and speaking at this great event. The Perl community and the tools around it is undergoing a bit of a renaissance, and we're happy to play our small part. On a related note we'll again be sponsoring the London Perl Workshop coming up on Saturday, November 8th. The exact schedule isn't yet set, but it's always an interesting day and no doubt several members of the team will speak. But Nestoria isn't just perl, and to sharpen our other skills we'll also be heading out to Nordic.js and the All Your Base conference in Oxford.

Here's a snap of the Nestoria sponsorship banner from YAPC::EU

Also in November will be wherecamp.de in Berlin. We'll be sponsoring and talking about OpenCage and some of the various geo brands like SplashMaps that we've invested in (more news on this front shortly). Over on the OpenCage blog as part of our Open Geo interview series we recently did an interview with Jan Nowak, one of the wherecamp Berlin organizers.

For those that can't wait that long to learn about our geo efforts, fear not. I'll be giving a five min lightening talk about the OpenCage geocoding API at LondonAPI on 17th September. A week later I'll go into much more detail during a 50 minute (!) talk at APIconUK. And of course there's always the geo-innovation event that we organize: #geomob. The next event is just a few weeks away on the 16th of September and the lineup looks fantastic. Before the last #geomob in July I blogged over on the Nestoria devblog about what #geomob is and why we do it. If you can't make it in September fear not as we have more events lined-up on 4th of November and 13th of January. The event has really grown over the last 18 months and we now regularly have 5 or 6 interesting speakers.

Many thanks to all the organizers of these events. We appreciate your efforts. Innovative thinking and source code is great, but in the end it is the human relationships that make the open source scene so rewarding. As such it's always good to put the keyboard down occasionally, and learn from others face-to-face.

Finally, there's one more important event on our schedule: in a few weeks we'll be having the company end of summer team day, and as per tradition we gladly invite all alumni in good standing to rejoin us for drinks in the evening. It's always great fun to see the old faces and learn what they're now up to. If you're an alumni please check the team facebook group for details and we hope you can make it.