This review of June’s event is more than a little late, but it was still a great event. The format was different this time around, with an open podium. This produced some interesting and unexpected topics, the first being an introduction into the world of geocaching from Alastair McDonald.
Alastair’s talk caught me unawares as I was expecting a technical overview of maintaining geographically dispersed content and services for load-balancing and DR. Instead I was introduced to a world of following GPS co-ordinates to find hidden caches of goodies, in the real-world. Whilst the concept of geocaching was new to me, once aware of it’s presence it appears to be a very popular hobby, Twitter seems to be full of people all over the globe discussing success or failure of searching for various caches. I’m failing to fully do justice to Alastair’s presentation and geocaching as whole, so I’d advice watching the footage yourself (along with the rest of the talks).
Second up, was the Ecommerce Experiment. The team are setting up an ecommerce site in an unfamiliar market over the next three years, and are blogging and tweeting all there experiences, positive and negative, throughout the entire process. Their presentation was interesting enough, but I’ve been following their posts since and the material is always interesting and shows a side of online commerce normally kept behind closed doors.
Third was Mike Parker with a demo of Drupal, with the goal of ‘work less, surf more’. Web site creation isn’t exactly my forte (check www.infosanity.co.uk if you don’t believe me), but Drupal seems to be a very powerful framework, with plenty of real-world application.
Finally Ryan (@ethicalhack3r), discussed the latest release of DVWA. I won’t go into too much detail, as I’ve already reviewed DVWA previously. If your interested in this area of research, check the archive footage of Ryan’s talk.
Whilst the presentations were all good, but as usual the real value of SuperMondays is the networking opportunity and the discussions before and after. Which begs the question, if you’ve not been to the event why not? Next meeting is July 27th, and the topic is still up for debate, so get involved.
— Andrew Waite