However, this looks set to change with the launch this past week of “Reading Geek Night” (#rdggeek) a monthly tech / geek event giving the techies of Reading an event to meet up, chat and give presentations.

Reading Geek Night was kicked off with a great presentation entitled “Who Do you think you are?” by Ben Nunney (@bennuk) looking into digital identity, the impact it can have on your life, career and how best to manage your digital brand.

Ben was followed by myself with a lightening fast introduction to a topic close to my heart, giving an insight into “What is Windows Azure?” and my now much loved Azure – Starbucks analogy, proving that geeks can’t keep away from coffee even when the Barista keels over whilst processing your order. (Slides from my talk will be up shortly).

Jim Anning (@jimanning) then showed that you are never too young to code with “Coding for Kids” with MIT’s sprite based Scratch programming environment. Scratch allows children to easily pick up programming and object oriented concepts in a fun easy to understand way, as well as the opportunity for the crowd to get in some good old heckling.

The night was then rounded off by Ruby Guru Chris Tingley (@fringley) showing how fast it is to set up and dive into dev using Ruby on Rails. Within the 15 minutes Chris had for his talk he had created a whole jukebox / song / artist MVC website with a backend database as well as giving an overview of some great Ruby features. Rails looks an exciting area, one I will definitely be sampling in the near future.

I hope that this even has really kick started the Reading tech community, with its tech agnostic and more social approach to community events, with each talk having “talk time” between them to allow for networking.

Looking forward to next months event, see you all there