In this post I’d like to talk about something less technical, or at least something that doesn’t include code snippets.

When I moved to London, more than a year ago not, I was surprised by the amount of interesting events available in the city. The usual entry point to these events is almost always the website meetup.com. They span from non-technical ones, like language exchanges where you get the chance to practice a language you’re learning, to events targeted specifically to IT professionals.

The types of events is usually various, and range from regular talks to more practical ones, like code dojos, hands-on sessions and hack days, where you can practice techniques like pair programming and TDD.

One of the events that I like particularly more is Hack the Tower, an hack day that takes place at the 26th floor of the Heron Tower, just in front of Liverpool Street’s station.

The event takes place roughly once a month, organized by the London Java Community and the London Scala User Group with the idea of bringing together developers who use JVM-based language to work on different projects or to experiment and learn more about new technologies. Projects are proposed by the attenders in the morning, at the beginning of the hack day, and everyone is free to join other people to work on something they consider interesting.

One of the projects that is always present and that I like to join is the OpenJDK, the open source implementation of the java platform. Some of the developers that are currently contributing to the project provide help an support to the people who want to bring their contributions to it.

One of the reasons why I particularly like the events is because, apart from the coding parting, it gives you the chance to get in touch with other developer, sharing some ideas a learning something new.

The next Hack the Tower will take place on the 18th of October, and the registration page is available at the following link: http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/198900352/

Hope I’ll see you there! ;-)

P.S. Here’s the view you can get from there: