How not to organize an event...

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Hull CS50 was great, but I always write down a list of things that I might want to think about next time I help to run something like this:

  • The Fisher Price Code a pillar is a great toy for kids and grownups to play with. You can track them down on eBay if you really want one. If you want to hack one, take a look here.

  • When you are printing the signs for an event it is a good idea not to print them double sided.

  • Talking of signs, don’t laminate them if they are going into Perspex holders. They won’t fit.

  • If you decide to use RFID cards to manage the free drink allocation, take a log of all the unique card numbers before you start and build them into your application. Otherwise you’ll find smart students using their university cards, bank cards and maybe even playing cards to get drinks. Fortunately the folks doing this were showing off - nobody got extra drinks like this. But next time it will be properly secure….

  • Don’t work on the basis that all your RFID cards will work. Turns out that if you buy 50 cards for an attractive price quite a few of them will not work.

  • The bits that you think will be most busy won’t be. I thought that the busiest time would be the quiz at the end, but in the end we had peek attendance at the talks.

  • People love having lots of things to do around them, even though they might not actually go and do them all.

  • Don’t deploy a new version of your robot manager software at 6:00am on the morning of the event. It will break and you will have a very nervous few minutes waiting for someone good with GitHub (in this case number one son) to pull back the previous version and deploy that.

  • Always take a picture of your audience. I completely forgot to do this during the talks (if you’ve got any pictures I’d love to have copies).

  • If you’ve not seen a little lady totally over the moon because her delegate badge is a match for the one on the dalek, you’ve really not lived.

  • Get T-shirts made. They add a lot. We got ours printed here. And modern banking systems make it really easy for people to pay for them. I used a Monzo link and it worked a treat.

  • Remember that having fun beats everything else. If folks are enjoying themselves doing what they are doing, you really don’t need to go and tell them what they should be doing to have fun.