In December I started going along to the new MK.js JavaScript meet up group. It’s been a great group with interesting people and I’ve even done a couple of talks. It got me thinking about the fact there wasn’t anything for Java and other JVM languages in Milton Keynes. It seemed like if no one had set a group up yet then no one was going to unless I did it myself.

So I created the MK JUG meet up group (which I was surprised cost a fair bit of money) and a Twtter account - @MiltonKeynesJUG We’ve already had a small pub meet up and a full blown technical meet with talks hosted by Office Depot at their offices in central Milton Keynes.

Schalk Cronjé gave a great talk about Gradle and even managed to do a quick introduction to Groovy in the process. I did a talk about managing database schema changes in a continuous deployment environment with Liquibase.

The next tech meet is already scheduled for May 4th at the offices of JUXT, a local consulting company. I just need to round up some speakers.

If you’re in Milton Keynes and working with Java or another JVM language or even just iinterested in programming then join the group and come along to a meet up.