To finish 2019 off with a bang, R-Ladies Manchester headed to Code Computer Love in Manchester’s Northern Quarter for an evening of socialising, celebrating and quizzing. The venue was extremely cool, with a makerspace, 3D printer, retro arcade games and all manner of gadgets we couldnt even hazard a guess at! There was the usual brilliant food from Open Kitchen, as well as some festive drinks and chocolates kindly provided by our sponsors Socium.

We would wholeheartedly recommend Open Kitchen for any event in Manchester, their sustainable ethos which saves food from landfill as well as reinvesting profits to provide hot meals for the homeless fits really well with the kind of community spirit R-Ladies works so hard to promote. Not to mention it’s delicious - some very organised ladies even remember to bring a tupperware along so even less goes to waste!

As usual, we did a bit of housekeeping before getting down to the fun stuff, giving a honorable mention to our sponsors, and as always, plugging a couple of their roles that they think would be a great fit for our attendees. We snapped a quick group photo and then got down to the serious business of our Christmas quiz!

No speakers or presentations this month, but Ellen our quiz master did sneak in a few cheeky revision questions covering some stuff that had been part of the presentations over the last 12 months - If you want to host your own R quiz, the resources are on our Github pages! They weren’t all testing how well we’d been listening though - there was also a “things that begin with R” round, and some festive Christmas questions too!

After 4 rounds our teams were quizzed out and while the scores were counted up we stopped to grab more food and drink and talked about the things we were most proud of achieving during 2019. We were thrilled to celebrate 4 brilliant events that were well attended and enjoyed by everyone, and others mentions successes like “getting to grips with functions” and “actually using coding at my job instead of just for a hobby”. We firmly believe everybody should celebrate their own successes and it was great to hear all these!

Now to the exciting bit - the “Christmas Elves” wiped the floor, with a whopping 38 out of 41 points to take top spot and a tub of chocolates to share! Happily though, everyone took away a prize as we were given a little pot of money from R-Ladies Global, with which we bought some R-Ladies Manchester coasters! (Nobody needs another branded tote bag do they really?)

If you like the sound of them, every speaker at our events going forward will be given one as a token of thanks from us, so get in touch with your ideas for talks, presentations and coding sessions!

Finally, all that’s left to say is a huge thank you to everyone who has attended, supported, retweeted and presented in 2019. We can’t wait to see what 2020 holds for our little group! Happy New Year everybody!

If you like the sound of this, come and join us at our next event on February 4th. We’ll be back at Autotrader taking on functions for a slightly more intermediate session

We’re always looking for sponsors to help us keep our events free to attend in the form of venue offers and provisions of catering - If you’re a Mancunian business passionate about diversity in tech and want to support us, use the email link below to get in touch!