Season's Geekings Irish Techie Quiz - The aftermath

Thanks all who took part of our Irish Geek's techie table quiz kindly hosted by Workday who also kept us fed and watered for the evening! Big shout out to Colette and staff for all their help. 💖

I would also like to thank our prize sponsors:

• Greyscout
• ShipItCon
• WITS Ireland
• Workday

🚨 Speaking of prizes, for anyone who won the Amazon vouchers, if you didn’t receive the code, please email me at irishgeeks@eventgeek.ie, we will sort you out.

🚨 Also if there's anything that was left behind, you can check with security at Workday's reception. We found a hat and scarf.

🫶 Hugs to the following Community Partners (in alphabetical order):

• Coding Grace
• Codú
• Dublin Elixir
• Dublin Java User Group (DJUG)
• Dublin Tech Talks
• GameCraft
• GDG Dublin & Women Techmakers
• HackHers Dublin
• Ireland Girl Geek Dinners
• JSConf Ireland
• PyData Ireland
• PyLadies Dublin
• Python Ireland
• Ruby Ireland
• TechFoundHer
• Techstars Startup Weekend Women Dublin
• TOG Hackerspace
• Women in AI Ireland

As with our quiz tradition (well, it's tradition now), Declan was all dressed up for the occasion
https://www.flickr.com/photos/micktwomey/53368334503/in/pool-irishgeeks/

Well done to everyone who joined in the fun answering our geeky questions. And we are serious that we are open to people to join the team to help with more general knowledge quiz questions (while being different to usual Irish pub quizzes).

Again, lots of great team names:

• Charlene's Angels (unfortunately they left after round 2, they were actually doing quite well).
• Chwasi
• Honey Badgers
• Ivan Wake II
• KitCrew & Giu
• Mariah Scary
• Pint Men
• Portmonteau
• Rainy Night In Soho
• Saylla Skates
• Sudocrewdo
• Taskmasters
• Team Fortran 77
• Tech B"AIB"s
• The A Team
• The MVPs
• The Try-Hards
• Warlocks

Here are the scores.

Fun fact: For those who didn’t know that on Dec 1, 2023, Ireland’s first satellite was successfully launched into space: https://www.eirsat1.ie/about

Ad Astra: Launch of EIRSAT-1 - YouTube

Watch live as Ireland goes to space, for the first time, with the launch of EIRSAT-1. Built by students at @universitycollegedublin under the guidance of ESA...

youtube.com

And if you are a radio amateurs, you can listen to the satellite in orbit: https://www.esa.int/Education/CubeSats_-_Fly_Your_Satellite/Calling_all_radio_amateurs_be_the_first_to_hear_satellite_EIRSAT-1_from_orbit

As folks found out that our techie quiz doesn’t really do coding questions, but we do cover science, technology, engineering (and sometimes maths) questions, some geek pop culture and anything mainstream that somehow is related to tech.

We don’t really do sports like footie, gaa or the usual Irish pub quiz questions on popular Irish culture, we do try and ask questions for non-Irish locals; we will mention this in our next quiz so people can set their expectations and find a person who has been keeping an eye on the sci/tech culture.

📢 And we are open to another person or two to help with questions for next one. (wink)

Some interesting answers to a difficult question: "Amazing languages like Elixir and Erlang run on a virtual machine called the BEAM. It is not as creatively named as the JVM but nonetheless what does BEAM stand for?"

• Binary Executing Abstract Machine
• Basic emulator assembly machine
• Brilliantly excellent automated machine
• Boolean Engine Automation Machine
• Binary Erlang Automated Machine
• box of electronics memory
• brian's excellent analysis machine
• Best ever automated machine
• binary enhanced access memory
• basic ethernet application machine
• bash emulator assemby machine
• Best Erlang amazing machine
• binary encoding assembly machine
• Bilingual Electronic Application Manager
• basic enterprise architecture method

The answer is:

• short for Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine
• (Björn's Erlang Abstract Machine is also acceptable)
• Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_(Erlang_virtual_machine)

And the one that everyone got right was from Round 1: "What was the highest grossing film of 2023?" (Note: There was a typeo during the evening and was clarified from 2024 to 2023).

And the answer is:

• Barbie
• $1.4 billion
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_in_film

Congrats to the following teams!

First

Second

Third

Share your photos/videos

If anyone have any photos or videos, feel free to share them with us via https://www.flickr.com/groups/irishgeeks/

🥁 How much did we raise?

And the question is how much have we raised so far (as the fundraiser is currently still open, so we are still receiving donations).

I want to say thanks to all who donated before the event, it was around €700 by Thursday Nov 30th.

We more than doubled that during the event, with idonate plus external donations, it currently stands at €1902!

We are still waiting on Workday match funds and our final amount will surpass €2k. We will update everyone when we receive the overall total, so a huge thanks to Workday staff who took part and for Workday to match their funds to 3 of the 4 charities: Bumbleance, Coolmine TC and Dublin Simon Community.

Why did we choose these 4 charities?

• BUMBLEance Children's Ambulance Service
• Coolmine Therapeutic Community
• Dublin Simon Community
• Médecins Sans Frontières /Doctors Without Borders Ireland (MSF)

Every past quiz we have donated to Dublin Simon Community, and after 3 years hiatus, we decided to include a charity of our choice as well: Bumbleance (Vicky), Coolmine TC (Declan), MSF Ireland (Mick).

Please keep sharing the fundraiser with your network and donate to 4 amazing causes: https://www.idonate.ie/fundraiser/IrishGeeks

And finally from Declan, Mick and myself, we wish everyone Season's Greetings and a Happy New Year!