From Code Monkey to Code Crafter ftw

This idea has been in my head for a while now, I'm sure all developers get here at some point where you want to move forward but not terribly sure how to get there, how to get better, how to write elegant maintainable code that you are proud of.
For me it all started when I saw how ruby on rails worked and now i m on the path (i think ) to become better and coding using principles like mvc, active record, etc
I remember I started assisting Ruby Ireland meetups and there was nothing like that for .net or java and it still feels like there still isn't a place(maybe i didnt look properly please let me know) or group that you can say, hey lets do

• A code jam about data models or
• A talk about how to do high performance Persistantent Domain Models or
• A talk about a particular project the talker worked on and what they learned in a very detailed technical way [not interested in company secrets but how to become a better dev how to learn from other peoples experience ] or- hey lets compare javascript frameworks or
• This is how you do unit testing in lolcats(im making this up but i recon this exists).
  

I would like to think this is possible, I would like to think that the group can be technology agnostic to a certain degree as i believe most best practises are general for all languages, however I am a c# developer so I talked to Martha Rotter about this and she was interested so we met and talked about this and we will be meeting in open coffee with other (hopefully) like minded people I will post here a date when this is decided but please let me know any thoughts and comments

Baiscally I m interested in relevant, higher level developer talk, in concept very similar to alt.net groups around the world. http://altnetpodcast.com/ http://altdotnet.org/ following good design principles from the Patterns book from Martin Fowler, apply XP , etc

Cheers

EDIT: Ozone thanks for agreing to the use of code crafter :D

Note: Thanks jaime for the proof reading :D