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Tech meetups near the seaside

Previous talks

So What Is AI Anyway?

Rebecca Vickery

with Rebecca Vickery

AI is everywhere—but is it really AI? This talk will clarify the differences between traditional automation, machine learning, and what we currently call AI. We’ll look at where each fits in modern software development, why they’re all still valuable, and tackle the question: Are we actually building AI, or just smarter code?
 

Database Design Should Be Agile

Ron Ballard

with Ron Ballard

Traditional database design is carried out as a theoretical exercise before any application development takes places. This talk describes a better approach: incremental database design, embedded in the development team and combining strong design principles with the embrace of frequent change, which we manage with version control and automated testing at every release.
 

AI: Automation, Augmentation, Augh! Part 1

Duncan Lawie

with Duncan Lawie

In this talk, we will think about how and whether AI can help us to automate repetitive tasks, what it means (right now) to use AI to enhance human capabilities and why we are not about to run out of 'augh!' moments.
 

The Edinburgh Multi Access System (EMAS) at Kent Part 1

Bob Eager

with Bob Eager

The Edinburgh Multi-Access System (EMAS) was used on the ICL 2960 mainframe at the University of Kent from 1979 until the hardware was retired in 1986. This talk will cover trials, tribulations and some interesting technical details - with a sting in the tail!
 

Live Action Text Adventure

Dan Bard

with Dan Bard

Remember those old text adventures from the early days of the internet... well let's throw out the green terminal and limited command set as we dive into a world of adventure where 'I'm sorry I don't understand that command' will never be uttered! Join us for a text adventure turned interactive group experience where the story is controlled entirely by you. Try not to be eaten by a Grue!
 

Data Needs Testing Too

Ron Ballard

with Ron Ballard

On 28 August 2023 a faulty flight plan brought Gatwick to a standstill. The application had been working for years but the data was bad. You can test your application, but you never know what data will be thrown at it. This talk is about testing the data.
 

My Journey Into Robotics – there is probably a better way!

Gary Emmerton

with Gary Emmerton

My interest in IoT and electronics has led me to dive into the world of robotics as a bit of a hobby. I’ll talk through some of my early experiments, experiences, things I've learned along the way and you’ll have a chance to see (and maybe try!) some of my latest working (ish) models. I’ll explain how they work and where my journey is heading next.
 

The World is Asynchronous – Let’s talk about Event Driven Architecture

Gary Emmerton

with Gary Emmerton

In this talk I will take a look at how our world works in an asynchronous way and how this affects architecture patterns. I’ll explore event driven architectures, what makes them up and how they lead to loosely coupled systems (and why that is a good idea!)
 

Any update? Lessons from 13 years running a moderately successful open source project

Tom Akehurst

with Tom Akehurst

13 years ago I started an open source project which, while not quite in the same league as the Rails/React/Laravels of the world, is probably the most widely used tool in its niche. In this talk I’ll share WireMock’s origin story plus a few lessons I’ve learnt along the way about what makes projects succeed, life as an open source maintainer, and maybe a daft anecdote or two.
 

SEO and AI, but not sketchy

Andrew Laws

with Andrew Laws

What's your opinion on AI? Will it bring about the inevitable robot apocalypse, or will it just churn out useless code to script Kiddies? And now that we have AI surely we can shut down all the SEO agencies? Find out the answer to all (or possibly none) of these questions.
 

From client brief to celebratory beverage: Delivering a data analysis project

Dan Wright

with Dan Wright

Dan sets the scene for designing and delivering a data analysis project and invites the group to interact, interject and interrupt as we explore how to get things done.
 

Growing up in the 8-bits - the weird world of 80s computing

Bill Newland

with Bill Newland

A personal journey through the 80s computer scene in Britain, from the strange to the sublime, and how it sparked an interest and a career
 

Srsly, Tho: Trust No One - A Hacker's Perspective on Web Development

Aaron Taylor

with Aaron Taylor

Hi. I'm an ethical hacker. I've been (legally) breaking into people's websites for a couple of years, having spent over a decade building and defending them. Here's some stuff I've seen along the way that, put into practice, will make the web a bunch safer.
 

MLOps: Building Production-Ready Machine Learning Systems

Rebecca Vickery

with Rebecca Vickery

MLOps is the fusion of Data Science, Dev Ops and Software Engineering. In today's rapidly accelerating AI landscape, building machine learning systems that are both robust and unbiased is crucial. In this talk, we’ll explore how to create stable and reliable machine learning systems ready for production.
 

From Prompts to Products: Building Robot Friends

Duncan Lawie

with Duncan Lawie

With a little bit of knowledge, a big pile of documents, and an Azure AI account, we can build a variety of AI assistants that understand our business and can help streamline operations and support decision-making. We will use Azure Open AI Studio to make some 'robot friends' and test their willingness to help out.
 

Risky business - drifting to cyber calamity

Glenn Wilson

with Glenn Wilson

In this presentation I talk about the indicators we should me measuring that highlight the current risk status of the organisation and how to identify when the risk pushes us closer to cybersecurity calamity.
 

Making developers happy with generative AI

Ricardo Sueiras

with Ricardo Sueiras

Within the last 12 months, the capabilities of AI have advanced exponentially. Generative AI is the next frontier of artificial intelligence, and in this talk/demo we will take a quick look at some of the tools that developers are using to help them supercharge their productivity. We will look hands on at some of these tools, and share resources that you can try out for yourself.

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Let's Change How We Make Presentations

Tommy Pargeter-Grey

with Tommy Pargeter-Grey

Presentations have been entertaining us for decades. What started with a projector and slides has now evolved into fairly buggy software. As we look to the future, with the help of advancements in AI and programming, perhaps presentations are about to take another big step forward.

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The History of UNIX

Bob Eager

with Bob Eager

Most people have heard of Linux. Fewer know that it's a partial clone of a system called UNIX. Fewer still know just how long UNIX has been around. This talk will cover some of the history of UNIX, including at leastone real UNIX system that is still around, and close relatives that are in heavy use. It will also talk a bit about the original design decisions.

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Artificial Intelligence in Drug Discovery

Willem Van Hoorn

with Willem Van Hoorn

Can computers discover new drugs? The short answer is no, but they are a great tool to improve the efficiency of drug discovery. I will give a brief overview how medicines are traditionally discovered, and how machine learning and AI have changed this with a few colourful examples. No prior knowledge required, but it helps if you have ever played the game battleship.

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Authentication flaws and responsible disclosure

Jonathan Haddock

with Jonathan Haddock

We'll be looking at what authentication is and some types of authentication flaws. Then we'll look at a real world example flaw found in a door access system and how that was solved following a responsible disclosure process. Time permitting there'll be a live demo too!

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That's not my database, it's far too relational

Gary Emmerton

with Gary Emmerton

Relational databases have a long history in application architectures, but there are now many more options available that mean you can choose the right database for the right job. In this talk I will explore the different database options and how to choose which one(s) are right for your application.

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Hacking Humans

Trevor Wood

with Trevor Wood

In this talk Trevor will cover:
What is Social Engineering?
• Psychology behind why we fall for attacks
• How bad guys collect information
• Different types of social engineering attacks and how to spot them

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Emulation and other stories

Bob Eager

with Bob Eager

This talk (which should be fun) looks at the increasing interest in computers that have long since been declared obsolete. It is interesting (and instructive) to see how much of what was done has affected modern systems, and how little people had to work with.

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Pair Programming with AI

Rebecca Vickery

with Rebecca Vickery

The recent release of chatGPT into the public domain has brought generative AI into the mainstream. One potential use case for this technology is generating code to make programming faster. In this talk I’ll give an introduction to how generative AI works, the coding tools implementing this technology and discuss whether these tools really can be your new coding assistant.

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SEO and Devs, it's a beautiful thing

Andrew Laws

with Andrew Laws

Some SEO consultants claim that what they do is mysterious and impenetrable. We all know that's crap. But how can the world's of SEO and Dev join together to make each other's lives easier?

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Panel session: journeys in to tech

Jonathan Haddock

with Jonathan Haddock

Everyone has a slightly different journey into tech, and their stories can be really encouraging. In this session our panelists will share parts of their journey and take questions from the audience, so please come armed with your questions! Our panelists have varied experiences in the industry so have plenty of experience to share.

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Fiction, Facts and Artefacts

Duncan Lawie

with Duncan Lawie

You do know how to use a slide rule, right? A tour of some of the lost highways of the technology industry, with highlights of where futurists thought we were going and examples of things which used to be part of the daily life of our industry.

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From Chaotic Security Engineering to Security Chaos Engineering?

Glenn Wilson

with Glenn Wilson

In this talk, I introduce you to security chaos engineering. I expand up some accepted theories from academic research to highlight the challenges we face in cyber security before moving on to talk about the conditions for doing security chaos engineering and how we create meaningful experiments that build cyber security resilience into out organisations. Finally, I will provide some examples of how we might implement security chaos engineering as part of our praxis.

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Internet of Things and the Cloud, An Introduction

Gary Emmerton

with Gary Emmerton

Ever wondered what the Internet of Things is used for, how it works and what actually goes into making an IoT solution? Int this session I’ll talk about how IoT works, give examples of where companies use IoT and some of the challenges faced when doing it on a large scale.

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Honeypots: Uses and results

Jonathan Haddock

with Jonathan Haddock

Jonathan will discuss what a honeypot is, how it can be used as an early warning system, and what studying a honeypot can tell us about an attacker’s motivation. Honeypots can range from simple low interaction environments to fully interactive environments, but the basic principle remains the same: there is no legitimate traffic for a honeypot.

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Thoughts on Carbon

Phil Nash

with Phil Nash

The world runs on C++ - but it has a reputation for being unsafe and complex. While alternatives, like Rust, exist they lack sufficient interoperability with legacy C++ to really take over the mantle. Carbon has been designed with this goal at its centre. But how does it stack up? Can it take over? All I can do is give my opinion, as a user of many languages, but three decades of history with C++.

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Hacking: What I've learnt so far

Aaron Taylor

with Aaron Taylor

At the start of July I decided that what I really want to do with my life is hack stuff. But, like, legally. I’d spent 12 years keeping the bad guys out websites and was always fascinated by the how and the why of these malicious actors. So in a ‘gamekeeper-turned-poacher-but-actually-gamekeeper’ career move I’m gonna share some of what I’ve learned about hacking stuff to keep people safe.

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Website Analytics and Metrics

Mike Pardon

with Mike Pardon

We’ll be exploring the utilisation a tool called Matomo Analytics, it’s a google analytics substitute, one with a focus on GDPR and user privacy. I’ll be showing you how I use it in my business and the type of data that can be pulled one.

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Digital, Digitise, Digitalise

Duncan Lawie

with Duncan Lawie

Whilst Duncan doesn't believe in uploading personalities, there is still a lot more of our businesses that can be aided by technology. However, rushing to make stuff digital can miss out on making it better – and can sometimes make our lives worse. What can we do to improve the chances we digit(al)ise well?

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Testing Software

Jonathan Haddock

with Jonathan Haddock

Testing software is really important, but sometimes it feels like the developers have forgotten to test altogether. The reality is that testing is hard, especially if you do it by hand. In this talk Jonathan will discuss how he uses automated testing to check for functionality as well as how testing can help from a security perspective.

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OWASP Top 10 2021 - let's take a closer look

Glenn Wilson

with Glenn Wilson

In this talk Glenn will walk you through the OWASP top 10 published towards the end of 2021 to explain what's hot and what's hotter. He will give a brief description of each weakness and explain how these they are exploited and, more importantly, what you can do to mitigate against attackers exploiting them in your code

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Data Quality for Data Science

Rebecca Vickery

with Rebecca Vickery

Good quality data is essential to data science success for any organisation. But how good is good enough for data science? This talk explores the role a data scientist should play in ensuring high-quality data and how the process can be automated.

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On and Off Page SEO

Stuart Wilson

with Stuart Wilson

During this presentation, Stuart will give an overview of the benefits of SEO to your organisation and the main on-page and off-page optimisation techniques you should consider when you are looking to improve your online visibility.

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Why I F*cking Hate Email (and so should you)

Aaron Taylor

with Aaron Taylor

Email is the devil. In this talk I'll show you in excruciating detail how pretty much all of the modern problems we face in society can find their causes in email. I will present sociological, anthropological, ecological, economical, historical psychological, biological and theological evidence to prove it was in fact invented by Cthullu in collaboration with the Eye of Sauron. I hate it, and so should you.

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DevOps: Applied Systems Thinking

Duncan Lawie

with Duncan Lawie

DevOps may have reached the buzzword phase but it is more than that. This talk covers the core concepts and shares some examples of how DevOps enables IT to be a successful partner in business strategy.

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OO Considered Harmful

Phil Nash

with Phil Nash

Is Object-Oriented Programming dead, as some claim? If so what replaces it? Functional? A return to Structured Programming? How do we choose? Do we even have to? Or have we lost our way in what OO should have been in the first place? We’ll mix a bit of programming language history with philosophy to get some answers.

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Machine Learning for Everyone

Rebecca Vickery

with Rebecca Vickery

From low code to no-code tools, machine learning is fast moving from data scientists into the hands of business users. What are these tools? Who can use them? And is this actually a good thing? These questions and more will be answered in this talk.

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Quality Control in statistical coding

Ulrike Naumann

with Ulrike Naumann

In Quality control, we distinguish between self-QC and external quality control. A risk assessment is usually done to decide on the best QC strategy, but in different environments, unforeseen pitfalls can occur.

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5 Reasons Why User Testing Isn't Working

Nick Ellis

with Nick Ellis

User testing rarely gets the results we want. That's because developers don't think like users, and users don't think like managers and managers don't allow enough time. Nick spends his life trying to get those groups to work together effectively. He won't blow your mind, but he will remind you of ways to make it easier.

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Automated security testing

Glenn Wilson

with Glenn Wilson

The use of manual pen testing may meet regulatory requirements and give your teams an albeit false sense of security, but incorporating automated security testing throughout your delivery lifecycle puts the focus on delivering secure applications. In this talk, I will explain the different types of automated security testing, their advantages and their disadvantages, and how to incorporate them in your delivery lifecycle.

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Our web developers guide to SEO

Harry Dance

with Harry Dance

You may see it as marketing fluff, extra hassle or something that is a buzz word without much meaning but SEO is here to stay. In this talk we’ll discuss how to make your web development more search engine friendly what will help keep those pesky SEO consultants quiet (well, till the next algorithm change 😊).

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Chaos Engineering – why we should all practice breaking things on purpose

Ricardo Sueiras

with Ricardo Sueiras

What can we learn from fire fighters to make the systems we come to depend upon become more robust and resilient? In this talk, I will introduce what Chaos Engineering is and why it is important and share some real case studies of how people like Netflix and Amazon are applying these techniques to create more resilient systems for the benefit of their customers.

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WhatsItLike, a microservice focused project from an inexperienced team

Karen Scott

with Karen Scott

WhatsItLike was developed by a team of young developers who used it as a learning experience. Its architecture leans towards a microservice approach, using a range of AWS cloud services. My talk will describe the project architecture and of managing a team with limited development time and inexperienced developers.

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Digital forensics and giving evidence

Jonathan Haddock

with Jonathan Haddock

Digital forensics is being used more and more as computers become increasingly prevalent in our lives. In this talk, Jonathan will walk us through a basic forensic process and discuss some of the complications. Jonathan will highlight some key forensics principles that you can follow without specialist software, allowing you to implement them as part of your own incident response process.

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Software Security

Glenn Wilson

with Glenn Wilson

There are many ways to secure software. In this talk, I will explain some of the different techniques used to prevent introducing security vulnerabilities into your software, using threat modelling, automated testing and dependency validation.

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Data Preparation and the Importance of How Machines Learn

Rebecca Vickery

with Rebecca Vickery

Machine learning is the ability of a machine to perform a task without being explicitly programmed. In this talk, I will cover how to manipulate data into a state that a machine can understand and make accurate predictions, and introduce a Python library that makes this easier.

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Cloud Automation with Low Code Tools

Nick Ellis

with Nick Ellis

Why reinvent the wheel? Or a trainload of wheels? Developers spend a lot of time creating integrations that already exist and are easy to access. A quick demo of how automation can extend developer capabilities quickly, easily and cheaply!

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Why Rust?

Edd Barrett

with Edd Barrett

For longer than I have existed, memory errors have plagued systems programming. Although many such errors are benign, sadly many end up being security vulnerabilities, or worse, exploits. In this talk, I will discuss how a security exploit is born, and how the Rust programming language tries to prevent them.

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Issue with tracking? Fail that build!

Steve Coppin-Smith

with Steve Coppin-Smith

The analytics strategy must be a primary citizen of the software delivery process in a data driven business! This talk will include a live demo of extending the Nightwatch automated testing framework to uncover and resolve issues in tracking code that would have otherwise hit production.

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Hack your voicemail with Javascript

Chris Willmott

with Chris Willmott

You're a developer, so you probably have working knowledge of Javascript. Its 2019, but people still leave you voicemails, pff. In this short practical talk, I'll show you how to hack and upgrade ANY mobile voicemail to do almost anything you want with the Twilio platform.

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Developing for Africa

Jonathan Haddock

with Jonathan Haddock

There are always challenges developing an app to scale and these are compounded when set in an African context. African Pastors Fellowship’s eVitabu project, launched in March 2018, provides an Android app pastors can use to access multimedia teaching resources.

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How to tell stories with data

Soti Coker

with Soti Coker

Data is everywhere and when used correctly, can shine a light, give insights and confidence to your project and business decisions. I’ll be talking about the best techniques and strategies to use when you need to communicate data to your stakeholders, work colleagues or customers.

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How to 10x learning a new programming language

Raymond Coulstock

with Raymond Coulstock

What is simplicity and why do we value it so much? How does it relate to complexity? When is complexity good and when is it bad? How does simplicity differ from ease? As we examine these questions we'll find that the situation is not quite as simple (!) as it might first appear. In the course of the discussion we'll come up with a mental model for framing problems that we can apply to many things - but we'll particularly look at how we can apply it to our designs and code. We'll also look at how some programming languages help us more than others in our drive towards simplicity.

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Blockchain in Your Business

Kenneth Cox

with Kenneth Cox

Blockchain is an emerging technology that has captured the attention of the financial experts, the media and the technical enthusiasts. In this talk we take a look at the technology; how it works, why you should consider it for your business and how it's given life to cryptocurrencies.

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Seeking Simplicity

Phil Nash

with Phil Nash

What is simplicity and why do we value it so much? How does it relate to complexity? When is complexity good and when is it bad? How does simplicity differ from ease? As we examine these questions we'll find that the situation is not quite as simple (!) as it might first appear. In the course of the discussion we'll come up with a mental model for framing problems that we can apply to many things - but we'll particularly look at how we can apply it to our designs and code. We'll also look at how some programming languages help us more than others in our drive towards simplicity.

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Sharing Data is Caring Data

Mark Terry

with Mark Terry

Considerations for creating, storing and trusting a unified business approach to data in a distributed environment. In order to prevent disjointed and competing views of business facts.

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Hacking WordPress: Why, How, Who, What

Aaron Taylor

with Aaron Taylor

Show me a WordPress website that isn't under attack and I'll show you a localhost. Let's take a look at the who hacks WordPress, how they hack it, what they do with it and why they hack it in the first place. We'll also look at a few simple ways you can tighten up your WordPress security to reduce the chance of you falling prey

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A brief introduction to IaC with Terraform

Kenton Robbins

with Kenton Robbins

Managing cloud infrastructure can be a complex and time consuming process. Using Terraform, we are able to create a blueprint capable of reproducing your infrastructure simply by running a script. Find out how ‘infrastructure as code’ can reduce operational costs and risk while increasing efficiency and stability.

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Managing technical debt

Chris Willmott

with Chris Willmott

With the talk primarily aimed at those in technical roles, I'll be providing a number of practical methods to use when managing technical debt. About half the talk will be things we can do as developers to quickly identify then reduce the impact of technical debt, and half will be around how to explain technical debt to non-technical stakeholders.

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Telephone Systems and Voice over IP

Bob Eager

with Bob Eager

The speaker will talk about his experiences with a gradually evolving SOHO telephone system, starting with a single POTS (landline), through ISDN, to the current VoIP solution, and the eventual removal of the original telephones. The majority of the talk will concern the use of the open source Asterisk platform to provide numerous facilities (including one or two quite unusual ones) in a large, rambling house used also as an office for part of the time. This will include an introduction to VoIP for beginners. Costs and savings will also be considered. There will be time for questions and discussion.

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A journey into functional programming

Sam Tracey

with Sam Tracey

Functional programming offers a very different approach to writing code. Seasoned programmers have reported that learning its techniques has made them feel like beginners. And yet more and more people are taking the plunge to make it part of their skill set, more employers are demanding it as a skill, and many are saying that learning it has brought joy to their coding lives.
 

Tech-x and the City: An insight into computation in finance

Oliver Fritz

with Oliver Fritz

Technology has rapidly become integral to the world of finance, with it being a mainstay in most every aspect.This talk will give an outline of the most interesting facets of computational finance, such as algorithmic and high-frequency trading, and focus on my research into the effect of news sentiments on financial markets.
 

APIs 2.0

Tom Vance

with Tom Vance

When building and delivering front end applications (web apps, mobile apps) the last thing we want to worry about is building and hosting a supporting API.Introducing the solutions to your problems, Google Cloud Functions and AWS Lambda.
 

How good is your API?

Caroline Clark

with Caroline Clark

The integrations team at Holiday Extras works extensively with third party APIs. To help us assess their quality we've developed a tool, and during this talk will walk you through a live demonstration of how to use it, taking our own API as the use case.
 

Remotely Interesting

Chrissy Garnett

with Chrissy Garnett

This is a case study from Holiday Extras on our Bulgarian and UK remote teams over the last 18 months. We'll be sharing the change curve in attitudes and how not only the scrum masters had to get used to remote workers, but the dev team had to get used to remote pair programming. We'll be delving into the challenges we faced and the changes for the better.
 

Gamification in the Real World

Stuart Stobie

with Stuart Stobie

Gamification. Just a buzzword? Or is it a silver bullet for businesses in the 21st century? Unsurprisingly it’s neither. Gamification aims to make the tedious entertaining but making anything fun is not as simple as it sounds. In this talk we'll take a look at the misconceptions surrounding gamification, the fascinating psychology behind it and the lessons we really should be learning from the games that inspire it.
 

Automate Awesomeness with Ansible

Edmond Lepedus

with Edmond Lepedus

Edmond is going to discuss how to use Ansible for automating best practices which would otherwise be far too time-consuming and error prone.
 

Making Monoliths Modular

Damian Casey

with Damian Casey

Many companies face the challenge of working with monolithic systems and over time they build up years of tech debt and become difficult to work with. I'd like to give some examples from my experience of how taking a modular approach can improve the developer experience