Speakers

Talks that show you how to get to the best out of yourself, your team and the tools you work with.

Employee Evangelism: Make Your Team Badass

Melinda Seckington - Developer at FutureLearn

Hiring good people can be hard. Keeping good people can be hard. It’s made easier though if you can set your company apart as a place that people want to work at. But how do you make the community aware that that’s the case?

Developer evangelists typically evangelise products to developers, but what if the thing you’re trying to sell is the team itself? How can you get your entire team sharing with the community what you’ve built and how you work?

This talk will examine why you should evangelise yourself and your team, and give concrete examples of how to encourage your team to do so.

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recruitment teamwork employee retention
About Melinda

Melinda is a Ruby developer at FutureLearn, a social learning platform, and leads the team’s employee evangelism. She loves attending BarCamps, Hackdays and other tech meet ups, and since 2009 has been organising them at Geeks of London. She also writes at MissGeeky, a blog about all things geeky and girly. When she’s not busy with events or blogging, you can find Melinda curled up on her couch with a good book or video game.

An introduction to Service Workers

Phil Nash - Developer Evangelist at Twilio

Service Workers are the biggest thing to hit the browser since XMLHttpRequest. We'll take a look at what the Service Worker can do for your app and more importantly, your users. We'll see the surprisingly small amount of code you need to get started with a Service Worker and finally we'll take a look at Progressive Web Apps and how the Service Worker will take part in a revolution for web applications.

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javascript html5
About Phil

Phil is a developer evangelist for Twilio serving developer communities in London and all over the world. He is a Ruby, JavaScript and Swift developer, Google Developer Expert, blogger, speaker and occasionally a brewer. He can be found hanging out at meetups and conferences, playing with new technologies and APIs or writing open source code.

L-I-V-I-N

Stuart Robson - Freelance Front-End Developer

In this talk, Stuart will be discussing how to keep on top of your front-end code when creating styleguides and pattern libraries for your designs. How documentation should be a part of the process. Deciding on the who, what and why for the code and how those answers determines decisions. All of this, peppered with opinions on what works and what does not when developing a pattern library as part of a project.

Stuart is full of experience from working with a multitude of clients to build front-end infrastructures, build tools and design systems.

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front-end styleguide writing better code
About Stuart

Stuart Robson is a freelance front-end developer and consultant living in Salisbury, Wiltshire. He spends his work days helping clients like UCL, Virgin and Monotype with their front-end frameworks, build tools and design systems.

Software Craftsmanship vs Lean Product

Elizabeth Ayer - Product manager at Redgate

You want to get your product out to users, but you want to write clean code. Test your market fast but keep the product maintainable. Lean product development and software craftsmanship just can’t work together, right?

Does Craftsmanship take focus off the end user? Does Lean make poor trade-offs between speed and quality? Can the same team follow both principles? Elizabeth will explore common misconceptions, as well as genuine areas of contention between the two approaches.

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writing better code product ship it
About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Ayer is a product manager at Redgate Software, a company with 15 years experience in Database Lifecycle Management. In her time there, she has investigated dozens of team's software delivery processes. Above all, she is ridiculously passionate about shipping high-quality software fast.

There's More to Code Reviews than You Might Think

Clair Shaw - Software engineer/tester

So, you do code reviews, and that’s great. But there’s always more that you can check during the review. More places you can check for any potential bugs or problems before deployment, before you find yourself with technical debt. Or worse: unforeseen downtime.

In this talk Clair will be going through the things that you should be checking to ensure confidence for developers, project owners and stakeholders. We’ll be looking at documentation, commit messages, and common code problems, with examples and tips along the way.

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writing better code pull requests teamwork product
About Clair

Clair is a freelance software developer and tester, who enjoys talking about QA and what’s wrong with everything to anyone who will listen. An active community member, when she isn't testing and breaking your hard work, Clair enjoys writing the best code she can, trying to learn to make better code, and trying to code better by working on and studying processes.

The Cloud – Hype to Reality

Paul Kuzan - Cloud Developer at JP Morgan

Cloud computing is no longer just hype; it has become one of the most defining technologies in IT with organizations of all sizes transitioning to it. Moving existing workloads from on-premises data centres to the cloud may seem appealing, but can be problematic. All greenfield software development should be at least cloud-ready, however this requires changes in architectural thinking and developer skills. The complexity of cloud migration is directly proportional to organization size.

In this talk Paul will explore various cloud adoption strategies from an architectural and developer perspective.

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cloud security

Little Scraps of Wisdom

Matt Northam - Lead Front-End Developer at Redweb, Dad of Two at Home

Matt became a Dad at roughly the same time as he became a lead in my team, and over the last 3 years or so, He's come to realise that the two roles have a lot of crossover. Matt will give practical, actionable tips for devs, from the point of view of a Dad.

Don’t worry, he's not intending to make it a slideshow of photos of his children; instead he'll talk about things like the importance of play, leading by example, effective time management, involving stakeholders in resource planning, dealing with conflict and minimum viable product, and more, much more.

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teamwork
About Matt

Matt used to make games in Flash, websites with FrontPage, and wanted to be a rapper. Since then, he's taught coding at primary schools and universities, made a lot of WordPress themes, and worked in various digital roles (sadly, none of which required rapping). All of those things have led to his current undertakings as a lead front-end developer for the largest agency in the South-West, and as a parent. He still wants to be a rapper.

Agile in the Public Sector

Roo Reynolds - COO at Digi2al

Government departments are finally getting to grips with agile software delivery. Roo will share a brief history of how the Government Digital Service (GDS) are using digital to transform government, together with what he has learnt about agile delivery in the UK public sector. Ever wondered if the public sector can *really* embrace agile ways of working? Bring your questions.

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project management public sector
About Roo

When Roo first joined GDS in 2012, there were 50 people in the office. By the time he left in 2015, there were over 600. He enjoyed sharing responsibility for the delivery, on-going success and continuous improvement of the core GOV.UK product and led a multi-disciplinary agile team that continues to deliver information and services used by millions of people each week.

Let’s talk about MIDI (and other fun Web APIs)

Ruth John - Web Technologist

What do you think of when I say MIDI, bad computer music? Websites playing annoying background noise when you land on them? Then let me let you into a little secret, let me introduce and educate you into a new world of MIDI.

MIDI is at it’s simplest a data protocol and doesn’t have to be associated with audio at all. With the incredible amount of compatible hardware available to us, alongside the new Web MIDI API, we can start to have a *lot* of fun with a new world of hardware-powered web tech.

In this enticing and interactive presentation we’ll journey through the different MIDI specifications and look at other web APIs. From sound with General MIDI and the Web Audio API, to the MIDI Show Control, timing firework and fountain displays with the Web Animation API, recording with the Media Recorder API and on to the latest MIDI BLE standard, what better way to demo the Web Bluetooth API.

The web is getting hardware-ready and this talk is a great beginning to those APIs at our fingertips. You’ll soon realise this isn’t just a talk about MIDI, this is a talk about community driven specifications and how wonderfully expansive the world of web can be!

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midi web audio html5
About Ruth

Ruth is a web developer and creative technologist, who has enjoyed a career spanning over a decade working on websites and web applications. She likes to educate people about new web technologies and inspire them to try them, coming up with exciting and engaging ways to use them, as well as interesting integrations into everyday development.
As a Google Developer Expert she’s almost always got a conference talk lined up or article ready to be published. Her favourite things include hacking with hardware, evangelising about MIDI and taking her award nominated, hand coded, audio/visual software to the streets, (or more recently conference after parties). She also knows all the names of the characters in Thundercats.