Author: Phil Wylie

Thanks to all those that attended August’s lightning talks. The evening was hosted by Phil and we had three lightning talks covering a range of topics. We will update this page with coverage as and when it comes in.

A big thank you to our sponsors, Connect Group and iWeb for supporting Staffs Web Meetup!

Lightning Talks

We’ve included a summary of the talks below and we’ll update the page with coverage (slides/videos) as it comes in.

Feature Testing and Deployment using Virtualisation

Presented by Trevor Adams

Describing the inception and evolution of internal product development and deployment using virtualisation and open source software.

An introduction to Elasticsearch

Presented by Ed Rowley

Elasticsearch is a modern powerful full-text search engine, but it is also really easy to get running and use. I will show how to get up and running with Elasticsearch, introducing the query language and explaining some of the high level concepts.

Port 80 All The Things Or At Least Most

Presented by Mike Elsmore

Micro service architecture is the in thing, and for good reason. With the growth of API’s, distributed infrastructure and the amount of things that are becoming app centric it totally makes sense. I’ll give an over view as to why it’s grown, why it’s great and some handy ways of glueing micro services together.

Thanks to everyone for coming along to April’s Staffs Web Meetup! Kevin Rutherford was our guest speaker. He demonstrated the real world benefits of agile processes through an interactive session. The event was well received and we look forward to bringing you more fun, interactive sessions in the future.

A big thanks goes out to our awesome sponsors Connect Group and iWeb.

Guest speaker

Kevin Rutherford

Dr Kevin Rutherford is a software developer, coach and trainer. He has delivered multi-million pound projects in domains as diverse as healthcare, logistics, defence, CAD, travel and operating system security; he ran his first eXtreme Programming team in 1999. He is the creator of the vastly under-rated Reek code smell detector, and the vastly over-rated book ‘Refactoring in Ruby’. If you have ever used Unix System V or transferred money between bank accounts, you’ve unwittingly used his code. He was using vi before you were born.

Delivering the Product Vision

Successful software development is all about delivering features into users’ hands in reasonable timescales. The question is: how should your company organise itself in order to beat your competitors to market? What is the best way for developers, managers, analysts etc to work together to get the job done?

In this game you will be divided into groups and each given a project to deliver. (Don’t worry, there’s no programming involved!) The game is a simple contest: which team can deliver the best product in the time allowed!

We had another great turnout last Thursday! Thanks to everyone who came along to our fifth meetup – we hope you enjoyed the Creme Egg! If you couldn’t make it, don’t fret, we filmed the talks and will update the page once they’ve been edited.

A big thank you to our sponsors (Campaign Monitor, Connect Group and iWeb) and of course Bean enCounter for the fantastic food, drink and service.

The evening was hosted by Natasha and we had four lightning talks with a show and tell theme.

Lightning talks

We’ve included a summary of the talks below and we’ll update the page with coverage (slides/videos) as it comes in.

Rapid Cross-device Development

Presented by Andrew McCombe

Over the years the web development cycle has involved saving in your editor, reloading the browser, switching to another browser, reload, repeat. This talk will introduce a workflow that rapidly improves cross-browser and cross-device web development, saving time, money and the F5 key.

Convergence Web-Based Gaming

Presented by Ollie Reardon

A proof-of-concept gaming platform using web-based technologies to demonstrate how a game can adapt to different devices such as desktop, tablet and mobile, that I am currently building for my final year project at University.

Icon design – First time for everything

Presented by Dave Redfern

New projects bring new challenges. It’s what keeps our jobs interesting. Recently I had the opportunity to design a set of bespoke icons. Embracing this new challenge I want to share my experience.

Cachet & Building for yourself

Presented by James Brooks

I started building Cachet as a tool for my own needs. Since then it’s grown into a product with a wide following, thousands of installs and excitement for Version 1.

In this talk I’ll be demoing Cachet, talking about its future and why you should build things for yourself.

We’ll be back!

We raffled off a number of prizes on the night, including some giant Easter eggs, a book and a bag of tea and coffee courtesy of Bean enCounter. Congratulations to our raffle winners!

Thanks to the generous support from Campaign Monitor, Connect Group and iWeb we are able to treat everyone to food and a drink. Make sure you show them some love!

We’ll be back in April for an evening of agile with Kevin Rutherford. Kevin will be demonstrating the real world benefits of using agile processes. Join our mailing list and we’ll keep you updated on all our upcoming events. We’ll see you in April!