Staffs Web Meetup

A big thanks to everyone who came to May’s meetup. It was a brilliant evening, with a record turnout for Staffs Web Meetup.

Thanks to both our sponsors – TopCashback and iWeb.

Talks

The Business Case for Modular Design

Laura Elizabeth

Designing patterns instead of pages is generally thought of as more sustainable way to design.

Anyone who’s ever tried it will have probably have found it takes a lot more than just designing a bunch of components and fitting them together (like Lego!)

So with a longer process, and bigger budget, it’s increasingly important that we can get clients on board with this new way of working. To do that we need to work out what the business case is for modular design and most importantly, how we can sell it to our clients.

Saving Time with Gulp

Jake Cobley

I will explain the pros and cons of introducing a task runner into your front-end development workflow. I’ll then introduce Gulp and demonstrate how it can be used to automate a number of common tasks such as asset compiling and optimisation.

Discussion Session (Lean Coffee)

Trevor Adams 

Our interpretation of Lean Coffee, a fast paced open discussion. Using sticky notes, during the break people will post up questions or talk topics. You will have the opportunity to vote for the sticky notes that you find the most interesting. We’ll then open the floor for a short discussion on each topic.

Nerdy t-shirt competition

Jamie Pollock was the winner of May’s nerdy t-shirt competition. Judged by our carefully selected panel of experts, consisting of Bean enCounter staff and Natasha Allsopp. Jamie went all-out, wearing not one… not two… but five t-shirts! Exceptional effort Jamie. Well deserved win.

A big thanks to everyone who came to April’s meetup.

Thanks to both our sponsors – TopCashback and iWeb.

Talks

Marketing & SEO for Web Designers

Jed Wylie

A 10 minute potted history of 10 years of marketing things we did which didn’t work, worked a bit or knocked our socks off.

How to grow crazily fast using scientific marketing

Karl Blanks

The web’s fastest-growing companies embrace experimentation. In this talk, Dr Blanks will discuss techniques that his company has used to more than double the sales of many companies.

A big thanks to everyone who came to March’s meetup.

Thanks to both our sponsors – TopCashback and iWeb.

Talks

We’ve included a summary of the evenings talks below.

Help! I Just Inherited This Web App. Where Do I Start?

Darren Beale

Aimed either at the owner/manager of an existing web application or a web team who have just landed a large maintenance project.

It covers commercial as well as technical subjects, but at a high level suitable for the technical and non-technical alike. Rammed full of actionable advice from the get-go with a downloadable check-list provided at the end so you don’t have to make any notes. An excellent primer on the things to consider when taking ownership of a legacy project.

Testing from the outside in

Andrew McCombe

The industry is full of talks, blogs and books on Test Driven Development, and many projects come with a full set of tests already. But what if your project doesn’t have tests? What if you’ve inherited a website and need to implement new functionality? How do you know what you’re going to break?

Discussion Session (Lean Coffee)

Trevor Adams 

Our interpretation of Lean Coffee, a fast paced open discussion. Using sticky notes, during the break people will post up questions or talk topics. You will have the opportunity to vote for the sticky notes that you find the most interesting. We’ll then open the floor for a short discussion on each topic.

A big thanks to everyone who came to our second meetup of the year. It was one of our busiest yet with 45 people through the door!

Thanks to both our sponsors – TopCashback and iWeb.

Lightning talks

We’ve included a summary of the evenings talks below.

AWS the art or the possibility

Presented by Alistair Henderson

How to develop for the AWS platform. Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a collection of cloud computing services, also called web services, that make up a cloud-computing platform offered by Amazon.com.

Security: Where to start

Presented by Darren Worrall

Hacking websites and stealing data is big business today, but there are steps you can take to protect yourselves and your customers – in this talk we’ll discuss what you want to protect and how to get started

Web Hosting for WordPress

Presented by Daniel Foster

There is no single right solution for hosting your WordPress website.  In this short talk I’ll take a look at the available options and the challenges and benefits associated with them.

Discussion session

Our interpretation of Lean Coffee, a fast paced open discussion. Using sticky notes, during the break people will post up questions or talk topics. You will have the opportunity to vote for the sticky notes that you find the most interesting. We’ll then open the floor for a short discussion on each topic.

A big thanks to everyone who came to our first meetup of the year. It was one of our busiest yet with 52 people through the door!

We’d like to thank our two speakers, Andy Wooton and Paul Boocock for speaking. Also to Trevor Adams for hosting our open discussion session.

This meetup saw the arrival of our new sponsor, TopCashback. Alongside iWeb, they will be helping with the ongoing costs of running the meetup.

The open discussion session was a big success again, thanks to Trevor Adams for hosting it. We are keen to run this on a regular basis moving forward.

Lightning talks

We’ve included a summary of the evenings talks below.

Fighting Intertwingularity

Presented by Andy Wootton

“EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no ‘subjects’ at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly… People keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t”. OR CAN THEY?

Continuously delivering software to big brands

Presented by Paul Boocock

The ability to react and deliver quickly is a vital component to the way we work. Our clients run some of the biggest brands in the world, so how do we continuously deliver software whilst ensuring we keep our clients happy and our quality high? This talk will take you on a journey from a developers mind to our customer’s hands from writing the first test to deploying your changes to a live environment using a variety of techniques and tools.

This talk will take you on a journey from a developers mind to our customer’s hands from writing the first test to deploying your changes to a live environment using a variety of techniques and tools.