Tag: Video

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the September meetup! A huge thank you to Tree Thunk for sponsoring the event—we really appreciate the support. Another big thank you to Codeweavers for hosting and supporting the meetup—their continued generosity makes these sessions possible.

Talk

Tracking an autonomous robot

Callum Booth — Senior Frontend Engineer, Dexory

Needing greater insights into the historical state of our Robot fleet at any given point in time, we embarked on a system to be able to see and playback a robot’s events over time.

Callum’s talk focused on a recent project at Dexory, an autonomous robotics provider. Dexory’s robots scan warehouse racking to track inventory, measure stock levels and optimise space utilisation. Callum’s team built a web app to consolidate the robots’ data, allowing users to replay their movements and see exactly what happened at any point in time. The goal was to turn fleeting telemetry—camera feeds, location, battery, state and alerts—into a searchable history, making it possible to review incidents such as forklift collisions or failed missions in full context.

He demonstrated a digital-twin interface featuring a map view, multiple camera angles and a scrub-able timeline that stitches per-second snapshots into a video-style playback, complete with accurate timezone handling. Behind the scenes, the UI is built with React, using React Query for incremental data fetching and Jotai for fine-grained state management, delivering smooth 60 fps playback without unnecessary re-renders. Callum also shared performance insights, including pointer-based iteration through time-series data, mitigating setInterval drift, and using spring animations, before explaining how the data is stored on-device and offloaded for long-term analysis.

Thanks to everyone who came along to the April meetup!

A big shoutout to Tree Thunk for sponsoring the event — your support means a lot. And of course, a huge thank you to Codeweavers for hosting us again. These meetups wouldn’t be possible without your ongoing generosity.

Talk

StrangerChat – the challenges of an anonymous chatting platform

Patrick Bowen — Software Engineer, Mi-Voice

Patrick shared the story behind StrangerChat, his Discord bot that facilitates anonymous chats inspired by Omegle. The bot randomly connects users for private conversations and has now facilitated over 12.5 million messages among 50,000 people. While the technical implementation was relatively straightforward, the real complexity came in managing safety, moderation, and privacy.

Patrick’s talk covered how content moderation quickly became the most demanding part of the project. Early on, he relied on manual review of user reports, but as the platform grew, this wasn’t sustainable. He eventually introduced automated systems, including OpenAI’s moderation tools, to help review conversations and enforce community guidelines. The platform also added features like age verification and separated NSFW and SFW channels to reduce risks.

Privacy and ethics were central themes of the talk. Patrick spoke openly about the uncomfortable tension between wanting to protect users and needing visibility into conversations to do so. Logging chats raised difficult questions about user consent and data handling, particularly in an environment designed to be anonymous.

Despite the challenges, StrangerChat has found its place as a low-friction, anonymous social tool on Discord. Patrick closed with a personal touch—sharing that his own marriage began with an anonymous chat on Omegle years ago, highlighting how these platforms can facilitate meaningful, real-world connections.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the March meetup! A huge thank you to Tree Thunk for sponsoring the event—we really appreciate the support. Another big thank you to Codeweavers for hosting and supporting the meetup—their continued generosity makes these sessions possible.

Talk

Use the platform

Fiona Knight — Senior Lecturer, Staffordshire University

What the web can do today without frameworks, libraries or fudges.

Fiona’s presentation explored the evolving web platform, focusing on CSS advancements while touching on HTML and JavaScript. She discussed how web standards now update continuously, and browsers follow an “evergreen” model with automatic updates, making it challenging for developers to keep pace—something 21% reported struggling with in a Google I/O 2024 survey.

She highlighted key initiatives like “Baseline” and “Interop,” which improve cross-browser compatibility, and showcased major CSS developments, including variables, container queries, masonry layouts, and new selectors. She also covered accessibility enhancements, such as media queries that adapt to user preferences like dark mode and reduced motion.

It was a fast-paced and engaging talk, and Fiona mentioned that additional HTML and JavaScript content could be explored in a future session. She wrapped up with a demo of web manifests, showing how web apps can be installed like native apps with offline functionality via service workers.

Thanks, Ian Knight, for photographing the event for us.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the February meetup! A huge thank you once again to Codeweavers for hosting and supporting the event — their continued generosity makes these sessions possible.

Talks

Making your mark – how to make an impact in your team

Ollie Reardon — Lead Full Stack Developer, DeterTech

In this talk, I will be sharing some personal notes on how to make a positive impact in your new or existing team, regardless of experience or skill level.

Creative coding on the web

Rob Wells — Lead Engineer, Absolute Collagen

In this talk, I’ll be talking through a project that mashes up a bunch of Web APIs in a living coding web app, that probably belongs in nightclub, instead of a tech meetup.

A massive thank you to everyone who attended our final meetup of the year! We’re so grateful for your continued support, and a special thanks goes to Codeweavers for once again hosting us so graciously.

We ended the evening with festive cheer, replacing our usual open discussion session with a lively Christmas quiz and raffle. Thanks to generous prize donations from several members, everyone went home a winner!

As we bid farewell to 2024, we want to thank every attendee, speaker, and supporter for making this year so special. We’re excited to return next year with even more great talks, engaging discussions, and community-building events.

Talk

Pure CSS Component APIs

Adam Harding — Lead UX Designer, Instem

Discover the power of modern CSS as Adam guides us through creating production-ready components with robust customisation APIs. We’ll explore public and private variables, type registering, clamping, range mapping, mutation, inheritance, and maybe even answer that age-old question: “Is CSS even a real programming language?”

Unfortunately, the audio didn’t record for the first half of the talk, but trust us—it was fantastic! The second half is well worth a watch, so don’t miss out.