Check out the latest tech events going on in the SouthWest area this month.
CodeHub Bristol: JavaScript 101
Tuesday 3rd May 2016 – 10:00am – Beatroot Cafe, 20-21 Lower Park Row, Bristol
This meetup is about learning JavaScript together. So far you’ve been using the book Eloquent JavaScript as your basis. In 2016 the focus will be on using different technologies like Node and React, and sharing your experiences. There are also plans to build an app together!
Most members of this group have a basic knowledge of JavaScript, but if you are new to it, just work through the Codecademy JS track and/or the first chapters of Eloquent JavaScript – Udacity also has a good JS basics course – , then come and join in.
Read about the format of the meetup here.
## [Bristol Java Meetup: Java Roadmap – Java SE, Java EE & Java in the Cloud](http://www.meetup.com/Bristol-Java-Meetup/events/230166906/)
**Tuesday 3rd May 2016 – 6:30pm** – *Oracle Corporation , Tower Wharf, Cheese Lane, BS2 0JJ, Bristol*
Steve Elliott will be giving a number of talks explaining Oracle’s roadmap for Java, including:
– Roadmap and features : Java 9 and beyond
– JEE update
– Java in the cloud : Containers, Developer Services, Microservices etc
Bristol WordPress People: User Experience and Open discussion – bring a topic
Tuesday 3rd May 2016 – 6:30pm – Famous Royal Navy Volunteer, 17-18 King Street, Bristol BS1 4EF
User Experience – It’s For Everyone with Ross Wintle.
Not sure what user experience (UX) is? (Neither is he, apparently). Or whether it matters to you? (It TOTALLY does!) Or why it’s important? (Let’s find out!).
Open discussion – bring a topic.
There will be a load of post-it notes, so all you have to do is think of a topic, write it down and put it on the wall. The group will then go through the topics and the most popular ones will be discussed in 5 minute time slots. The format will be loosely based on the “Lean Coffee” style.
Flag & Bell IT Pub Crawl Bath
Tuesday 3rd May 2016 – 7:00pm
The F.A.B. Bath is one year old! If you haven’t been yet, you should definitely pop along! The meetings are friendly, fun and rewarding. It’s an opportunity to chat about the latest developments in web/mobile/cloud tech and start ups. You’ll learn about new places, people and ideas and make friends and business connections.
Bristol Clojurians: Programming in the Pub
Wednesday 4th May 2016 – 6:00pm – Small Bar, 31/32 King Street, The Beermuda Triangle, BS1 4DZ , Bristol
Bring your laptop to the pub and work on whatever Clojure project you like in the company of like-minded people.
The Simpleweb Challenge: Communities & Relationships
Wednesday 4th May 2016 – 6:30pm – Simpleweb, Unit G, Albion Dockside Building, Hanover Place, Bristol
It seems we currently can’t get enough of apps that introduce us to new people. Whether it’s through the sharing economy, dating apps, social media or gaming, there’s definitely a massive trend in bringing people together.
So for this very special Challenge Simpleweb are inviting you to prototype something cool around the theme of communities & relationships.
This time, you don’t have to write any code to win. There are two prizes – one for the best working prototype (be it app, website, widget or hardware hack) and another prize for the best idea (shown though mockups, no coding required).
Prizes will be annouced shortly before the night!
Bristol PHP Training: Introduction to Unit Testing with PHPUnit
Wednesday 4th May 2016 – 6:30pm
This is aimed at those who’ve never written a Unit Test before but would like to know how to do it. This training session will start off with a demo of writing tests using Test Driven Development. Then it’s over to you to work through some examples.
You’ll need to bring a laptop to work through the practical examples. Spaces are limited to a maximum of 8.
User Experiencing & Rapid Prototyping in Axure Bristol: Automated Mobile Menus in Axure
Wednesday 4th May 2016 – 6:45pm – JUST EAT, 2nd Floor Broad Quay House, Prince Street, BS1 4DJ, Bristol
Axure includes many useful menu widgets like the classic vertical and horizontal website menus. However, it doesn’t yet provide out-of-the-box solutions for other menu interface conventions.
Utilising variables, conditionals, and a repeater widget the presenter, Monty Webster, was able to create an off-canvas menu that automatically updates all menu levels based on a single, repeater data table. This talk will show you how to integrate this menu framework into your workflow and how to create your own off-canvas, mobile menu.
Here is a sneak peak of how this single repeater automated menu looks and interacts.
Bristol Agile Scrum Game Makers: Safe to fail – attitudes to risk
Wednesday 4th May 2016 – 7:00pm
Following on from the analysis of the famous “marshmallow challenge”, the group felt that they could iterate on this game to see if they could use the game to find out if having an environment that makes it safe to fail produces better results – because it enables experimentation.
This month’s group will test out this hypothesis, using the marshmallow challenge with tweaks to make it safe to fail – and if anyone has any other games that explore this hypothesis we’ll get a chance to discuss and try those out too!
BathSpark: Coffee and Networking at the Hub
Thursday 5th May 2016 – 10:30am – The Guild Coworking Hub, High Street, Bath, BA1 5EB
The drop in coffee mornings are a very informal networking forum, where you can come along and meet others who work in Tech in the region.
Whether you’ve just moved your business to the area and would like to build your network, or if you’re well established in the region, do feel free to pop down, have a coffee courtesy of those lovely people at the Guild Coworking Hub, and also a friendly chat.
The forum is there to connect people, spark ideas, and create introductions. At the very least the BathSPARK team will be there to have a chat and help connect you to the right people!
Talend User Group Bristol & SouthWest: Talend and Salesforce Integration, a powerful mix
Thursday 5th May 2016 – 6:00pm – Cafe Du Jour, , 11 Park Street, , Bristol BS1 5NF
For May, the Talend Community User Group are delighted to be joined by Salesforce integration specialists, Desynit, to look at how Talend and Salesforce can create a powerful solution. There will be the usual mix of demonstrations and round table discussions.
You will also get the chance to take a look at the latest release of the Talend data prep tool. Why not download the tool now and have your questions and comments ready.
Design Stuff Bristol: Meetup #2
Thursday 5th May 2016 – 6:45pm – Phoenix Cafe, All Saints St, Broadmead, Bristol, BS1 2LZ, Bristol
The next Design Stuff Bristol event is here!
Tickets will be released in late April and will go fast! Here’s a sneak peek of the Bristol-based speakers:
Games for Interactive Learning with Claire Morley.
Claire’s joint background as a freelance games artist and developer and as a science graduate has shaped the way she thinks about learning. She has been involved in several outreach programmes and is very intersted in the current focus on interactivity within education. There are increasing examples of interactive experiences used in museums and schools, and she feel that games are a particularly good mechanism for providing this experience.
Draw! Print! Fold! Staple! Do DIY with Simon Moreton
A DIY approach to art – making, publishing, distributing everything yourself – isn’t only a means to an end. It’s a conviction that we all have things to say, and that we can find ways to say them in lots of ways, even if the dominant media make us feel otherwise. In this talk, Simon will reflect on 9 years of self-publishing zines and comics, and reveal why he’s still really bad at stapling – and why he hopes that doesn’t matter.
Bristech: Dave Simons – Recommendation Engines / Tom Carter – Feeling without touching
Thursday 5th May 2016 – 7:00pm – Bristol Engine Shed @ Temple Meads, BS1 6QH, Bristol
How to build a Recommendation Engine with Dave Simons
Companies are striving to make their content personalised to their users, by tailoring dynamic content based on users’ data and previous actions. If we can pre-empt what a customer is likely to interact with, then we can keep users interested in our services much longer. Traditionally, this has been tricky, needing complex models or self-learning neural networks
Nowadays, recommendations don’t have to be hard. In this talk, you’ll look at some of the use cases and theory behind recommendation engines, and look at the technologies that can be used to unlock them. You’ll even show and develop code that backs recommendation engines in a live demonstration to show easy it can be!
Feeling without Touching with Tom Carter
Little is known about the sense of touch but it is essential for us to explore and interact in every day life. You will look into ‘what is touch?’ and what Ultrahaptics are doing to bring the sense of touch to devices and games of the future.
Women’s Tech Hub: Free Three Friday
Friday 6th May 2016 – 10:00am
Women’s Tech Hub Bristol are very pleased to announce that Desklodge Bristol are offering free hot-desking to twenty of their members. So if you are a woman working in the tech industry, or interested in working in tech, come and join in!
Desklodge Bristol is a brilliant, bright, accessible building in central Bristol with wifi, a range of interesting workspaces and free coffee to boot and 20 of their lucky female members can come along and try it out.
Their Free Three hour Fridays will run from 10am-1pm in a reserved area so that you can work alongside other members of Women’s Tech Hub. There will also be an 11am coffee break for networking, where you can share info about tech-related jobs, training and other interesting news. (There also may be biscuits!)
Although this is a women-only activity, Desklodge do also support men so if you want to get in touch speak to Thanh or Jamie on here and they’ll show you around and explain how it works (they’ll even throw in a couple of free days to trial it).
TechSpark Bristol: Techie Brekkie – How to do well and do good in tech
Tuesday 10th May 2016 – 8:15am – Desk Lodge, 5th Floor, 1 Temple Way, Bristol, BS2 0BY
In a world where the measurements of success in tech are pretty well established, we wanted to get together and discuss what it means not only to be ‘successful’ as a business, but also socially or environmentally minded.
So what are the measures of ‘doing good’ in tech? How does this impact on how investors evaluate you? Can you really do well AND do good? If you have any thoughts on this area, join TechSpark Bristol and their special guests for an informal discussion on what it means to do good and do well in tech.
All are welcome, from those thinking of starting up a socially or environmentally minded company, to those who simply have an interest in the topic (and anything in between)!
CodeHub: Bristol Hack Night
Tuesday 10th May 2016 – 6:00pm – Momentum Financial Technology office, 10 Temple Back, Bristol
This is a chance for developers in Bristol to get together in an informal social setting to work on projects, learn, and share with other developers.
What is a “hack night”?
Hack night is a casual social coding event where people can come together to work on projects and learn new technologies in any language at any skill level. It is a good time to work on those projects on the “back burner” that you never have time for. Some people will have personal projects that they want to work on in a social atmosphere. Others may be interested in pairing up to work on a project or learn something new together, or work through some of the online coding challenges. Some people may be experts, others may be noobs, and others may just want to learn how to code – all are welcome!
South West Data Social
Tuesday 10th May 2016 – 7:00pm – The Watershed, 1 Canon’s Road, Bristol
The South West Data social is an informal evening for those involved in using, learning about or discovering data technologies to meet and network.
The social takes place on the second Tuesday of every month at the Watershed.
SWUX: Workshop – ‘User Research with Social Media’
Tuesday 10th May 2016 – 7:00pm – cxpartners, 2 College Square, Bristol
In this 55 minute workshop, Dave Ellender will show you how he did user research with social media for a heavily-used web service at Highways England. He will introduce five steps you can follow on your future projects:
1. Defining your keywords
2. Using monitoring tools
3. Creating a usable data set
4. Analysing data
5. Creating research insights
There will be some hands-on group activities where you can work through these steps with a sample data set (which will be provided).
PHPSW: Upgrades
Wednesday 11th May 2016 – 6:30pm – Desk Lodge, 5th Floor, 1 Temple Way, Bristol, BS2 0BY
In May PHPSW are hosting a night about Upgrades!
Magento 2, The Transition into Modern PHP with Nathan McBride
The talk will revolve around modern practises such as SOLID development, decoupling from frameworks so different corners of PHP communities can benefit each other, modular development and finally aspect orientated development.
Dive Into PHP 7 with Kat Zien
We all eventually gave up discussing that famous article describing PHP’s bad design, bought our t-shirts and got on with our lives. Some of us decided to give Ruby a go. Or Go. We all know PHP is far from perfect but it’s still one of the most popular languages on the web (thanks WordPress!) so… just get on with it. Right?
Wrong! There’s a new kid in town. And it deserves your attention. Shame no more. Because PHP is not done yet!
Over 10 years since its last major release, PHP 7 is now out and available. Heck, we’re at 7.0.5 already! All this hard work, sweat, tears and swearing in the community brought us significant performance improvements, drastically reduced memory consumption, a brand spanking new Zend Engine and a host of new language features to make PHP shine again.
South West Founders Meetup
Wednesday 11th May 2016 – 7:00pm – Watershed, Canon’s Rd, Bristol
South West Founders is a monthly meet-up for people based in the South-West who have been, are, or want to be tech start-up founders.
The meetup welcomes entrepreneurs and tech investors with open arms, but discourages freelancers, consultants, lawyers and other service providers unless they have a genuine interest in founding or mentoring start-up businesses. There’s a strict ‘no selling’ rule at our events.
Bristol Wed Performance: Why perf matters at the ONS + Resource (pre)loading
Wednesday 11th May 2016 – 7:00pm – cxpartners, 2 College Square, Bristol
Prioritising performance to improve usability and build trust at the Office for National Statistics with Matt Jukes
In February the ONS launched a completely new website. Its predecessor was once called ‘a national embarrassment’ so with so much to fix why and how did the product team prioritise site performance throughout the project.
Resource (pre)loading with Yoav Weiss
Parsing HTML in order to load a full Web page is a complex process. On the one hand the browser needs to discover external resources as soon as possible. On the other hand, those same resources can in some cases block the browser’s HTML parser, as they may change the eventual result. Over the years browsers have developed mechanisms to cope with that, to make sure resources are discovered even if the parser is blocked.
In this talk you’ll discuss these mechanisms and then talk about a new link relation that can help improve the browser’s resource discovery process, and get faster loading Web pages.
Bristol Salesforce Platform Developer User Group: @Future, Batch and Queueables; Adventures with Asynchronous Apex
Thursday 12th May 2016 – 6:00pm
Force.com MVP and Meetup regular Chris Lewis will be adorning the stage again in May to talk through his recent adventures with Async Apex work.
Many tasks and integrations using salesforce are dependent on being able to process and transfer large amounts of data without affecting the user experience. There are many different asynchronous options available to apex developers to facilitate this requirement. It can be tricky to know which to use in different scenarios. In this talk, Chris will explore the different techniques available at your disposal, and discuss best practices and tips for implementation.
South West DataL Open Data Camp unconference
Saturday 14th May 2016 – 10:00am – The Watershed, 1 Canon’s Road, Bristol
Hot on the heels of South West Data becoming Bristol’s Open Data Institute (ODI) Node community, Open Data Camp is coming to Watershed, Bristol, 14th-15th May.
Open Data Camp is a weekend two-day unconference, entirely devoted to open data. Previous OD Camps have attracted participation from a wide range of people and organisations, ranging from individual open data newbies right through to veteran professionals from organisations like the UK Cabinet Office.
.Net SouthWest: Life as a Contractor with Duncan Thomson
Tuesday 17th May 2016 – 6:30pm – DNV GL, 1 Linear Park, Avon Street, Temple Quay, BS2 0PS, Bristol
Life as a contractor with Duncan Thomson
A talk on the risks and rewards of contracting, looking for new contracts, starting out and some of the useful skills to develop.
SWMobile: Watch the Google IO live stream
Wednesday 18th May 2016 – 5:30pm
Come watch the live streamed keynote and first couple of talks from Google’s IO conference.
It’s a great time to discuss the new announcements form Google with fellow SWmobilers face-to-face as they happen.
ProductTank SouthWest: Scoping and Discovery
Wednesday 18th May 2016 – 6:15pm – DeskLodge Ltd, 5th Floor, 1 Temple Way, Bristol BS2 0BY, Bristol
In May, ProductTank SW are focusing on the early life of a new product or product iteration – the discovery or scoping phase. They’ll be discussing three perspectives on the value of this and some suggestions on how to go about it.
Sarah Prag will share her take on working through a Discovery phase, including a few tales of how this has been applied in the public sector orgs she’s recently worked with.
Darwin Peltan & Alistair Lee will share their take on Design Sprints.
The third speaker will be sharing some tips and suggestions on user research and user experience design in the discovery phase – more info to come soon!
AWS User Group Bath
Wednesday 18th May 2016 – 7:00pm – The Makery, Beau Nash House, 19 Union Passage, Bath
Introduction with Nick Ferro & Andy Powell
Update from AWS with Ian Massingham
CloudFormation with James Jackson
ACCU Bristol: Lightning Talks
Wednesday 18th May 2016 – 7:00pm – Bristol Marriott Hotel City Centre, 2 Lower Castle Street, Bristol
This month will be an evening of lightning talks. If you have been to previous Lightning Talk evenings, or the ACCU Conference, you’ll be familiar with the format: a series of short talks from various members of the group.
Each talk will be ten minutes or less. Come along and enjoy a varied, fascinating evening! Or why not present something yourself? The programme is still open, please get in touch with the event host if you would like to give a talk on any subject you think will be of interest to the group. The only constraint is that the maximum length of your presentation should be ten minutes. This is a great opportunity to present to a very friendly audience.
OWASP Bristol: Threat Modelling
Friday 20th May 2016 – 6:00pm – KMPG, 100 Temple Street Bristol BS1 6AG, Bristol
Secure Application Design and Cyber-Attack Simulation & Testing Using Risk Centric Threat Modelling with Dr. Marco Morana
The presentation will cover the fundamentals and the practice of using threat modelling to review the design of web and mobile applications and identify design flaws that lead to security weaknesses. Learn how to mitigate threats with the design of security controls and countermeasures and security test cases that can be derived from use and abuse cases and attack vectors to identify vulnerabilities in web and mobile applications.
The overall workshop consists of two sessions of one hour each: the first session will provide attendees with an understanding of the fundamentals of threats, attacks vulnerabilities and impact on the data assets. The second session will provide example on how to conduct threat modelling including analysis of the threats affecting a specific application software, the modelling of the attack vectors, the derivation of specific security requirements for the design of the web application during the SDLC and the derivation of test cases to simulate the behaviour of either a web or mobile application under specific types of attacks.
South West Data: Bristol Open Data Challenge – ‘Cleaner Leaner Bristol’
Saturday 21st May 2016 – 10:00am – The Watershed, 1 Canon’s Road, Bristol
A one-day hackathon type event, with a £100 cash prize and a free lunch!
Work with The Bristol API to innovate a creative solution that aims to reduce pollution by tackling a key transportation issue.
In this second Bristol Open Data Challenge, the ‘hackathon’ seeks innovative and creative answers to the question: “How can we use data to help create a city that has better air quality, and has fewer single-occupancy vehicles guzzling gas and contributing to congestion?” You may wish to think about:
– Making it easier to use electric vehicles by finding nearby free charging points.
– Maximising the capacity of existing vehicles on the roads, whether this be buses, cars, or other vehicles.
– Promoting the use of other sustainable forms of transport.
This event is organised in partnership with Bristol City Council.
* Whilst there is a cash prize, the event hopes to strike a balance between competitiveness and collaboration. If you have a great idea and you want to go for the cash prize, great, but if you are more interested in exploring possibilities, playing with The Bristol API (with help and tips from those that have built it) and spending an interesting day with like-minded people, that’s fine too.
Bristol Wagtail Users & Developers: Where does Wagtail sit in the CMS Market?
Wednesday 25th May 2016 – 6:30pm – Omni Digital Office, 14-16 Wilson Place, Bristol
An evening of talks looking at where Wagtail sits within the spectrum of offerings by various CMS’s. Speakers TBC.
BristolJS: Ionic & Angular 2
Wednesday 25th May 2016 – 7:00pm – BaseKit (NEW OFFICE), South Wing, One Castlepark, Tower Hill, Bristol, BS2 0JA, Bristol
Ionic with Tom Kelsey
Ionic is a framework built on top of Cordova for developing mobile apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Tom will run through his own experiences with Ionic, reeling off some pros/cons and trying to give some guidance as to what apps/situations best lend themselves to a hybrid framework like Ionic.
If there’s time, he’ll squeeze in a bit about the Ionic ecosystem and try and cover what’s happening with the development of Ionic v2.
Angular 2 with Joseph Woodward
You’ve probably heard of all the drama surrounding the Angular 1 to Angular 2 upgrade. Joseph will take you through what’s changed, and why, features and lessons learned whilst building a number of applications using Angular 2 and TypeScript.
