Have a peek at some of the interesting and exciting events happening in February for techs & creatives based in the South West.
Bristol WordPress People: Question & Answers
Tuesday 2nd February 2016 – 6:30pm – Famous Royal Navy Volunteer, 17-18 King Street, Bristol, BS1 4EF
For the first meetup of the new year, Bristol WordPress People will be hosting a question and answers session. This is an ideal meetup for new members, as it’s a great time to introduce yourself and chat with all of the friendly members. If you have any question about WordPress at any level (no question is stupid) pop along and ask. All levels, all areas, they will do their best to help out.If your question requires further discussion then feel free to go and chat to the organisers at the bar afterwards. Simon will happily open up his laptop and try and fix code, or show you how to do things for example.
Start Up Drinks Bristol
Tuesday 2nd February 2016 – 6:30pm – Engine Shed, Temple Meads, Station Approach, Bristol, BS1 6QH
UWE Enterprise in partnership with the University of Bristol, invites you to come along to the drinks and informal networking evening at the Engine Shed. Start Up Drinks Bristol happen on the first Tuesday of the month from 6:30-8:30pm and are for all those interested in start-ups and entrepreneurship.
This is a fantastic opportunity for you to meet other professionals, students and entrepreneurs from around Bristol, whether you are looking for a start-up partner, people to share ideas with, or just to meet and talk with like minded people!
Grrrl Games Bristol: First Tuesday
Tuesday 2nd February 2016 – 7pm
First Tuesday is a welcoming get-together for women working in games, whatever their level of experience. It’s a chance to share ideas or work-in-progress, get feedback and network.
Get in touch if you would like to share any news and updates about your game projects & plans, and if you have heard of any interesting Grrrl Game friendly events that would be worth taking a look at.
Bath: Hacked
Wednesday 3rd February 2016 – 6pm – The Guild Coworking Hub, High Street, Bath, BA1 5EB
This is the third of several evening events being run ahead of the environment hackday on 13-14th February. These evenings will be an opportunity to get together with others from the community to discuss and share ideas; meet people from the council and other local environmental groups to get some insight into local challenges and issues; and explore the data available. Hoefully, some short talks will be confirmed before each event.
Go along, share ideas, and bring others that you may think are interested.
Bristol Business Brainstorm
Wednesday 3rd February 2016 – 7pm – Halo, 141 Gloucester Road, Bristol, BS7 8BA
This group is aimed at providing a social, interesting and productive evening for Entrepreneurs. It’s your chance to meet up and talk through business ideas, challenges or anything else important.
BathSPARK: Coffee & Networking at the Hub
Thursday 4th February 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! It’s also an opportunity for you to share ideas with the team for events and articles you’d like to see come to fruition over the coming few months.
Bath Ruby User Group: Hangout
Thursday 4th February 2016 – 6:30pm – Picnic Coffee, 9 Saracen Street, Bath, BA1 5BR
Bath Ruby Hangouts are bi-weekly, agenda-free get togethers in Picnic Coffee shop, bring your laptop and pair on a problem you’ve been having or just come along to chat about Ruby, Rails or anything really with other local Ruby people. Picnic have upgraded their wifi especially for the meetup and will be reserving some tables with power, everything you need for a relaxed evening with some very good teas, coffees, beers and cakes.
Bristech: “Ethics and Algorithms” & “More power to developers”
Thursday 4th February 2016 – 7pm – Engine Shed, Temple Meads, Station Approach, Bristol, BS1 6QH
“Ethics and algorithms” – Benjamin Byford
Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, Paypal), describes the potential of Artificial Intelligence as our “biggest existential threat”. Stephen Hawking, amongst other eminent thinkers, has signed open letters to world leaders demanding legislation against the development of autonomous machine agents and soldier robots. The first fully automated vehicle has been given a road license in the US with tests already going ahead in China, UK, and Japan. We’ve also invited AI into our homes and offices. Capable of automatically ordering goods, locking us and intruders in/out of our homes, altering heating, lighting, and recording our every movement, algorithms are deployed all around us with increasing amounts of autonomy. The future is now but our general understanding of it is foggy. Machines Ethics is about how machines should feel about us? What are the ethical issues with giving machines more autonomy, whether there are strategies to limit or control this autonomy, and the inherent difficulties in giving anything ethics.
Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, Paypal), describes the potential of Artificial Intelligence as our “biggest existential threat”. Stephen Hawking, amongst other eminent thinkers, has signed open letters to world leaders demanding legislation against the development of autonomous machine agents and soldier robots. The first fully automated vehicle has been given a road license in the US with tests already going ahead in China, UK, and Japan. We’ve also invited AI into our homes and offices. Capable of automatically ordering goods, locking us and intruders in/out of our homes, altering heating, lighting, and recording our every movement, algorithms are deployed all around us with increasing amounts of autonomy. The future is now but our general understanding of it is foggy. Machines Ethics is about how machines should feel about us? What are the ethical issues with giving machines more autonomy, whether there are strategies to limit or control this autonomy, and the inherent difficulties in giving anything ethics.
“Whole Systems Energy Transparency” (or: More Power to Software Developers!) – Dr Kerstin Eder
Energy efficiency is now a major (if not the major) concern in electronic systems engineering. While hardware can be designed to save a modest amount of energy, the potential for savings are far greater at the higher levels of
abstraction in the system stack. The greatest savings are expected from energy consumption-aware software.
abstraction in the system stack. The greatest savings are expected from energy consumption-aware software.
This talk emphasizes the importance of energy transparency from hardware to software as a foundation for energy-aware system design. Energy transparency enables a deeper understanding of how algorithms and coding impact on the energy consumption of a computation when executed on hardware. It is a key prerequisite for informed design space exploration and
helps system designers to find the optimal tradeoff between performance, accuracy and energy consumption of a computation.
helps system designers to find the optimal tradeoff between performance, accuracy and energy consumption of a computation.
SWUX: Double header – Passwords & Edge Cases
Tuesday 9th February 2016 – 6:45pm – MixRadio, Prudential Buildings, 11-19 Wine Street, Bristol, BS1 2PH
“Passwords? Really?” – Tom Melamed
Passwords are a real barrier to user adoption and a major pain point for users, but are also often necessary. Or at least they used to be… In this talk Tom will give an unapologetically mobile focused talk on passwords, why we need them, why they are bad and then go though several alternative strategies for mobile sites and apps that each offer a password free future with different pros and cons that just might be better than passwords for your next project.
“My Year of Being an Edge Case” with Kathryn Hegarty
About a year ago, Kathryn moved house, changed jobs and got married in the space of six weeks. Trying to negotiate the more serious levels of life administration simultaneously exposed the flaws in much of our UX reasoning. We find it easy to ignore edge cases in form and service design because ‘Surely no one would ever want to do that?’ – when actually it’s at these complicated points in life that users need us to help them most. Plus, she’s due a good rant.
Bath Scrum User Group: Lightning Talks
Tuesday 9th February 2016 – 7pm – IPL offices, Bath, BA1 5LR
When one speaker isn’t enough for you, this month offers at least half a dozen people from the local agile community all giving lightning talks of up to 10 mins each. This is a great way to get to hear talks about a variety of Scrum and agile-related topics, and an even better opportunity to share your experience with the community by presenting a short talk.
There are already a number of exciting talks lined up (details will be announced soon), but there are still a couple of spaces left if you want to take part. Just get in touch with Ewan, the meeting host.
The Lightning Talks are always a popular and entertaining evening, pop along and join the fun!
Bath: Hacked
Wednesday 10th February 2016 – 6pm – The Guild Coworking Hub, High Street, Bath, BA1 5EB
This is the final evening event before the hack day on the 13th-14th. For this final evening there will be a summary of the range of ideas shared over last previous few weeks to help people decide what they want to make at the weekend. The group will also be doing a run through of the new and updated datasets that have been published for the event.
This will be a great opportunity to meet and team up with others from the community ahead of the hack day, as well as getting some insight into the data.
Simpleweb: Music Hack at the Fringe Festival
Thursday 11th February 2016 – 7pm – At-Bristol, Anchor Road, Harbourside, Bristol, BS1 5DE
As part of the Fringe, supported by BBC Radio 6 Music Festival, Simpleweb is challenging you to build something cool around the theme of “music”. Your challenge will be to create a web, mobile or hardware hack with a musical theme. Points for creativity, originality, usefulness and all around general craziness. You can work in teams of up to 3 people. The winning team will take away an awesome prize and the chance to have your project showcased at the Fringe.
The rules
To make sure the competition is totally fair,there’s just one ground rule… no coding before the day. Preparation is good, and you’re welcome to research, gather docs or relevant open source projects and draw up plans beforehand, but you can’t have started on the code for your project until the night.
Who can come?
You don’t have to be a hardcore developer to try your hand at the Bristol Music Hack, but as you’ll be competing with other developers, you’ll probably want some coding skills and app development experience.
What to expect?
Arrive at At-Bristol between 6pm-6:30pm for homemade food and proper ales, ciders and soft drinks. the coding will kick off at 7pm and then you’ll have 3 hours to create something cool. At the end of the night, each team will get a couple of minutes to show off their hack and the judges will pick the winners. Prizes will be revealed on the night.
ProductTank SW #1: Relaunch of SWProductPeople!
Thursday 11th February 2016 – 6:30pm – JUSTEAT Technology, Broad Quay House, Broad Quay, Bristol, BS1 4DJ
South West Product People is now ProductTank SouthWest (UK)! Everything else remains the same and there will be quarterly meetups full of interesting networking opportunities and relevant, thought-provoking talks on Product topics.
Jamie Turner, Director of Product Management at Hotbreak
In business, no-one likes surprises. Jamie has found that the most successful product managers ensure that their stakeholders’ expectations are grounded in reality and aligned with the product vision. This talk reveals the best techniques to achieve this.
Rachel Andrew, web developer, author, speaker and co-founder of Perch CMS the “really little Content Management System”
Moving from consultancy or services into products is the dream of many a web developer. Rachel’s company made that move and she’ll share some of tips, successes and failures from that journey.
Dominic Mason, Director at Wemanity UK.
Dominic will be talking about Agile product management in the enterprise. Five mistakes that large companies commonly make and how to avoid them.
Bath: Hacked
Saturday 13th February 2016 – 9am – The Guild Coworking Hub, High Street, Bath, BA1 5EB
As part of the Bath Digital Festival, Bath: Hacked will be kicking off the weekend’s festivities with a free hack weekend where attendees will be exploring how open data and technology can create a more sustainable and environmentally friendly region. Bringing together local organisations, residents and the digital and creative sectors to create new applications, visualisations and technology, this event will explore how we can turn Bath and its surroundings into a smarter, cleaner, more sustainable place to live.
Bristol Freelancers: BYO Freelance Lunch
Tuesday 16th February 2016 – 12:15pm – Seamus O’Donnells, 13 St Nicholas Street, Bristol
Meet in Seamus O’Donnell’s to discuss ongoing projects, bounce ideas of other freelancers, get some inspiration for the coming month and have a jolly nice lunch.
SWmobile: February talk night
Wednesday 17th February 2016 – 6:30pm – MixRadio, Prudential Buildings, 11-19 Wine Street, Bristol, BS1 2PH
The first talk will be given by Chris Williams, who will talk all things test automation in Practice with Xamarin TestCloud at MixRadio.
The second talk is yet to be announced, so keep an eye out!
Bristol DevOps: “Ten Easy Wins” & “People, not Platforms”
Wednesday 17th February 2016 – 7pm – BaseKit, 5th Floor, One Castlepark, Tower Hill, Bristol, BS2 0JA
“Ten Easy Wins” – Jamie Andrews, Senior IT Operations Engineer at IOP Publishing
In the real world, what small steps can we make to move our less than ideal deployment and development environments a bit nearer to the DevOps dream?
“People, not Platforms” – Dan Young
This talk is about People, not Platforms. This is purposefully not about the technology behind DevOps, PaaS or continuous innovation, but rather what it actually means for organisations to try to work in this way; specifically, large, established businesses called Enterprises. It’s also an exploration of the crazy and irrational things that we keep doing as humans, once we’ve been arranged into a hierarchy and system of beliefs.
Bristol Digital Marketing Workshop
Wednesday 17th February 2016 – 7pm – Watershed, 1 Canons Road, Harbourside, Bristol, BS1 5TX
Are you ready for 2016? Want to get results for your business across the digital landscape? Why not come along to the Watershed to talk business with like minded digital marketing enthusiasts! This group is primarily for those of you that want to network, and meet new people in a digital marketing arena. It will be a very informal event, so grab a drink and chat to like-minded individuals about what they do and how they are doing it.
Digital marketing is a very competitive space that can change overnight. If your looking to bring a business online you have a massive opportunity if you know how to do it right. So no matter what you are interested in, pop along. Podcasting, Youtube Channels, Paid ads, Blogging/Vlogging, Live streaming, Social media marketing, Content Marketing, Product Creation, High ticket Courses/Events/ Software Development & SAAS Apps or Ecom.
Smart Success Business Network of Bristol Party
Thursday 18th February 2016 – 6pm – Highbury Vaults, St Michael’s Hill, Bristol, BS2 8DE
Mix and mingle with new friends in the Bristol business community in a relaxed environment. This is a great opportunity to meet business-savvy individuals in your area to network, learn and connect as you build your reputation in your industry. It is also a powerful way to grow your business and referral network.
BathCamp: “Let me entertain you…”
Thursday 18th February 2016 – 7:30pm – The Guild Coworking Hub, High Street, Bath, BA1 5EB
It’s been some time since the last BathCamp, but they’re getting things back up and running in 2016.
“Simulating classic synths with the Raspberry Pi” – Phil Atkin
Phil will be giving a crash course in the history of electronic music, from the Theramin to modern synth. Then he’ll show you how he simulates some of the classic sounds from the 70s and 80s in code using a Raspberry Pi, giving you that classic synth sound from just a £5 computer.
“Everything you think you know about MIDI is wrong” – Ruth John
I want to tell you about a standardised data protocol, one that is simple to use, easy to learn and quick because of the small packets it uses to pass instructions. It could be used in both software and hardware, in fact it already is. In this enticing and interactive presentation we’ll take a look at MIDI through the Web MIDI API, and no we’re not just talking about digital audio! We’ll talk through MIDI’s past, present and future. Could it be the data protocol of your dreams? Why don’t you come and find out!
“Hacking Animatronic Dinosaurs with the Raspberry Pi” – Neil Ford
The subject kind of says it all really…Neil will be showing us what you can do with a Raspberry Pi and Node Red to juice up a robot t-rex (you’ve got one of those, right?).
Bristol Health Tech Meetup
Monday 22nd February 2016 – 3pm – Engine Shed, Temple Meads, Station Approach, Bristol, BS1 6QH
These afternoon and evening sessions will bring people together to learn and discuss how health and data interrelate, and how they can be harnessed for the public good. The sessions include a conversation cafe, lightning talks and networking opportunities, and are jointly run by the RSA West (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) and Bristol Health Partners.
The event will bring together people and information about local and national initiatives, raise questions and invite participants’ opinions on important issues. The event will include an interactive installation, ‘An apple a day: exploring your health in everyday data stories’ hosted at the Engine Shed from 18 January.
Apache Spark South West: Demo your Spark App
Monday 22nd February 2016 – 7:30pm – The Westgate Pub, 38 Westgate Street, Bath, BA1 1EL
A meetup for everyone to demo an Application built with Spark. It could be a professional product and you are a developer on it, or an Application you have built in your spare time to solve a problem. You don’t need to have something to demo to attend the event, everyone is welcome!
F#|> Bristol: Taming Cloud Complexity with F# DSLs
Wednesday 24th February 2016 – 6pm – JUSTEAT, 2nd Floor, Broad Quay House, Prince Street, Bristol, BS1 4DJ
The emergence of Cloud platforms has fundamentally changed the IT landscape, to the extent that it is now unthinkable for a technology-focused startup not to operate on the cloud. However, attempting to ride on this ever-expanding platform ecosystem wave has created a new set of challenges.
Join Yan Cui in this talk as he draws on his extensive experience with AWS over the last 6 years to illustrate, with real-world use cases, how you can use F# to build internal and external DSLs to successfully navigate AWS service complexity.
Bristol JS: Hardware
Wednesday 24th February 2016 – 7pm – Basekit, South Wing, One Castlepark, Tower Hill, Bristol, BS2 0JA
This month, take a look at some of the challenges of developing with hardware, and how using JavaScript can let you create power-efficient software quickly and easily – with a few demos along the way!
Then, Chris McKirgan talks about how hardware such as the Arduino Leonardo allows us to emulate various devices, opening up a great deal of yet unseen creative opportunities with not always honest intentions.
## [Bristol Games Hub Antisocial](http://www.meetup.com/bristolgameshub/events/vsfqllyvdbhc/)
**Thursday 25th February 2016 – 7:30pm** – *Bristol Games Hub, 77 Stokes Croft, Bristol, BS1 3RD*
Bristol Games Hub is the centre of all things games development in Bristol. They are a community of like-minded people working in all areas of games development, from programmers and artist to designers and testers. The last Thursday of the month they run ‘the Antisocial’ – a plethora of talks, discusses, demos, games, testing and the rest takes place all followed by a few beers!
DigiMakers Bristol
Saturday 27th February 2016 – 10:30am – At-Bristol, Anchor Road, Harbourside, Bristol, BS1 5DE
DigiMakers is back with a series of fantastic events aimed at showing children aged 8-18, and their parents / teachers the myriad of ways they can express their creativity and have fun with technology. This introduction to ‘making’ in the digital world includes activities ranging from software programming to hacking hardware allowing young people to unleash their imaginations.
