The low down on what’s on in Bristol and Bath for tech events and meet-ups for October.
Don’t forget! We’re having our very first CookiesHQ Open Desk Day on Wednesday 28th September. Have a read down below for more details and sign up on our Meetup page!
Design / Build / Market social
Thursday 29th September 2016 – 7pm to 10pm – Location TBC
Yes, this one is technically not a date in October, but it’s definitely worth mentioning! We’re starting a mini-conference/event called Design / Build / Market later this month, but before we do, we thought it would be good to have an intro to the event, find out a bit more about everyone who is interested in it and what they’d like to get out of it.
The location is still yet to be determined, but we know it’ll definitely be central in a nice pub somewhere in the city. Why not sign up to the event and find out more?
Bristol WordPress People: Writing coherent web content, custom post data and WP multi-site
Tuesday 4th October 2016 – 6:30pm – Famous Royal Navy Volunteer, 17-18 King Street, Bristol, BS1 4EF
Bristol WordPress People are putting on three talks in October, the first of which will be on writing coherent content, followed by two lightning talks covering custom post meta data and WordPress multisite.
These will be held in the upstairs room of The Famous Royal Navy Volunteer from about 6.30pm with talks starting at 7pm, with plenty of chance to network/chat with other members during and after the talks.
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How to Create Easy Outlines for Writing Coherent Content
Zach Goldie – Copywriter and USP Creator
In the session, you’ll learn how to create these prompts for a range of pages, including subtle ways to word the questions to ensure your writing is clear to your visitors, or to make clients think you’re a goddamn magician!
Level: Beginner +
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Custom post meta the code way – lightning talk
Simon Pollard – Lead Web Developer at SHIFT Active Media
Showing you how to add custom meta fields to posts using your own reusable code and no need for plugins.
Level: Intermediate +
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WordPress Multisite – lightning talk
Hannah Smith – Freelance agile doer: web developer, project manager and organiser
An introduction to WordPress Multisite which allows you to host multiple sites (on different domains) with just one installation of WordPress.
Level: Intermediate +
Threads: Dealing with culture change as you grow beyond the founders
Wednesday 5th October 2016 – 5:30pm to 7:30pm – Ashfords LLC, Tower Wharf, Cheese Lane, Bristol, BS2 0JJ
This first session will explore the topic “Dealing with culture change as you grow beyond the founders”.
Those attending should consider the issues surrounding the topic in advance and contribute to the conversation flow:
- In what ways do the founders of a business influence its culture?
- What are the key differences in attitude between a founder and an employee?
- What aspects of culture would engage a newly recruited employee?
We look forward to exploring these questions and hearing your views and experiences. Keep an eye on the Meetup page for details of future events.
Bristech: Tom Kealy – Teaching computers to play games / Julien Nioche – StormCrawler
Thursday 6th October 2016 – 7:00pm – Bristol Engine Shed @ Temple Meads, BS1 6QH, Bristol
Tom Kealy recently completed a PhD in statistical signal processing and is now working on Natural Language Processing problems for UKHO. His talk will be looking at machine learning and the modern AI, with a demo of AlphaGo.
// Julien Nioche runs DigitalPebble Ltd, a consultancy based in Bristol that specialises in open source solutions for text engineering. His expertise covers web crawling, natural language processing, machine learning and search. In his talk, he will give an introduction to Storm-Crawler, an open source collection of resources, mostly implemented in Java, for building low-latency, large scale web crawlers on Apache Storm
BathSPARK: Coffee and Networking at the Hub
Thursday 6th October 2016 – 10:30am to 12:30pm – 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.
Web Dev Conference 2016
Thursday 6th – 12:00pm to 5:00pm and Friday 7th October 2016 – 9:00am to 5:00pm – The Watershed, 1 Canon’s Road, Bristol, BS1 5TX
Web Dev Conf is back!
Situated, once again, at the Watershed, Web Dev Conf is a 2-day event aimed at web professionals, freelancers and students, focusing on the world of the web. Now in it’s 9th year, the event will focus on a variety of development, design and team-based topics to inspire and entertain.
Thursday is all about workshops. You can choose to take part in either one of these or both: the first is from Stu Robson, named “Design Systems Rock!”, and will be covering how creating websites and apps has moved on from building pages towards building design systems, using pattern libraries and front-end frameworks etc. Luke Murphy-Wearmouth presents the second workshop, looking at “Product Design in 5 Days” and how design sprints are a great technique for validating product ideas and concepts within a 5 day period.
The conference on Friday will be presented by Luke Murphy-Wearmouth and Keir Moffatt (we will be expecting much hijinks from these two, given Keir’s intro video from 2014 – see below). There are loads of great speakers taking part, including Gavin Strange (aka. Jamfactory), Joe Leech and our very own Nic Alpi, so this is definitely an event not to be missed.
South West Data Social
Tuesday 11th October 2016 – 7:00pm – The Watershed, 1 Canon’s Road, Bristol, BS1 5TX
The South West Data social is an informal evening for those involved in using, learning about or discovering data technologies to meet and network. It takes place on the second Tuesday of every month at the Watershed.
Git Workshop
Thursday 13th October 2016 – 6:30pm to 9:30pm – Momentum Financial Technology office, 10 Temple Back, Bristol
The Git Workshop is back with an evening workshop!
Want to know how to use Git once you have got past the very basics? These are some of the things the group will be covering:
- How to undo changes
- Branching and merging
- Pushing/pulling and working with remotes
- (Interactive) Rebasing
- Useful tips and tricks (please submit your own favourite commands)
There will be a brief presentation followed by a practice session (please remember to BYO laptops!).
This event is for all skill levels, but you should have ideally worked through a tutorial that covers the basics of Git. Also, please have Git installed and create a GitHub account, if you don’t have one yet.
Some good places to start learning Git are:
Food, drinks, and space sponsored by Momentum Financial Technology (MoneyHub)
SW Mobile: Lightning Talk Night
Tuesday 18th October 2016 – 6:30pm – DeskLodge Ltd, 5th Floor, 1 Temple Way, Bristol, BS2 0BY
October’s meetup is going to be lighting talks! If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, this means each talk will be only 10 minutes long. It should be a really fun evening, with lots of speakers and a wide range of topics – something for everyone.
TechSPARK: Morning Coffee and Networking
Thursday 20th October 2016 – 10:30am – Beatroot Cafe, 20-21 Lower Park Row, Bristol, BS1 5BN
The TechSPARK 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, and a friendly chat.
Bristol Web Performance extravaganza 💃🏼
Thursday 20th October 2016 – 7:00pm – cxpartners, 2 College Square, Bristol
The next Bristol Web Perf meeting will be a series of lightening talks on various topics. More details TBC – keep an eye on the Meetup page for more details.
CookiesHQ’s Open Desk Day
Wednesday 26th October 2016 – 9:30am to 5:30pm – CookiesHQ, 5 Beauley Road, Southville, Bristol, BS3 1PX
Hello!
Come along to our Open Desk Day where we invite local freelancers, remote and solo workers to work in our office for the day.
We’re opening up our meeting room for the chance to spend a bit of time working alongside like-minded people, getting to know us here at CookiesHQ, with free wi-fi and the chance to use our device lab.
There’ll also be tea, coffee and water provided throughout the day. We tend to break for lunch together, so feel free to do so, if you’d like. North Street is a five minute walk away and has lots of places to grab a sandwich or something tasty.
If you’d like to join in, please RSVP to this event. There is a limit of 6 places for each month, but if you miss out on this one, we’ll add you to our list for next time.
Please leave a comment below, drop us a message on Meetup or send us a tweet if you’d like to know more.
BristolJS: HTML5 Game Development with Phaser
Wednesday 26th October 2016 – 7:00pm
Phaser JS – Richard Davey
“I’ll flesh this out closer to the event, but I’ll be talking about game development with my framework Phaser.
I’m curious to know how to target this: You’re all experienced JS devs already of course, so I don’t want to do a complete beginners talk. Although, I’ll definitely start with a brief overview.
If there are specific topics you’d like covered, then please leave a comment on the Meetup page. Maybe it might be worth talking a little about what it’s like managing such a large open source project? Or perhaps just stick to the games? :)”
Design / Build / Market:
Thursday 27th October 2016 -7pm to 10pm – Location TBC
Design / Build / Market is a Meetup for people involved in the creative and digital industries who are passionate about design, development, and marketing.
The event will take place every three months, featuring three speakers that will discuss subjects relevant to that evening’s particular theme. Each of them will be from backgrounds fitting within one of these categories:
- Design – looking at all aspects, from graphic to digital, as well as the behaviour and psychology of design
- Build – focusing on the process of development, problem-solving, specialist areas and a variety of platforms
- Market – how to improve your content, increase your community and build a brand
This month’s theme is Crowdfunding and features some great speakers:
- CrowdReach – an advertising service providing targeted Facebook ads that put your crowdfunding project in front of a highly focused audience.
- Fundsurfer – a hybrid crowdfunding platform and community that provide a range of funding options for projects and companies.
- Kirsty Ranger – founder of Crowd10 and IdeaSquares, a support service for startups that offers tools and accelerator programmes to help them achieve funding.
Below is a rough schedule of how the evening will run. There will be plenty of time to meet new people and for networking throughout the event.
- 6:30pm – Arrive at the venue with time for a chat whilst you wait for the evening to begin
- 7pm – Our first speaker (Design – CrowdReach)
- 7:30pm – Break for drinks/food
- 8pm – Next speaker (Build – Fundsurfer)
- 8:30pm – Another break
- 8:45pm – Last speaker for the evening (Market – Kirsty Ranger)
- 9:15pm – Wrap up with more time for networking
We want to focus on bringing people together to collaborate through combined knowledge. By showcasing topics that are useful for everyone, Design / Build / Market aims to be an inclusive event that promotes discussion between disciplines to devise better solutions for all aspects of the creative process.
Whether you’re a professional, an entrepreneur, freelancer or student, there will be something for everyone – it’ll also be a great opportunity for you to meet new people and make connections.
If you’d be interested in sharing your experiences and giving a talk at a future event, then get in touch! We’d love to hear from you – leave us a comment below, send us an email or give us a shout over on Twitter.
Main image by birgburg
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