The South West plays host to some of the best creative, tech and business events. November is looking to be packed with an exciting mix, so find out what’s on, below.
Bristol Java Meetup: Hack Night, Tech Talks & Beer
Tuesday 3rd November 2015 – 6:30pm – Brightpearl, New Bond House, Bond Street, Bristol, BS2 9AG
Topic to be announced. Watch this space!
Bristol WordPress People: Loops & Custom Fields – Making WordPress Work for You
Tuesday 3rd November 2015 – 6:30pm – Famous Royal Navy Volunteer, 17-18 King Street, Bristol, BS1 4EF
[Simon Pollard](https://twitter.com/smp303) will be looking at how to get data from WordPress (including custom post types) and how to manipulate it for your website. For example, getting an event custom post type and displaying those events then adding filters such as dates and types to get specific results.
[Janice Tye](https://twitter.com/123design) will be taking you through the process of creating user-friendly newsletter templates to make layout selections, populate the template with text and images without creating a dogs dinner that offends the eye. She uses Elliot Condon’s [Advanced Custom Fields](http://www.advancedcustomfields.com/) set of plugins to do this.
Bristol Salesforce Developer Group
Wednesday 4th November 2015 – 6pm – The Watershed, Harbourside, Bristol, BS1 5TX
The theme of this session is data security. In an increasingly connected and data driven world, the volume of sensitive information held in systems increases exponentially every year. You only have to look at recent news articles in relation to hacked systems to realise the importance of preventing unauthorised access to sensitive data in the modern world.
But help is at hand! [Peter Chittum](https://twitter.com/pchittum), Salesforce Developer Evangelist extraordinaire, will be providing a presentation on how Salesforce developers can address these security concerns. More specifically, the presentation will focus on Platform Encryption, part of Salesforce Shield, a premium set of integrated security services built natively inside the Salesforce platform. Using platform encryption, developers can provide the data security required, whilst still enabling the full intended range of functionality without restriction, even in third party apps!
Bristol Digital Analytics Meetup: Digital Analytics on Financial Sites
Wednesday 4th November 2015 – 6pm – Momentum Financial Technology Office, 10 Temple Back, Bristol, BS1 6FL
Meet other analytics folks in Bristol and talk about Digital Analytics on Financial sites. There will also be a short talk at 6:15 on how to recognise super users or newbies from their usage patterns.
Bristol Secrets of Startup Success
Wednesday 4th November 2015 – 6:30pm – Bristol Radisson Blu Hotel, Broad Quay, Bristol, BS1 4BY
The founders of four of Bristol and the Southwest of England’s most exciting entrepreneurial small businesses will speak at a free business event to be held in Bristol on Wednesday 4th November.
‘Sharing the Secrets of Startup Success’ is aimed at encouraging more people to start their own business by providing inspiration, practical insights and professional support from those who have been there and done it. So if you’re serious about starting your own business and living life on your terms, this is a unique opportunity to meet, hear from and ask your questions to the very people who know what it takes.
Bristol Business Brainstorm
Wednesday 4th November 2015 – 7pm – Halo, Gloucester Road, Bristol, BS7 8BA
The Bristol Business Brainstorm meetup is aimed at providing a social, interesting and potentially productive evening. Meet up and talk through business ideas, challenges or anything else important. Develop a refreshing perspective, gain some valuable insight and get inspired. It’s also just a nice group of people having a chat about business.
South. West. Test.
Wednesday 4th November 2015 – 7pm – Brightpearl, New Bond House, Bond Street, Bristol, BS2 9AG
[Andrew Morton](https://twitter.com/testingchef) will be talking about his career in testing, where he is right now, and hopefully lessons others in those positions can learn from.
Andrew is a Context-driven tester. His current context involves a lot of programming, the majority of which is Ruby and Java, and trying to create testing tools and practices to help the development teams he works with.
Bristech: User Adoption / Big Data Analytics
Thursday 5th November 2015 – 7pm – Engine Shed, Bristol Temple Meads, Station Approach, Bristol, BS1 6QH
How can we track the progress of people from first contact to qualified user of a product? In Open Source our users can be almost invisible. Using models for diffusion of innovation and stages of commitment [Alice Sowerby](https://twitter.com/sowerbyalice) will talk about how to understand how to model the User Adoption of a product and apply this to real data that you already have such as Google Analytics. You’ll then look at actionable steps to provide tailored support for users based on the current stage of your users through the adoption process.
Afterwards, Mike Barlow talks about “The Last Mile of Analytics” (via O’Reilly) and the new tools that are coming along to succeed where the complex platforms haven’t quite delivered, what are these new tools (Apache Spark, Kafka, data-mining tools)? And where are they going and are we really moving from platforms to tools.
SWUX: Psychology and the Perfect Design – Joe Leech
Tuesday 10th November 2015 – 6:45pm – MixRadio, Prudential Buildings, 11-19 Wine Street, Bristol, BS1 2PH
In this talk, [Joe](http://mrjoe.uk/) will take you on a journey to find the holy grail everyone is looking for: the “perfect” design. You’ll take a look at a practical strategy that uses psychology to produce the ideal design for those tricky user experience problems faced everyday.
But what exactly is the perfect design? Well, that’s what you will find out in the session as you look at the three aspects that define the perfect design and how you can make it work in your projects.
South West Founders Meetup
Wednesday 11th November 2015 – 7pm
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. They welcome entrepreneurs and tech investors with open arms, but discourage freelancers, consultants, lawyers and other service providers unless they have a genuine interest in founding or mentoring start-up businesses.
SWUX: World Usability Day Celebration
Thursday 12th November 2015 – 6pm
A joint celebration of [World Usability Day](http://www.worldusabilityday.org) with the Bristol Usability Group (BUG). Food & drink kindly provided!
Bristol MEAN School: Building RESTful Service Layers in NodeJS
Thursday 12th November 2015 – 6:30pm – Temple Studios, Temple Gate, Bristol, BS1 6QA
A session with slides and some live coding to show the nuts and bolts of how to build a fully formed RESTful service layer in NodeJS. The meetup is all about how you can structure a backend to support your web application.
CodeHub Bristol: JavaScript 1-day Workshop
Saturday 14th November 2015 – Bristol YHA, 14 Narrow Quay, Bristol, BS1 4QA
Come along and see our very own [Denis](https://twitter.com/Denis_Sellu) giving a talk on getting started with Ionic!
On the day, he’ll also be joined by other tech enthusiasts where you can learn all about transpiling, hardware hacking with Littlebits and ES6. All the talks will have interactive examples, so don’t forget your laptop!
Bristol Entrepreneur & Opportunity Seekers: An evening of networking & talks
Monday 16th November 2015 – 7pm – Llandoger Trow, King Street, Old City, Bristol, BS1 4ER
Details coming soon, watch this space!
TechSPARK: SPARKUp school – Getting Traction for your Startup
Tuesday 17th November 2015 – 10:30am – University of Bath Innovation Centre, Carpenter House, Broad Quay, Bath, BA1 1UD
Getting to the point of knowing exactly what you want out of your business can be an extremely exciting prospect. Yet, finding the tools you need to achieve your goals can be a little trickier and, as leaders and managers, it can help to learn some of the best and simplest ways to keep your team motivated and on the same page.
For this SPARKup School, [Dean Breyley](https://about.me/deanbreyley) will share tips and tools to give you a head-start in clarifying, simplifying and achieving your vision.
SWmobile: Talks Night
Tuesday 17th November 2015 – 6:30pm
There will be two talks this month. #1 is by [Ben Howes](http://ben-howes.co.uk/), CEO and founder of zoetrope.io, who will tell you all about the ‘Internet of Things’. Second up is a talk on creating and publishing your own awesome android open source libraries, given by [Danielle Emma Vass](http://www.de-velopment.com/).
Sole Traders United: Meetup
Wednesday 18th November 2015 – 10am – Falafel King, 6 Cotham Hill, Bristol BS6 6LF
Details coming soon!
ACCU Bristol: Thomas Guest – Go. Steady! Ready?
Wednesday – Brightpearl, New Bond House, Bond Street, Bristol, BS2 9AG
As a C++ and Python programmer, [Thomas Guest](http://wordaligned.org) has been following the progress of the Go programming language with interest. Go is a modern reinvention of C. Promising Python’s simplicity and safety, it adds static typing, solid performance and language-level support for concurrent programming.
In this talk he will discuss his experiences of programming with Go, and will answer the question: does Go deliver?
Applied Behavioural Science Group: Joe Leech
Thursday 19th November 2015 – 6:30pm – Experimental Psychology Department, University of Bristol, 12a Priory Road, Bristol, BS8 1TU
If you missed him first time round, [Joe Leech](http://twitter.com/mrjoe) returns to take you on a journey to find the holy grail that is ‘the perfect design’.
You’ll look at a practical strategy that uses psychology to produce the ideal design for those tricky user experience design problems faced everyday.
TechSPARK: Techie Brekkie – IT Strategy for your Business
Tuesday 24th November 2015 – 8:15am – Engine Shed, Station Approach, Temple Meads, Bristol, BS1 6QH
We all know in today’s fast-paced business world that in order to succeed in tech, we need to be switched on in more ways that one. Digital technologies are revolutionising how we market, sell and serve our products and services. Yet in order to succeed, we not only need to have killer technology – we also need matching killer strategy.
Whether you’re a business leader considering your digital future, a digital newbie wanting to find out more about how you can create a compelling IT strategy or you’re more experienced and wishing to collaborate, discuss ideas and spark new ones, this brekkie will be a great way to get your ideas of the group!
Independent Professionals South West: Women in Freelancing Network Event – Are you Pitch Perfect?
Thursday 26th November 2015 – 6pm
IPSE will be hosting an interactive, workshop style event with [Esther Stanhope](http://www.estherstanhope.com/), Impact Coach, for the Women in Freelancing Network in Bristol. During this meetup, you’ll learn to pitch with effortless confidence and still be YOU. You’ll learn the Basic tips and tricks that make a knock-out pitch, how to craft your core message and content that has an impact in the first 30 seconds; plus much more.
Bristol JS: Real-Time Web Apps in 2015 & Beyond / Visualising Runkeeper Data with the Web
Wednesday 25th November 2015 – 7pm – cxpartners, 2 College Square, Anchor Road, Bristol, BS1 5HL
[Phil Leggetter](http://www.leggetter.co.uk/) will cover the past, present and future of real-time communication technology, the real-time web and provide a number of use cases and demonstrations of how the technology is actually used today.
Then [Ben Foxall](https://twitter.com/benjaminbenben) will take you through some features of the web platform that allow you to retrieve, process, and visualise data. He’ll cover stuff like service workers, indexeddb, canvas, d3, webgl.
umBristol: Talks – November 2015
Thursday 26th November 2015 – Temple Studios, Temple Gate, Bristol, BS1 6QA
Agenda TBC… any suggestions welcome! What do you want to know about?
Photo by Inspirationfeed.com on Pic Jumbo
