Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

This month’s Lightening Talks speakers are confirmed and listed below. Everyone is new to speaking at SuperMondays, and half are speaking for the first time. Sign up, come along, and learn something fresh, new and exciting.

Rails Girls

Fiona McDonald – https://twitter.com/noni_may

I’m going to spend a couple of minutes talking about RailsGirls, a free two-day workshop where participants (girls, although boys are allowed if accompanied by a girl) develop web applications using Ruby on Rails and with the help and guidance of coaches from the local Ruby community.

Git, Bitcoin & matroyoshka dolls

Chris Price – https://twitter.com/100pxls

A set of matryoshkas consist of a wooden figure which separates, top from bottom, to reveal a smaller figure of the same sort inside, which has, in turn, another figure inside of it, and so on. Did you know that nestled deep within a set of matryoshka dolls lies one of the fundamental principles of git, the most popular way of sharing code on the net, and bitcoin, the most popular way of acquiring illicit substances on the net?

From Student to Work

David Ingledow – https://twitter.com/dingledow

I’m planning on talking about the transition from being a student studying Interaction Design to making a move into the ‘real world’ of jobs in design and web/tech. I’ll be looking at what a degree and the university system does/does not gear you up for and what’s different about the first steps into working life compared to the way we work at university.

Switching to Jekyll

Dan Richardson – https://twitter.com/gsdan

CANDDi’s corporate site recently made the switch from being a dynamic site powered by PyroCMS to being static and generated by Jekyll. I’ll be talking about the advantages and disadvantages of doing this, as well as the processes the transition involved.

Code Club

Kamran Chohdry – https://twitter.com/Chohdry

Code Club creates projects for volunteers to teach at after school coding clubs or at non-school venues such as libraries. The projects teach children how to program by showing them how to make computer games, animations and websites. Volunteers go to their local club for an hour a week and teach one project a week.

Metadata

Janet E Davis – https://twitter.com/janetedavis

My lightning talk will be on my addiction to metadata. My work on digital cultural heritage projects in the past decade has focused quite a lot on creating collections & item level descriptive metadata schemas with controlled vocabularies. This was partly with a view to improving searching in the future when semantic search engines become more available.

I aim to be less controlling these days, and am trying out less structured metadata in a blog that collates blogs written by people not linked by workplace, profession or topic.

So much to learn

Ben Cooper – http://www.benjaminrcooper.co.uk/

We work in such a young industry, and as we all know everything moves so fast. What this means is new techniques, frameworks and trends hit the web every day, and we all need to keep our finger on the pulse so that we do not fall behind. Obviously this is easier said than done and sometimes it is hard to find the time to read the articles and practice the techniques. This talk is going to take a look at how I handle keeping on top of things without getting overwhelmed by the masses of data we all trawl through on a daily basis.

Home Automation

Steve Jenkins – https://twitter.com/skyste

With more and more companies getting into the home automation space and more and more devices coming to market every day. I will be explaining the technologies and products I used to setup simple home automation and how I was able to adapt the relatively simple technologies to do more exciting things that what was available out of the box.

The Trials and Tribulations of WYSIWYG Editors

Kerry Gallagher – https://twitter.com/kerry350

This talk is an overview of some of the features that can be used to create WYSIWYG functionality – or even just somewhat enhanced text editing. It will look at the contenteditable attribute, the somewhat mysterious .execCommand() method and the lesser known Range and Selection APIs.

Mozilla’s Educational initiatives

Doug Belshaw – https://twitter.com/dajbelshaw

Doug Belshaw from the non-profit Mozilla Foundation will be talking about their educational initiatives. He’ll mention Open Badges, a new web-native way to share and display your credentials, a new open learning standard for Web Literacy, as well as Mozilla’s Webmaker tools.

Time & place

The venue is:

Research Beehive, Newcastle University
NE1 7RU Newcastle upon Tyne
United Kingdom

A map can be found on the eventbrite page. Please arrive from 18:00, presentations will start at 18:30

This months Supermondays is going to be lightning talks. That’s an opportunity for you to share your enthusiasm for anything tech related over a 5-10 minute presentation. And when we say anything, we really do mean it:

• Languages, frameworks, plugins or open source code
• Hardware: The Rasberry Pi, Arduino, anything else.
• Code patterns, philosophies, practices or industry trends
• A project you worked on.
• Laws, business, recruitment, clients, project management, freelancing.
• Something that really gets your goat within the world of tech.
• Design, UX, analytics, SEO.
• Educatin
• A cool startup, company, website or app.

And anything else IT or tech related

We’d especially like to encourage first time speakers to come forward. My (Richard) first public presentation was at Supermondays and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I still remember how rewarding it was and how welcome the audience made me feel.

If you want to speak (and you really should), please do get in touch via twitter, the email group or if you’d like a less public way to say hi then you can email [email protected]. You really will not regret it.

Septembers SuperMondays will be held on 30th September, at 18:00 in Newcastle University.

Good news. We are back this month, but this time on a Tuesday.

Optimising key areas of your application with Redis

Matt Wells – Head Of Development – Performance Horizon Group
https://twitter.com/ninja_p http://www.ninjapenguin.co.uk/

“Introduction to Redis, strengths and weaknesses. The talk will cover practical examples of optimising standard application operations using some of the key features of Redis” Specifically it will cover the Redis data structures and very briefly touch on embedded programming with Lua”

MongoDB: Fast and Painless Scaling

Marc Qualie – Developer – Performance Horizon Group
https://twitter.com/marcqualie http://marcqualie.com/

MongoDB is an open source document data store which is designed for simplicity and speed. I’m going to cover how it can help you scale your application quickly and efficiently, taking advantage of it’s schema-less nature to improve both development speed and application performance. You’ll learn how easy it is to create, replicate and shard your application in no time at all with no additional coding to go from a single instance to a 100 node, failure tolerant sharded cluster.

MySQL – Not dead yet

Sam Lambert – DBA Badass – Github
https://twitter.com/isamlambert http://www.samlambert.com

MySQL was first released 13 years ago and is still the database of choice for some of the largest sites on the internet (Google, Facebook, Twitter). In this talk we will explore the tooling, architecture and techniques that allows us to achieve uptime, scale, resilience and most importantly constancy with this battle hardened database server.

Non standard queries

Ross Cooney – Head of Engineering Software and Telemetry at Smith Electric Vehicles

The vast majority of database queries are in a query language such as SQL or something similar….however there are other query methods. Innovation in this area is being pushed by large network operators where query speed, data replication, reliability and query bandwidth are very important. Some examples include using DNS lookups to perform database queries (in the case of DNSBL’s) or an even more bandwidth friendly system over TCP is used by the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse.

Venue

The venue is:

Research Beehive, Newcastle University
NE1 7RU Newcastle upon Tyne
United Kingdom

A Map can be found on the eventbrite page. Arrive from 18:00, presentations will start at 18:30