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iO Associates are excited to bring you our Data Virtual Meetup!

Taking place on Thursday 17th August at 13:00, this meetup is a community with the aim of bringing together Data professionals nationwide through insightful and interesting talks.

Join us for this instalment discussing ‘How Can Microsoft Fabric Have an Impact on Your Business?’, with our brilliant guest speaker Paul Andrew, Co-Founder & CTO at Cloud Formations and Microsoft MVP!

All this talk about Data-Ware-Lake-Delta-Beach-House-Lakes (or some combination of that) and Data, Yarn, Fabric integration, everything has got a bit… Meshy! Yes, my friends. The beat of the technology drum is certainly relentless. And with no limits cloud scale and huge innovations from the biggest brains.

Two years, it seems, has become the benchmark for tools to live and die by. Reach three years and you almost have a mature product. That said, Microsoft Fabric, the latest offering from global software giant is no exception. But what does this mean for the real world. For the data analysts, engineers and scientists that need to continue answering everyday problems to inform business decisions.

In this session we will firmly ignore the hype and focus on the reality. With the pragmatic view of an experienced architect. The problem of gaining insights from our data hasn’t changed. So, what does this mean if implemented using Microsoft Fabric. What, why and how is the tooling going to change our daily deliverables in the short term, medium and long term. Join me for these answers and more as we explore the impact of Microsoft Fabric-Server, erm, Power. Resource. Thing!

About our speaker, Paul:

Paul (AKA @mrpaulandrew) is the Founder & CTO of Cloud Formations, a specialist data consultancy based in the UK. With nearly 20 years’ experience designing and delivering Microsoft data architectures, Paul leads a passionate team of engineers, supporting businesses small and large with scalable cloud platforms. Business value delivered through data insights. Over the years, Paul has covered the breadth and depth of design patterns and industry leading concepts, including Lambda, Kappa, Delta Lake, Data Mesh and Data Fabric.

Paul is also a Microsoft Data Platform MVP, director for the Data Relay community conference, East Midlands user group leader, book author and mentor. In addition to the day job(s), Paul is a father of three, husband, foodie, runner, blood donor, geek, Lego, and Star Wars fan! Lastly, Paul confesses to enjoying a Ramstein playlist when given half a chance to do some coding for a customer project.

Please sign up for this highly anticipated session via the link at the top of this page. This is not one to be missed!

iO Associates, tech and digital recruitment specialists, have always been a very active member of multiple Meetup groups across the UK. We’re really keen to help keep our community positive and engaged hearing from the best speakers on the topics of your choice so encourage you to share this with your team and the wider community.

We hope you can join us and please get in touch at meetups@ioassociates.co.uk with any questions or suggestions on future virtual meetups.

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The July instalment of the Cardiff .Net meetup has arrived!

This month, the awesome Tramshed Tech is hosting us and we will once again see the return of some lightning talks.

We’ll be joined by two wonderful people that have supported and been a part of the Cardiff .Net journey since it began – Aaron Green & Richard Jackson.

Richard is a Software Developer based in Cardiff that’s been working as part of the Nightingale HQ team for the past year. He made his speaker debut earlier this year at DDD South West where Rich reflected on his past year working in the Microsoft tech stack, informed largely through his experiences at Nightingale.

This month, Rich is delivering a talk called “Process Mapping & Empathy”. While working on process mapping projects, Rich started to appreciate the value of process maps as tools for improving communication, empathy and compassion between individuals, departments, and partners at all levels of business.

This talk discusses the value that comes from visual representations of day-to-day working practices, and how such visuals can be used to make everyone’s life easier.

Aaron is a tech guy turned recruiter (booo!!) who fell in love with programming during the fever dream that was a pandemic and decided to live vicariously through the incredible developers he speaks to on a daily basis. He loves the tech community, runs a meet-up himself, and still codes most days. He’s also a huge anime nerd.

More recently, Aaron has fallen in love with Umbraco and that’s what this lightning talk is based around.

“A Story of Hubris, Learning and Making Friends”

One of the most amazing things about the technology community is the open-source projects that people pour their hearts into, and give away for free just to make the world a better place. You may or may not have contributed to an open-source project, and maybe you haven’t because you’re worried you may not have anything to offer.

Well, we hope in this talk to convince you that you do and you won’t be more unqualified than Aaron was when he turned up to a hackathon and ended the day on a pull request.

Agenda:

6:30pm– arrivals, drinks, pizza
7pm– talks start
8pm– end

iO Associates, tech and digital recruitment specialists, have always been a very active member of multiple Meetup groups across the UK. We’re really keen to help keep our community positive and engaged hearing from the best speakers on the topics of your choice so encourage you to share this with your team and the wider community.

We hope you can join us and please get in touch at meetups@ioassociates.co.uk with any questions or suggestions on future virtual meetups.

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Our first Guest Speaker will be Mark Rendle. Mark is a Microsoft Azure Development MVP and a well known speaker – his career in software design and development spans three decades and more programming languages than he can remember.

C# has been his favourite language pretty much since the first public beta, when you had to write the code in a text editor and compile it on the command line.

Things vying for Mark’s attention lately include .NET Core, Docker and all the new things on the Azure Cloud platforms.

Mark will be speaking on “From WCF to gRPC”.

gRPC is a high-performance messaging protocol that is ideal for communication between microservices and other clients on internal networks. It’s the ideal replacement for WCF or .NET Remoting, which are not supported on .NET Core.

In this talk, he will explain the different models that gRPC enables, from Request/Response to full bi-directional streaming, and how they map to various WCF models. He’ll show how to create gRPC services and clients using the dotnet CLI, and share best practices for using them in the real world.

Please get in touch at meetups@ioassociates.co.uk with any questions or suggestions on future virtual meetups.

About iO Associates Specialising in recruitment across the Tech and Digital market, iO Associates have extensive experience in recruiting the highest calibre of talent to create the products and infrastructure of the future.

Get in touch to find out more on what we do and how we can help you.

We are excited to bring you the next instalment in the iO Virtual Meetups, this time for those working in Testing and discussing ‘Modern Testing: Do we all need to be SDIT?’. ​

Our guest speaker Callum Akehurst-Ryan will be delves into ‘Modern Testing: Do we all need to be SDIT?’ and how Manual / Exploratory testing skills are still needed in a DevOps & Modern Agile environment.

He explains what SDIT really is and looking at how SDIT have the skills for scripting and coding. In addition he will be looking into how you cannot neglect test skills and things like: Critical Thinking / heuristics / risk analysis which is needed to know what to test. ​

Frequently we’re seeing that the testing job market is asking for pure SDIT (Software Developer in Test) roles. Callum will explore if this is a good thing? What benefits does it give us? And how do testing (and manual testing) skills fit in? ​

In this Lean Coffee style webinar, Tester Callum Akehurst-Ryan , who has over 14 years’ experience, leads discussions answering your questions about whether the rise of SDIT is a good thing. ​​

Please get in touch at meetups@ioassociates.co.uk with any questions or suggestions on future virtual meetups.

About: iO Associates Specialising in recruitment across the Tech and Digital market, iO Associates have extensive experience in recruiting the highest calibre of talent to create the products and infrastructure of the future.

Get in touch to find out more on what we do and how we can help you. www.ioassociates.co.uk

Here, our guest speaker Emily Jiang, Liberty Microservice Architect, Advocate and Java Champion, tackles the modern and open way to build cloud-native microservices and the programming models available.

You may have heard about Eclipse MicroProfile and are wanting to find out more.

In this session you’ll learn:

• Everything you need to know about MicroProfile (including a demo)
• How to package the MicroProfile in to a Docker container and deploy it to a Kubernetes cluster
• And finally, how to use Istio to manage your microservice interactions Listen to this session to develop your in-depth knowledge about MicroProfile and how you can use it to build well-performed microservices.

After this session, you will understand how to best develop Cloud Native Microservices by using MicroProfile and how to work well with Cloud infrastructure, such as Kubernetes and Istio. Emily Jiang, is a Java Champion.

Emily Jiang is a Liberty Microservices Architect and Advocate, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) in IBM, based at Hursley Lab in the UK. Emily is a MicroProfile guru and has been working on MicroProfile since 2016, leading the specifications of MicroProfile Config, Fault Tolerance and Service Mesh.

She is a CDI Expert Group member and passionate about MicroProfile and Jakarta EE. Emily regularly speaks at conferences, such as Code One, DevNexus, JAX London, Voxxed, Devoxx, EclipseCon, QCon, GeeCon, JFokus, etc.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Java Virtual Meetup – The Modern and Open Way to Build Cloud-Native Microservices: MicroProfile’ on-demand here:

This .Net Meetup is a series of lightning talks hosted by iO Associates’ Michael Collins and Stella Webster. Our first guest speaker is Robin Minto, the Head of Technical Architecture at ByBox, who kicks us off with ‘OWASP ZAP HUD WTF?’.

During this talk, we see how the features of ZAP can be used to find issues during development, so that we can deploy a better-tested app when we navigate through a web application.

Stuart Lang from Coditorium follows up with his lightning talk on ‘C# 8 -Async Streams & Channels’. He discusses what’s new in .Net for asynchronous processing with hands on examples. Our final speaker is Joe Woodward, a Senior Software Engineer at Just Eat.

He takes us through Microsoft’s new Feature Toggle library and shows us how we can utilise it to de-risk deployments of new features, and also use it to gradually role out new changes into production and promote continuous delivery.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘.NET – Lightning Talks’ on-demand here:

Bea Meyrick and Inness Law, Java Champion Matt Raible present ‘Microservices for the Masses’.

Microservices are being deployed by many Java Hipsters. If you’re working with a large team that needs different release cycles for product components, microservices can be a blessing.

If you’re working at your VW Restoration Shop and running its online store with your own software, having five services to manage and deploy can be a real pain.

This presentation shows you how to use JHipster to create Angular + Spring Boot apps with a unified front-end. You will leave with the know-how to create your own excellent apps!

Matt Raible Matt is a well-known figure in the Java community and has been building web applications for most of his adult life. For over 20 years, he has helped developers learn and adopt open source frameworks and use them effectively. He’s a web developer, Java Champion, and Developer Advocate at Okta. Matt is a frequent contributor to open source and a big fan of Java, IntelliJ, TypeScript, Angular, Spring Boot.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Microservices for the Masses’ here:

Microsoft MVP and Managing Consultant at Excella Alexander Slotte presents ‘Machine Learning; an introduction to ML.NET’.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Machine Learning (ML) is quickly changing the way we live. Things we are accustomed to today are things we could only dream of 10 years ago. As ML is becoming more and more mainstream, you may be asking yourself how to get started.

Historically, many of the tools and libraries used to train a model have been found in the Python and R communities (e.g. Scikit Learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow), but what if you’re a .NET Developer? This session introduces ML.NET!

ML.NET is an open-source, cross-platform machine learning library, specifically built to enable .NET developers to train their own custom machine learning models in C# or F#. In this session we introduce some fundamental ML concepts and terms before transitioning into the world of ML.NET and building our first model from scratch.

Beware, there is live coding! ​ About Alexander Slotte Alexander is a Microsoft MVP, and a Managing Consultant and .NET Xpert at Excella, based out of Washington DC. He is an international speaker, and have spoken at conferences such as NDC London, ProgNET, Big Data Europe, .NET Jetbrains Global Online Day, Beer City Code, Music City Tech, Code PaLOUsa, Code On The Beach and Philly.

.NET He’s the organizer of the .NET DC User Group and a member of the .NET Foundation. He is passionate about .NET and cloud architecture, and constantly attempts to push his knowledge on data science and machine learning.

When not coding, you’ll find him out running or enjoying a good IPA! Say hi on Twitter @alexslotte! ​

​iO are pleased to bring you the full recording of our Virtual Meetup with Scott Hanselman.

Our guest speaker Scott is a Partner Program Manager at Microsoft. During his talk, Scott picked up on ‘Developing for Windows and Linux using Windows 10 and WSL’. Scott uses a variety of live demonstrations in this highly advanced session to take you through the state of the art of Linux on Windows, showing us if you can really use Windows to develop Linux apps. This session also exposes how real WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is, and how close it is to reality.

We were delighted to see so many familiar faces but also lots of new ones as well!

This platform allows our meetups to reach more of our community and communicate with you directly.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘.NET Meetup with Scott Hanselman’ here:

This .Net Meetup is hosted by iO Consultants, Charlotte Herapath and Danny Watts, and features special guest speaker Ian Cooper, a passionate exponent of OO, SOA, EDA, CQRS and Agile.

In this highly interactive session, Ian guides us through Kent’s original proposition from his book on Test Driven Deployment. We then discovered where key misunderstandings occurred and looked at a better approach to TDD that not only supports software development, but also stops hindering it.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘TDD Where did it go wrong?’ here: