Our latest meetup featured Venkatesh Balakumar, Founder and CTO at Amzu, who presented a fantastic talk on ‘Fuelling Start-Up with Reactive Java’. 

In this session, Vankatesh gave an overview of the journey to create the server-side components for our HRTech Start-Up using Spring Boot and Webflux, a reactive framework.

​​​About the speaker:

Venkatesh has been in the IT Industry for the past 23 years. He has consulted as CTO, Chief Architect, and Head of Engineering in the UK and the USA. Venkatesh is the Founder and CTO at Amzu, a Technology Consulting Service, partnered with Google Cloud and AWS. They provide Digital Transformation, Enterprise Architecture and Cloud Management Services to start-ups and enterprises. is a functional developer, engineer, software architect and entrepreneur. Furthermore, Venkatesh is also the Co-Founder at HRTech Start-Up. This involves working on AI, Machine Learning Based Human Resource solutions and services.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Fuelling Start-Up with Reactive Java’ here:

This meetup features Prasad Rao., Senior Partner Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services, who presented a fantastic talk on ‘Port That .Net Framework Application to .Net5’.

.NET 5 represents a new era within the .NET ecosystem. New development on the .NET Framework has ended, and while it is still a viable application framework, the writing is definitely on the wall as there is no reason that any new development projects would use the v4.x .NET Framework. Instead, they would most likely be on .NET 5 or .NET Core 3.1. This could end up with projects within a company being scattered across various development frameworks as your team manages both current applications and new systems.

In this session we look at how to port your .NET Framework application. We used the Porting Assistant for .NET (an open source AWS-created application) to evaluate the level of effort needed to convert the applications as well as work through several of the most common porting issues and concerns.

About the speaker
Prasad Rao is a Senior Partner Solutions Architect for AWS based out of the UK. His focus areas are .NET Application Modernization and Windows Workloads on AWS. He leverages his experience to help AWS Partners across EMEA for their long term technical enablement to build scalable architecture on AWS. He also mentors diverse people who are new to cloud and would like to get started on AWS.

​Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Port That .Net Framework Application To .Net5’ here:

REGISTER TO ATTEND HERE

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There has been much talk and confusion over recent months concerning the further changes to IR35 affecting engagements with private sector organisations being introduced this April. With this in mind we’re delighted to invite you to ‘iO Associates’ IR35 Workshop’at 8.30am – 10am on the Wednesday 24th February.

In this session we will explore the legislation, its ramifications, what this means for you and your contractors and how we can help with the transition.

We will look to answer the following questions:

• How are different clients adapting?
• How are contractors reacting to the changes?
• What makes up an IR35 determination?
• What are Outside and Inside IR35 working practices?
• How can our Status Determination Tool help?

It will conclude with a Q&A session for any further questions you may wish to raise.

iO Associates have unparalleled IR35 experience as we have been through the process with 100’s of contractors in the public sector. Our 2017 transition was successful and smooth, but we now have even better processes and our market-leading IR35 tool.

I hope this proves to be a valuable workshop which will help you further understand the legislation, prevent disruption to your projects and help you maintain a compliant workforce. In addition, we have a number of roundtables and virtual meetups if you would be keen to hear more about them.

If you have any specific questions around IR35, feel free to send them through prior to the workshop, so we can ensure they get answered.

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Demystifying IR35 Workshop – A regulatory burden? Or an opportunity to win the war for talent?

There has been much talk and confusion recently regarding the forthcoming changes to IR35 and its implications for private sector organisations’ hiring of contractors.

In this session we explore the changes to the legislation, what it means for you and your contractors, and how we can help with the transition.

We will also share some real-life insights into how our clients are reacting to the new legislation, and the implications of these actions on their ability to attract the top talent in the market. You will also have the opportunity to assess how our new Status Determination Tool can help you tackle the challenges ahead, and how it can give you a significant advantage in your search for the most talented individuals in the marketplace.

– We will look to address the following:

– What are the implications of getting things wrong?

– What are other organisations doing, and how are contractors reacting?

– Why should you consider an alternative to HMRC’s CEST tool?

– How can our IR35 Status Determination Tool help?

– We will conclude with a Q&A session to address any final questions you may have.

We are confident that this workshop will prove to be hugely valuable in helping you further understand the legislation, prevent disruption to your projects and help you maintain a compliant workforce.

Today we are joined by Scott Hunter, Director of Programme Management at Microsoft, who delivers a talk on .NET 5 and .NET 6.

This talk covers the state of .NET and gives us an overview of all the new capabilities in .NET 5, including new features for building smaller, faster Web API’s and gRPC for Microservices, Windows desktop enhancements including ClickOnce, and the new features in Blazor for SPA’s. We also talk about the journey to One .NET and show a preview of Project Tye for building and publishing Microservices. We end with a look to the future in .NET 6.

About the speaker

Scott Hunter is responsible for the Microsoft’s .NET platform, which includes the .NET Framework, .NET Core, ASP.NET, Entity Framework, .NET Tools, Web Tools and the managed languages (C#, F# and VB). Prior to leading the .NET Platform, Hunter helped the Azure Developer Experience team build the Azure SDK’s, App Service Tooling, Azure Redis Cache, Azure API Management, ASP.NET, Entity Framework and the Web Tooling. In his spare time he loves hiking mountains around the world. Scott grew up in Little Rock, AR and went to college in Fayetteville before heading to the West Coast for a startup and Microsoft.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Exploring .Net 5 and .Net 6’ on-demand here:

This meetup features Ying Zhou, Senior Director at Oracle. Ying presents a fascinating talk on ‘Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned When Building AI SaaS Solutions’.

Ying Zhou started building their first AI SaaS solution in 2016, there are countless things they learned on this journey. In this talk, Ying shared with us the mistakes they made.

How they almost failed?

What lessons they learned?

Why they made the current design decisions?

About the speaker: Ying is head of the OCI AI framework in Oracle. She works with the senior leadership teams to deliver Oracle AI SaaS solutions.

Before Oracle, Ying has worked in both financial and telecom sectors to transform legacy systems with modern big data architecture. iO Associates, tech and digital recruitment specialists, have always been a very active member of multiple Meetup groups across the UK.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned When Building AI SaaS Solutions’ on-demand here:

iO Associates bring the launch of The DevOps Virtual Meetup, which iO Associates’ consultants Theo Borek and Will Rouse hosted. We are joined by Tr Thambi, Cloud Operations Director EMEA & APAC at Dense Neuron, who deliver a fascinating talk on ‘The Future of DevOps with Edge Compute’. 

With the rollout of 5G now fully underway, businesses are taking a second look at edge computing and ways to leverage this technology to create new capabilities and enhance existing ones.

This talk covers the benefit of 5G and Edge computing, the opportunities it brings and the impact it will have on SREs and DevOps Engineers. It explains some of the enabling factors, and where companies are already leveraging these technologies. We discussed why open-source will remain key to the future of our connected life, and which trends to watch out for to keep ahead of the curve.

About our speaker:

Starting his IT career in 1997, Tr has worked with so many technologies it would be easier to list the technologies he hasn’t worked with. Tr has served many roles in the IT Industry, including Software Developer, Infrastructure Architect, Network Engineer, Release Manager, Project Manager, and DevOps Lead.

Tr has proven experience leading outsourced and international teams. Since 2012 Tr has been building successful Software Development and DevOps teams, which have delivered global projects in the Americas, Asia, EMEA, and Australia. Tr has shaped technology strategies for over 10 years providing insights and prediction, which has enabled businesses such as Moon Pig and Sainsbury’s to thrive in the ever changing technology landscape.

Discover more .NET talks here.

iO Associates bring you our new panel discussion as part of The Defence Series’ – ‘Regaining the Initiative, Exploiting Data within Defence’! Our first instalment is hosted by iO’s Business Manager Danny Watts.

​During our first discussion, we cover the following topics:

• How do we best improve the quality and accuracy of our data?
• What steps are needed to ensure the integrity, confidentiality and security of data?
• How do we improve the knowledge, education and behaviours of our people to ensure data is managed as a strategic asset?
• How can we enable the exploitation of new data-driven technologies to meet information, business and operational changes?
• Where do technologies like AI, Machine Learning and Digital Twins fit into the future of Defence?
• In terms of data maturity, how far off are we from utilising these technologies fully?

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Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘The Defence Series – Regaining the Initiative, Exploiting Data within Defence’ on-demand here:

Mads Torgersen, Lead C# Designer and Programme Manager at Microsoft, who delivers a fantastic session on C#10 for iO Associates.

C# 9 has been out since November of 2020, and C# 10 is starting to come together. Let’s have a look at what’s in the works: What’s next with records? Will we ever get good numeric abstraction in C#? 

We have a 2 hour session where Mads kept is free form and made sure there’s lots of time for questions and conversation.

About the speaker

Mads is the lead designer of C#, and a Program Manager at Microsoft. In the past he has also worked on TypeScript and even Java.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘C#10 with Tags Mads Torgersen’ on-demand here:

In this meetup we are joined by Jason Maude, Chief Technology Advocate at Starling Bank, who will be presenting a talk on ‘Ultra-High Reliability Architecture at Scale’.   

When building a banking platform from scratch reliability is a core concern. You have to make sure that every payment and card transaction goes through without a hitch or your customers will stop trusting you.

In this talk we will look at how to build a system that is optimised for reliability, how to test that reliability, and how to retain it as your numbers scale.

About the speaker:

Jason Maude is a coder, coach, and public speaker. He has over a decade of experience working in the financial sector, primarily in creating and delivering software. He is passionate about explaining complex technical concepts to those who are convinced that they won’t be able to understand them. He currently works at Starling Bank as their Chief Technology Advocate and host of the Starling podcast.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Ultra-High Reliability Architecture at Scale’ on-demand here: