Tiffany Dawson, ex-mechanical engineer turned career coach for women in STEM, presents a poignant talk on ‘Gender Diversity in Engineering – Why it Matters & What You Can Do About It’.

Despite efforts to address the imbalance, as of 2020 just 10.4% of those working in engineering identified as female. In this session, we share insights and resources around D&I and cover topics such as;

– The current gender balance landscape in engineering UK
– Why it matters
– Why gender inequality still exists in engineering
– What you can personally do about it

More about Tiffany

Tiffany Dawson teaches step-by-step frameworks to become confident, strategy-savvy and influential leaders with ease and grace. Having worked at global engineering consultancies across Australia and the UK, she witnessed and experienced the many challenges women still face in male-dominated industries. After overcoming her own battles with impostor syndrome and poor work-life balance, she was compelled to teach other women to do the same. You can often find Tiffany speaking at events about gender equality in STEM and sharing career advice on her podcast, How to be a STEMinist.

Find out more here: https://www.tiffanydawson.co/

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Gender Diversity in Engineering’ on-demand here:

iO Associates are delighted to bring you our next .Net Virtual Meetup! We were joined by Poornima Nayar & Clare Sudbery who presented a fantastic session on ‘GraphQL in .Net Core & How to Stop Testing and Break Your Code Base’

Poornima gave us some insight into her part of the session: ‘GraphQL is a cool kid on the block. It’s a term that is gaining traction these days and the tech stack is getting quite popular. In my session, I introduced GraphQL as a concept. From there on, we looked at how we can create a GraphQL service and consume that GraphQL service in a Blazor App’.

About Poornima:

Poornima is an Umbraco MVP has over 10 years of experience in .Net, she is passionate about learning new technologies and keeping herself up-to-date with the latest developments in technology. Based in Langley, she mothers a little girl and spends her spare time reading, cooking, watching movies, enjoying music and she is undergoing training in Indian Classical music.

The second half of this session is led by Clare Sudbery: “Recently, I asked a friend to pair with me on a personal project because my testing strategy was getting lax. I stopped testing for bad reasons, but started again for good ones. The experience has allowed me to demonstrate in practice the impact it can have on your code base when you don’t test, and also when you do. This talk, based on simple practical examples, will explain exactly why unit tests, a TDD approach and pairing can make all the difference to your code.”

Clare asked: Do you code on your own? When you do, do you write unit tests? Do you agree that there are benefits to using test-driven development?

Clare is a Lead Engineer with Made Tech, she is a maths graduate with 20 years of software engineering experience, and a particular interest in teaching and mentoring; encouraging more women into IT; and banishing impostor syndrome.

She is on a mission to awaken the inner geek in clever women (and men) everywhere. iO Associates, tech and digital recruitment specialists, have always been a very active member of multiple Meetup groups across the UK.

iO Associates are delighted to bring you our next Java Virtual Meetup!

The topic of this session was ‘Kubernetes for Java Developers’, with guest speaker Rob Barr, Applications Development Senior Manager at Citibank.

Kubernetes is the definitive winner of the container orchestration wars. Originally created by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, it is the de facto standard for automating scaling, provisioning and monitoring of modern cloud applications.

In this talk we delved into what K8s is and how to package and deploy your Java apps using technologies like Jib, Docker, Helm, Skaffold and Istio.

About the speaker:

Rob Barr has been a Java developer for over twenty years, working in financial services with a focus on high performance systems. He is passionate about building communities and leveraging modern technologies. He coaches teams to adopt proven Agile, Lean and DevOps methodologies which deliver value to the enterprise.

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.

Details matter when it’s time to scale and milliseconds add up quickly. Understanding the relevant details of the .NET subsystems can make the difference between scaling and failing.

We are joined by David Fowler, Principal Software Architect at Microsoft and Creator of SignalR, who delivered a session on ‘Implementation Details Matter’.

About the speaker:

David Fowler has been at Microsoft for 13 years working on developer frameworks and tools in the .NET space. He’s one of the creators of several popular OSS frameworks and tools such as NuGet, SignalR and ASP.NET Core.

He’s an avid open source advocate and developer currently focused on helping teams at Microsoft adopt .NET 5/6 and beyond. 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.

iO Associates bring you our latest .Net Virtual Meetup. We are joined by William Eastbury, Principal Azure Architect and Engineer at Microsoft, who deliver a session on ‘Implementing the Geode Pattern in Azure with Front Door, Azure App Service and Azure Cosmos DB’.

Many large-scale services have specific challenges around geo-availability and scale.

The Geode pattern involves deploying a collection of backend services into a set of geographical nodes, each of which can service any request for any client in any region. This pattern allows serving requests in an active-active style, improving latency and increasing availability by distributing request processing around the globe.

We walk through a practical demo of this architecture and built a cloud-scale, globally geo-resilient, and globally performant scaled data storage service architecture that will perform at scale from all corners of the globe.

About Will:

Will is a Principal Engineer on the FastTrack for Azure Engineering team at Microsoft, helping customers to build, deploy and scale cloud solutions. A 25 year technology veteran in the sector, Will helps customers ask, and answer the hardest challenges around cloud technologies, regardless of size or budget.

Here we are joined by Rupert Madden-Abbott, Senior Developer at YellowDog, who delivered a session on ‘Monitoring a Murmuration of Microservices’.

This was a deep dive into how we gain insight into our production applications at YellowDog using technologies like Grafana, Loki, Promtail and Prometheus and how we integrate them with Spring Boot.

About our speaker:

Rupert Madden-Abbott has been a software developer for 10 years and nowadays mostly focusses on Java. At YellowDog he works on Spring Boot microservices that enable their multi-cloud compute provisioning and workload scheduling.

iO Associates present to you our next .Net Virtual Meetup, and our second Meetup with Scott Hunter, Director of Programme Management at Microsoft! Scott delivers a fascinating session on ‘.NET 6 and Cloud Native’.

About our 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.

The topic of this session is ‘Making Change Stick’.

The session includes a number of panellists to discuss the topics. Our speakers include Fredrik Hagstroem, CTO of Emergn, Ravi Lal-Sarin, Partner & Co-Founder at Arca Blanca, Simon Adams, Managing Consultant & Executive Board Member at Nine Feet Tall, Zoë Gould, Principal Delivery Manager at Kainos, and Stephen Moffitt, Partner at We Are Atmosphere. The topic of the session was ‘Making Change Stick’.

In this session, we covered:

– Who should drive the change – the leaders or the consultancy?
– How to best develop a network of internal change ambassadors
-The importance of benefits realisation – how to best utilise this part in the change programme to ensure current & future success.

The session included a number of panellists to discuss the topics. Our speakers included Adam Skinner, Director of Consulting at P2 Consulting, Andrew Pitkeathly, Head of Manchester Division at Nimble Approach, Darren Lynch, Head of Delivery at Difrent, and Ben Davison, Director at Axiologik, who participated in our session surrounding ‘Digital Transformations: What to do when it all goes wrong?’.

In the second instalment of our Leaders in Transformation Consulting series, we turned the tables and focused instead on what to do when a transformation has failed.

We ask our panellists to discuss several talking points, including:

• Why ‘failure’ has a different definition based on who you ask
• Repairing client relationships
• Recovering projects before it’s too late

About our speakers:

Adam is a Transformation Consultant of 20 years, and P2 Consulting’s Director of Consulting, with responsibility for the quality of their 200 strong consulting team, services, and consulting support. Adam specialises in providing organisations with pragmatic maturity assessments of their transformation ability, and then supporting them through engaged mentoring and coaching to deliver those transformations in a fully stable fashion.

He is also the co-author of the APM’s Portfolio Management Specific Interest Group’s ‘Portfolio Management: a practitioner’s guide’, and their publication ‘The Agile Portfolio: Fact or Fiction’.

Andrew has been in the IT Industry over 20 years working as Project Manager, Programme Manager and now Head of Manchester Division for Nimble Approach. Andrew has worked on the client side, as a consultant, and as a Programme Manager delivering large scale IT delivery for customers for a top 10 European IT consultancy. 

Darren is a specialist in delivering large scale digital transformation & change programmes across both public and private sectors. Delivering end to end services, utilising multidisciplinary teams and Agile methodologies, Darren has 20+ years experience in IT related service delivery and managed services.

Ben is an expert digital transformation leader and general manager with an impressive track record of delivering results on complex and challenged transformation programmes and in struggling business environments.

Ben has led high value, complex digital transformations on both the client and supplier side and has worked across the full programme lifecycle from systems engineering through to service management. This, coupled with his track record in turning around struggling organisations, gives him a highly balanced viewpoint and the leadership skills to take on the most complex challenges.

In this session we are joined by Gerald Versluis, Senior Software Engineer – .Net MAUI at Microsoft, who delivers a session on: ‘Introduction to App Development with .NET MAUI’.

.NET MAUI provides an extremely flexible and powerful way to create apps for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows, from very simple to extremely robust and complex. Is this one size fits all? Where should you start?

In this session, Gerald runs through:

– What .NET MAUI is

– How it fits in the .NET ecosystem

– Differences with Xamarin

– How to get started yourself

About our speaker:

Gerald Versluis is a Software Engineer at Microsoft from the Netherlands. After years of experience working with Azure, ASP.NET, DevOps, Xamarin and other .NET technologies, he has been involved in a number of different projects and has been building several real-world apps and solutions.

Not only does he like to code, but he is also passionate about spreading his knowledge – as well as gaining some in the bargain. Gerald involves himself in speaking, providing training sessions and writing blogs (https://blog.verslu.is) or articles, answering questions on Stack Overflow and contributing to open-source projects in his spare time. Twitter: @jfversluisIWebsite: https://gerald.verslu.is