We’re bringing our Data & AI Happy Hours to DC! Join us on Wednesday, June 19th at the Irish Channel Pub in Penn Quarter, DC.

These meetups are a perfect opportunity for data and AI professionals in the DC area to engage in thoughtful discussions, share insights, and network in a warm, welcoming atmosphere.

Sign up here.

Event Details:

• Date: Wednesday, June 19th
• Time: 6 PM to 8 PM
• Venue: Irish Channel Pub, Penn Quarter, DC
• Theme: Data, AI, and Networking

Building on the success of our events in Philadelphia, we aim to grow this community in DC, making each meetup a chance for professionals, students, and anyone enthusiastic about data and AI to connect and learn.

Drinks for the first 20 people will be on us. All other drinks will then be on your tab.

Your hosts, Christian, Ellen, and Joe will be eagerly waiting to welcome you by the bar!

We are excited to be building a space for collaboration, learning, and networking for Data & AI professionals in DC. We look forward to meeting you soon!

Secure your spot now.

Join us on Wednesday 26th June from 17:30 at FISCAL Technologies for two fascinating talks on Communication – one focussed on your coding; the other focussed on you.

17:30 – Arrival
18:00 – First Talk
18:50 – Break/Food/Networking
19:00 – Second Talk
19:55 – Wrap up and close

Sign up now to secure your spot.

The Talks

‘REST, gRPC, GraphQL or Asynchronous Messaging’ (Poornima Nayar)

Be it any industry, applications need to talk to each other. So, developers often build bridges – Application Programming Interfaces (API) – to allow one system to communicate with another.

REST, gRPC, GraphQL and Asynchronous Messaging are all patterns of communication between distributed systems. What are the core concepts behind these patterns? Do you know what problems they try to address? What about the use cases? Join Poornima’s session to find out the answers to these questions!

‘Confident Communication (and Why it Matters)’ (Aaron Green)

Being autistic, confidence—especially in communication—hasn’t always come naturally to Aaron. He often found himself searching for the mystical, elusive rules underlying communication, likability, rapport, and trust. Delving into books, consuming hours of video content, and experimenting through trial and error, Aaron has tried to uncover the principles of confident communication.

Confidence is the secret sauce that helps you build trust in others, and the ability to communicate confidently can unlock not only better quality interactions but also new career prospects, higher salaries, improved team buy-in, stronger work relationships, and, a better overall quality of life.

In his talk, Aaron takes you on a journey, through belief, body language, and a little bit of science, to offer a fresh perspective on communication. This talk is designed to inspire hope; and to show you that if you feel your communication could use some work, it’s within your power to improve it and get the opportunities you deserve in your tech career.

The Speakers

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

Aaron Green is a Consultant at iO Associates, as well as an Umbraco contributor. He is passionate about his place within the tech community, running, attending, sponsoring, and speaking at multiple tech meetup groups. By nature of his job in recruitment, Aaron gets an understanding of what both candidates and hiring managers are looking for. Aaron is big on communication, and wants to do what he can to give back to the community and share this unique perspective, helping bridge the gap between developers and the careers they want.

A big thank you to our hosts, FISCAL Technologies, who will be providing food & drink during the half-way break. Parking is available at the venue.

There are only 30 spots available, so RSVP to secure yours today.

We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday 26th June!

Join us for an engaging evening of tech talks and networking at iPipeline in Cheltenham. Dive into expert discussions on building secure software for sensitive data and optimizing AWS applications for high-performance reads.

Secure your spot via Meetup.com

Date and Time: Thursday 6th June at 18:00
Venue: iPipeline, Cheltenham
Schedule:

• 18:00 – Arrival & Networking
• 18:30 – First Talk with Q&A
• 19:00 – Pizza and drinks provided by iPipeline
• 19:15 – Second talk with Q&A
• 19:45 – Close

The Talks

Ensuring a Secure Software Lifecycle with Chris Blackwell

Explore best practices in developing and deploying secure financial applications that handle highly sensitive data. Chris Blackwell will share insights from iPipeline’s approach to integrating robust security measures throughout the software development lifecycle. Learn how they maintain security and data integrity while processing life insurance quotes through their systems.

Optimising Read-Heavy Applications on AWS: Harnessing the Power of CQRS with DynamoDB, CloudFront, and EventBridge with Duncan Wilkie

Step into the world of serverless architecture with Duncan Wilkie as he breaks down the design and implementation of optimised read-heavy applications on AWS. This talk will cover the implementation of the CQRS pattern, DynamoDB table design, and the integration of CloudFront and EventBridge to enhance performance and scalability.

Our Speakers

Chris Blackwell has been securing iPipeline application for over half a decade. As an OWASP Member and BCS committee member, he is passionate about technology and security. He is an AWS Security Specialist and CompTIA Security Expert. Focusing on API security and best practises, to keep applications and data secure in the world of financial services.

Duncan Wilkie is an Application Architect at iPipeline UK, he has over 15 years of experience in .NET and Node.js – and worked across healthcare, education, and financial services. At iPipeline UK, he’s worked on projects improving high-performance systems, developed AWS Serverless architecture, and introduced patterns like DDD and CQRS. Duncan champions Serverless Architecture, Development Experience, and actively engages in our global solution architecture community.

This meetup is perfect for software developers, system architects, and technology enthusiasts interested in the latest trends in software security and AWS optimisations.

Come for the knowledge, stay for the community. Enjoy complimentary pizza and drinks while connecting with fellow tech professionals.

RSVP Now to secure your spot

Don’t miss out—secure your spot at this exciting meetup and be part of our vibrant tech community!

Join Us for a Happy Hour after AWS re:Inforce in Philadelphia!

📅 Date: Tuesday, June 11

🕕 Time: 18:00

📍 Location: Con Murphy’s Irish Pub

🖋️Sign Up: https://www.meetup.com/lehigh-valley-aws-user-group/events/300860843/

Are you attending AWS re:Inforce in Philadelphia? Don’t miss our Happy Hour event! We’re teaming up with the Greater Philadelphia and Lehigh Valley AWS User Groups to provide a fantastic networking opportunity for AWS professionals. Whether you’re registered for the conference or not, everyone is welcome to join us for drinks and great conversations.

Why Attend?

• Networking: Connect with fellow AWS enthusiasts, exchange ideas, and expand your professional network.
• Relaxation: Unwind after conference sessions and enjoy a laid-back atmosphere at Con Murphy’s Irish Pub.
• No Membership Required: You don’t need to be a member of either user group to participate. All AWS professionals are invited!

What to Expect?

Expect lively discussions and insights. Our team will be there to welcome you, and drinks will be on the house. Come raise a glass with us and celebrate the AWS community!

Secure your spot by signing up here.

See you there! 🥂🌟

Join us at FSP for two cutting-edge talks that delve into the integration of AI within Microsoft 365 and Azure SQL environments. Whether you’re a developer, IT professional, or business executive, this event will provide valuable insights into leveraging AI to enhance productivity, creativity, and collaboration.

17:30 – Arrival & networking
18:00 – First Talk and Q&A
18.45 – Networking & Pizza (with thanks to our hosts FSP)
19:00 – Second Talk and Q&A
20:00 – Close

Sign up now to secure your spot.

The Talks

Launching Copilot for Microsoft 365 (Pete Kemp)

Copilot for Microsoft 365 has the power to positively transform the modern workplace. Using LLMs and integrating your data and Microsoft 365 Apps, Copilot for M365 supports employees to be more productive, creative, and collaborative. Pete will share some of FSP’s experiences working with several organisations on launching Copilot for M365, including some of benefits and challenges it presents.

Query Azure SQL using Natural Language (Adam Buckley)

Are you a database developer who wants to get in on all this ChatGPT action? Maybe you want to integrate a large language model with your database without writing Python code? How about if you could do this with just simple T-SQL statements? In this session Adam dives into tsql-chatgpt which integrates an Azure SQL database with OpenAI models such as GPT-4 using just T-SQL. Automate documentation, unit testing, generate test data and more including turning natural language into SQL queries on your data.

Our Speakers

Pete Kemp is a Principal Consultant in the Advisory team at FSP. He delights in building solutions, diverse teams, and relationships that deliver impactful, innovative, and lasting digital outcomes and products. Throughout his career, Pete has worked in IT consultancies and digital agencies, leading design, engineering teams, and driving digital product innovation for some of the world’s largest organisations. His passion lies in championing the latest digital trends and helping clients embrace them to deliver groundbreaking and meaningful work.

Adam Buckley is Principal Data Engineer at First Central Group. Adam is an experienced leader in Data and Software Engineering, working with Microsoft Data & AI technologies over the last 30 years for many organisations including Logica, Nike, Transunion, Microsoft and most recently First Central Group. Adam has previously published apps for Apple’s iPhone and iPad and now focuses on delivering Data and AI Solutions using Microsoft and Databricks platforms.

Sign up now to secure your spot.

Connect with like-minded tech leaders at the Tech Leadership Collective of Philadelphia on Thursday April 25th from 5:30pm in ‘The Vault’ at The Mulberry.

This will be an informal session, giving you the opportunity to catch up with peers in the industry, discussing the challenges that are affecting you most at this time. Appetizers will be provided. 

The Tech Collective of Philadelphia is a community tailored to high-level tech leaders in the Philadelphia region, committed to building an environment of professional growth, knowledge exchange, and ethical leadership.

If you are a Philadelphia-based tech leader, you can register to join our Tech Leadership Collective, or sign up for our latest event, by completing our Registration Form here.

Join us on Wednesday 24th April from 17:30 at FISCAL Technologies for a collection of Lightning Talks.

A great opportunity to engage with a variety of topics across .NET while connecting with fellow developers in the area.

Sign up via Meetup.com to secure your spot.

Our Speakers

Pooja Nayyar – Overcoming imposter syndrome – career transformation

Shaun Bulbrook – Mutation Testing

Dan Earwicker – Prompt engineering

Additional speakers to be confirmed soon

Plan for the Evening

• 17:30 – Arrival
• 18:00 – First Talks
• 18:35 – Break/Food/Networking
• 19:00 – Second Talks
• 19:30 – Wrap up and close

A big thank you our hosts, Fiscal Technologies, who will be providing some food & drink during the half-way break.

There are limited spots available, so RSVP to secure yours today.

We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday 24th April!

The Talk

Stevan shares how testing, including people, processes, and tools, fit into a DevOps framework. Stevan’s talk will examine the overall development life cycle, and how testing fits into each aspect of that from the perspective of delivering rapid change into production. Stevan hopes the talk will prompt you to investigate your own existing practices and how to evolve them to support DevOps.

Our Speaker

Testing is a passion for Stevan Zivanovic. In the past 30 years that he has been actively involved in testing, he has worked in a wide variety of businesses, from aircraft safety critical systems to financial “start-ups”. Since 2005 he has been presenting at various conferences on adapting approaches to meet the changing and accelerating needs of the “real” world.

Exclusively run by iO Associates, tech and digital recruitment specialists, at iO Meetups, we coordinate and host a variety of dynamic events designed exclusively in the realms of Tech, Digital, and Engineering.

We’re partnering with .NET South West again this month for their Meetup on Tuesday 26th March at Amdaris. We have 2 talks from fantastic speakers – Nurhak Kaya and Kevlin Henney.

Sign-up now to secure your spot.

The Talks:

Integrating Cloudflare CDN with Umbraco Websites
In February 2012, the multinational retailer Walmart run a study to understand how website page performance affects e-commerce conversion rates. The website did $7.7 billion in sales, hit billions of page requests, and hosted millions of active product SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) in 2012.

This study revealed a shocking relationship between page load times and conversion rates and there was a sharp decline in conversion rates as load times increased from 1 to 4 seconds.

Cloudflare CDN (Content Delivery Network)’s performance and security features can dramatically improve load times for users accessing your static and dynamic websites, which can increase customer satisfaction, and potentially drive conversation rates up.

In this talk, Nurhak Kaya will give you the details about how CDNs work, together with setting up Cloudflare CDN for your websites, key features of Cloudflare, creating page rules for full-page caching, and consuming the Cloudflare API programmatically to purge the Cloudflare cache to reflect Umbraco CMS content changes on the Front-end website and display the most up-to-date content to your users.

Program with GUTs
One of the greatest shifts in modern programming practices has been how programmers across many different domains, languages and environments have embraced unit testing. Good unit testing, however, is more than waving NUnit at your C# source. Tests help to make long-term product development cost effective rather than a cost centre, they underpin the effective flow of CI/CD and reduce failure demand on a team.

But the discussion of unit testing goes further than simply writing tests: what makes a good unit test? It is not enough to have tests; poor quality tests can hold back development just as good tests can streamline it. This session looks provides a perspective on what good unit tests (GUTs) can look like with a couple of examples.

The Speakers:

Nurhak Kaya
Nurhak is a Solution Architect at Wattle in Bristol, UK. He’s an Umbraco MVP, a Certified Umbraco Master and an Umbraco CMS Community Team member.

Nurhak is an active Umbraco community member since 2014 and passionate about contributing to Umbraco CMS by working on issues, answering Umbraco forum or StackOverflow questions, writing articles, speaking at events like Umbraco meetups, conferences, UmbraCoffee, or organising events like umBristol meetups.

Kevlin Henney
Kevlin is an independent consultant, trainer, coder, speaker and writer based in Bristol. He’s interested in development practices, programming languages, software design and developer culture, as well as a bunch of other things you can ask him about over a drink. He’s co-authored two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series and edited and contributed to a number of O’Reilly’s 97 Things books.

Sign-up now to secure your spot.

.NET London is back on Wednesday 17 April with two brilliant talks on C#. Andrew Poole will share his insights into Async Method Chaining, while Tim Armstrong explains why Dark Fibre Network management is being rewritten in C#.

Join us from 6pm to catch up with others over some food and drinks, kindly provided by the team at ClearBank, before the talks.

The Talks

Async method chaining in C# => super clear orchestration code

What if there was a way to declaratively describe a chain or flow of async methods, which could be used when handling API requests or messages from a service bus queue or actually anywhere?

Recently, while refactoring a growing piece of business logic, Andrew found a way to achieve this. The logical conclusion is that related flows can be described in one place, in a single piece of orchestration, which is very easy to understand, navigate and debug.

Dark Fibre Network: Rewritten in C#

Dark Fibre Network management hasn’t changed for more than a decade, so why is one of the only Open-Source Fibre report generating solutions being completely rewritten from Python to C#? Project initiator Tim Armstrong explains why and answers your questions.

The Speakers

Andrew Poole

Andrew Poole has been writing code for a living for 15+ years, most recently as an L5 Senior Software Engineer at ClearBank since 2020. He loves solving problems, design and architecture, communicating ideas and the incredible creativity of software engineering. He’s interested in event sourcing, immutable architecture and distributed systems. He also enjoy mentoring others and building great team culture. He has previously been a successful team lead, but what really drives him is striving to write elegant, intentional code which is easy to understand and maintain. He absolutely loves C# and only really dabbles in other languages in order to write better C#. Outside of work Andrew is a husband and father of 2 who enjoys playing bass guitar and making things in his shed.

Tim Armstrong

Tim Armstrong uses his 15 years of experience as an engineer to help others discover and embrace new technology and solve problems through clear guides, tutorials, and sessions. He does his best to provide free mentorship to people who show a genuine passion for technology and drive to learn. Currently working as a Senior Developer Advocate at CloudQuery, he works on Open Source plugins & projects, engaging with the community, and creating Tutorials and explainers for the CloudQuery Youtube channel. He lives by one simple rule, look before you code – Someone has probably already done it better, faster, and cleaner than you have time for.