Join us at .NET Edinburgh’s Meetup on Wednesday 27 March at The Cambridge Bar for a brilliant talk by Andrew Poole on Async Method Chaining.

Sign up now to secure your spot via Meetup.com

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.

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.

Sign up now to secure your spot via Meetup.com

iO Meetups are proud to be long-term supporters of the .NET Edinburgh community and look forward to continuing to support the group in 2024.

Join us at .NET South West’s Meetup on Tuesday 27 February at our iO Offices in Bristol for two talks looking at the Umbraco Content Management system.

Sign up now to secure your spot via Meetup.com

Umbraco is a leading .NET content management system used by brands such as Carlsberg, Volvo and The European Union. Perhaps you’ve seen it mentioned in job ads, or had a play with it years ago in the .NET Framework days. It offers developers high flexibility, security and scalability whilst giving content editors an easy-to-use interface and intuitive editing experience. It’s free and Open-Source, and supported by a community of friendly, highly-engaged developers.

If Carlsberg did .NET Content Management Systems with Lotte Pitcher
In this talk we learn what a .NET developer needs to know to get started with modern (.NET 8) Umbraco. We review its key features, including recently added ones such headless and EF core support, and where the product is heading in the future. Enough for you to determine if Umbraco is a good fit for current or upcoming projects, or if you want to extend your .NET skills and learn something new.

Lotte Pitcher has been building websites for longer than she cares to remember, and has recently joined the Developer Relations team at Umbraco, She is a Microsoft MVP, a long-time open-source contributor and a passionate advocate for being an active member of a healthy, inclusive tech community. Follow her on Twitter.

Live demo : Building an Umbraco site with Carl Sargunar
In this demo, Carl puts together a small website from a template to demonstrate some of the features of the Umbraco CMS. While we can’t look at all the features available, we get a good overview of the various stages in putting a website together

Starting with v13 of Umbraco, a new feature also allows headless access to your content, so we look at building a cross platform app in .NET Maui to consume content from your CMS

Carl Sargunar is a .NET developer who has been building web and mobile apps for the last decade or so, and for the majority of that time his favourite CMS has been Umbraco

Sign up now to secure your spot via Meetup.com

iO Meetups are proud to be long-term supporters of the .NET South West community and look forward to hosting another of these Meetups at our offices.

Join us at the Tech Leadership Collective of Tampa on Wednesday February 28th from 5:30pm at our Tampa Office where we will be discussing ‘Visions for 2024’.

With 2024 well and truly here, take a moment to think about where this year is taking you and what you would like to see from your leadership and business this year. Meet with fellow tech leaders in the Tampa region over pizza and drinks, building valuable connections and sharing ideas for the coming year.

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

If you are a Tampa-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.

Kick start your 2024 with our first Meetup of the year.

Join iO Meetups at .NET South West’s latest Meetup on Tuesday 9th January from 7pm at our offices in Central Bristol, where Catalin Rosu presents a ‘double-header’ of talks on ‘Evolving Clean Architecture’ and ‘.NET Aspire’.

Register for this Meetup here.

Evolving Clean Architecture to Reduce Tech Debt
Another modern architecture seems to have conquered the .Net Developer’s hearts and minds in the last decade or so, leaving the projects created on older best practices and architectures in a “Technical Debt” state.
Cat uncovers the evolution of software architecture, leading to the clean architecture principles that are shaping .NET development today. He compares popular clean architecture templates and brings theory to life with a hands-on demo.

.NET Aspire: The Local Cloud for Your Microservices
With the growing trend and challenges of microservices, Microsoft developed a new tool with the release of latest .Net 8: .NET Aspire, a descriptive way to build and deploy microservices.
Cat shows how this can simplify and enhance the microservices development with a practical demo of setting up and running microservices locally to showcase the .NET Aspire key features.

Who is our speaker?

Catalin Rosu is the Development Manager at Signal Agency, where he plays a pivotal role in building and leading the engineering team towards Agile Digital Transformation. With nearly two decades in the tech industry, Cat brings a wealth of experience, having previously worked as a Senior Software Engineer at UCAS.

In his personal life, Cat is a family man at heart, particularly enjoying nature-related activities with his loved ones. Despite a busy schedule, he is committed to helping others grow in their tech careers through mentoring on various platforms.

Register HERE for our latest Meetup.

Join us at the Tech Leadership Collective of Philadelphia on Wednesday January 24th from 6pm at our Philadelphia Office where we will be joined by Excellence Trainer, Navixha Bagga.

Navixha will host a 60-minute session that will help you jump start your new year. Navixha will share her insights into identifying your barriers and creating an intentional and incremental plan to overcome them with an opportunity to progress towards your defined outcomes by the end of the session. There will then be a chance to move into breakout groups to dive deeper in your personal takeaways and action points for 2024.

A member of the Tech Leadership Collective of Philadelphia, Navixha Bagga has over 25 years of experience as a Personal Excellence Mentor, Leadership and Life Coach, Seasoned Corporate Leader, and DEI Advocate. She passionately champions women’s leadership, recognizing women as a societal cornerstone with insightful, effective, and inherent leadership qualities. Her own strategic leadership has helped organizations align with their strategic vision and optimize processes for enhanced value realization. Simultaneously, her development and empowerment programs enable leaders to unlock their own, and their employees’, full potential, fostering their most dynamic and effective selves.

The Tech Collective of Philadelphia is a community tailored to high-level tech leaders in the Philadelphia region, committed to fostering 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.

Sign up HERE for our latest iO Meetup.

Join us at our Gloucester & Cheltenham Meetup on Thursday 18^th January at Ecclesiastical for two fascinating talks exploring modern software development. We are thrilled to be joined by two fantastic speakers: ClearBank’s Andrew Poole shares his insights into using async method chaining in C# to create clear orchestration code. While, Confused.com’s Chris Taylor explains how to build effective pipelines to deploy your code using Azure DevOps.

Whether you’re an experienced developer or just starting out, gain invaluable insights from leading professionals in the industry that will elevate your understanding and skills in today’s software development landscape, by registering for our latest iO Meetup here.

With free pizza and drinks and the opportunity for a fantastic evening of insights and networking, you don’t want to miss this one.

Andrew Poole: 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.

Chris Taylor: Keep it simple folks! Building effective pipelines to deploy your code using Azure DevOps

It is really easy to fall into the trap of building complicated, logic ridden pipelines, usually created by a central team. On the tin they look great however when they go wrong they take an age to fix, and require SME knowledge that exists outside of the team!

In this talk Chris takes you through how to create simple and effective build and release pipelines in Azure DevOps, leaning into containers and Microsoft Azure, making sure you can deploy with speed, stability and most importantly confidence.

Who are our speakers?

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.

Chris Taylor is a Director of Engineering at Confused.com specialising in Platform Engineering, DevOps and SRE, having previously been a DevOps Consultant for 6+ years. He’s worked with organisations large and small, helping to implement principles and practices in pursuit of elite engineering performance and currently leads 3 teams delivering an Internal Developer Platform for Confused.com’s engineering teams. Away from work, he loves extreme sports – snowboarding, biking, skateboarding, surfing – anything he can hurt himself on and get him outside!

Sign up HERE for our latest iO Meetup.

If you’ve read about the cognitive services in Azure and thought “wouldn’t it be cool to use those for something”, well Legado is actually using them! Alex Shiell, Legado’s Head Sotware Engineer, takes us through the services on offer and how they are being used.

Alex Shiell has been building applications in the Microsoft stack for 25 years and is a keen enthusiast of Azure.

We are proud to be supporting DataPhilly with their latest Data Talk in collaboration with DataRobot. This month’s event focusses on ‘Applied Generative AI and How to Build a LLM’.

RSVP list closes on Tuesday 24th at 6pm ET. So please click here to register for the event.

Join us at our Philadelphia Offices, for a fantastic opportunity to hear from three leading Data experts, as well as network with the other members of the iO Associates, DataRobot teams and DataPhilly community.

Event Schedule:

1. Meeting opens at 5:50pm ET
2. Introductions (Starts at 6pm ET)
3. Generative AI for Organizations (30 minutes)
4. Building an LLM (30 minutes)
5. Q&A (10 minutes)
6. Networking event (30 minutes)

Event Speakers:

David Frigeri – Joins us from Slalom where he leads their East Coast practice as the Managing Director of Data & AI. David is known for his exceptional track record in driving high-growth data and analytics initiatives over the span of 25 years.

Quncai Zou – Hails from DataRobot where she works in their Data Science practice of 400+ Data Scientists; specializing in a customer-facing role focused on the Insurance & Financial industries. Quncai has nearly 20 years of experience in the insurance industry with background as an actuarial data scientist at both Munich Re and NJM.

Steve Martin – From DataRobot, will also be joining the speakers above for the Q&A portion of the session. Steven has worked in pre-IPO SaaS startups for the last decade from Snowflake to MongoDB to, most recently, DataRobot. Prior to that, Steven had served in the Intelligence Community utilizing tools like Palantir for network analysis and pattern-of-life forecasting.

iO Associates, tech and digital recruitment specialists, have always been an active member of multiple Meetup groups. We’re passionate about keeping our community positive and engaged by facilitating Meetups with the best speakers on a variety of topics. We encourage you to share this exciting talk with your team and the wider community. 

iO Associates are excited to bring you our latest interviews as part of The Defence Series’ – A conversation with Nick Elliott CB MBE, Chair of Helsing UK, the £100,000,000 man

During our discussion, we covered:

Helsings £100,000,000 investment in to UK defence.

If Ukraine have anything to do with that decision?

How Nick plan’s to spend the £100,000,000?

Which technologies are having tangible results on the battlefield and in protecting our soldiers?

Which technologies are being over-hyped by the media?

How will the next generation of ‘TikTok’ enabled soldiers change the way the military uses digital technologies?

Recruitment, there’s a digital skills gap in the UK, with defence not often seen as a top pick for graduates, how do we attract that talent into UK defence?

How do Helsing go about their recruitment? What makes Helsing such an exciting prospect?

As part of The Defence Series, we are looking to bring together individuals from all walks of life – whether previous service history, working within the MoD, working for a prime or someone that’s just interested in finding out more.

Exploring the Future: PHP 8.3 Is Tomorrow

Damien Seguy guide us through a comprehensive review of PHP 8.3’s new features and improvements. Discover how PHP is continuously evolving to meet the challenges of modern web development, making it even more powerful and efficient than ever before.

In this session, we explore key highlights of PHP 8.3, from typed constants to random extensions (sic), increments improvements to dynamic static value, and much more. Damien provides valuable insights into how these advancements benefit developers, and how you can prepare your code for these new features.

Whether you’re a seasoned PHP developer or just curious about the latest trends in PHP development, check out this iO Meetup. Be part of the PHP community as we embrace the constant modernization of PHP and elephant love.

Watch ‘Exploring the Future: PHP 8.3 is Tomorrow’ on-demand here: