Open Tech Calendar

We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 12, sponsored by Cucumber!

Mode 2 is a regular meetup about IT innovation within large companies across central Scotland.

Each meetup will feature two short talks and a chance to connect with IT innovators in a relaxed environment with free beer/wine and pizza. The talks for this meetup are:

1: Dr. Sal Freudenberg, Director, Cucumber Ltd

Dr. Sal Freudenberg is Chief Being Sal Officer at Cucumber Ltd. When she’s not hacking, Sal focuses on nurturing more nimble, customer-centric and human(e) ways of working. She holds a PhD in the Psychology of Collaborative Software Development and since being diagnosed as autistic has developed an interest in neurodiversity. Through re-assessing her own traits and neurology, and considering the extra-ordinary people with whom she has worked over her 25+ years in tech, Sal is raising awareness of the benefits of having diversity in our organisations, and is helping the industry to begin to understand how to support and include every kind of brain.

"Neurodiversity"

The tech industry needs all kinds of minds - so how do we support them?

Sometimes in our keenness to collaborate we risk forgetting that teams are still made up of individuals. The diversity that helps create amazing teams and products may ironically be being drummed of us by our own practices and environments. Inadvertently creating a mono-culture when far from being a weakness, our diversity is our biggest strength.

This talk then is about embracing diversity of thinker. About making our collaborations more inclusive. About experimenting with how we can create teams, spaces and practices where people can turn up authentically and have their differences not only supported but celebrated.

2: Mike McQuaid, Senior Software Engineer, GitHub

Mike McQuaid is a senior engineer at GitHub where he works from home in Edinburgh. At GitHub he works on improving the quality of internal and external software whilst attempting to automate himself out of the job.

Outside of work, he is the lead maintainer of the Homebrew package manager for macOS, author of Git in Practice (published with Manning) and has contributed to a wide array of other open source projects including KDE and the Linux kernel.

Previously in his career he’s worked as a full stack engineer and built CI and CD at AllTrails, been an international engineering consultant and lead and trainer at KDAB, setup CI and CD as first employee and engineer at Mendeley and created high-performance network analysis tools at BT.

"How to Not Fail at Using Open-Source Software in Your Organisation"

Almost every company today uses open source software to do business (whether they know it or not). Almost every company isn’t using open source software as effectively as they could. Learn from GitHub’s Mike McQuaid about how to use open source software in your organisation without succumbing to the most common of pitfalls.

Cucumber are also going to facilitate an (optional) paired programming, cyber-dojo exercise (cyber-dojo.org) that will run as people arrive from 6 sharp. If you want to take part, please bring a laptop.

Hope to see you there!

Contact Us:

Mail: mode2meetup@gmail.com
Twitter: @mode2meetup