We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup Episode 17.
Mode 2 is a regular meetup about IT innovation within large companies across central Scotland. We're sponsored by Infinity Works and episode 17 is hosted by Solarwinds.
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: Martina Pugliese, Data Science Lead, Mallzee
I work as a Data Science Lead at Mallzee, Edinburgh-based tech startup helping retail making better decisions, aided by data. I’ve always got a bit of fetish for collecting data points, extracting patterns and visualising information, so back then I had decided to study Physics, just to preserve more of my sanity really. I believe and support the democratisation of knowledge, and that using data ethically makes us all better informed and freer.
“Remaining sane in the Age of Data”
Working with data isn’t about using the latest AI research finding. Fundamentally, it is about collecting data that is informative to your question, digging into it to understand its strong and weak points, and battling your own human biases and opinions. One of the easiest mistakes to do is inferring insights from some data points that aren’t proven. Some media use this all the time, and have always done so, however today we are all much better equipped to spot lies. Carefully analysing your data first is something that Big Data hasn’t killed yet, and no off-the-shelf AI tool can do it for you. It’s the human side of Data Science, the most interesting and the hardest. Working with data in a startup also means being flexible and wearing a variety of hats as each day is different. I will explain a bit what I’ve learned along the way about doing “Data Science”, how to not disregard the actual foundations of this discipline and what this field, born out of (often inflated) expectations is developing into.
2: Mark Smith, Senior Developer Advocate, Vonage
Mark is a Senior Developer Advocate at Vonage. He stumbled into Developer Relations 3 years ago when a job advert appeared listing every esoteric interest he had, along with a strong background in engineering and the ability to talk to a crowd. Since then he's discovered that he'd accidentally been doing Developer Relations for years without even realising it was a discipline.
"What the Hell _is_ Dev-Rel?"
Maybe you've met a Developer Evangelist, but you've maybe never heard of a Developer Advocate, and you almost certainly don't know what a Developer Educator is... but it's something to do with _Developers_, right? These, and more, are all roles encompassed by Developer Relations - which may also be a term that's new to you, but may just be something your business needs.
Developer Relations is a difficult thing to pin down, but is fundamentally the discipline of talking to and learning from developers. It's been around for a while now, surprisingly, but it's still a discipline that's in its infancy. This talk will explain what Developer Relations _is_, what it _isn't_, why you might want to do it, and how you can get started. So next time you meet a Developer Advocate you won't have to ask "What the hell _is_ dev-rel?"
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup Episode 16.
Mode 2 is a regular meetup about IT innovation within large companies across central Scotland. We're sponsored by Infinity Works and episode 16 is hosted by Hymans Robertson.
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: Hilde Frydnes, Head of Product, Mallzee
Hilde has worked with product, marketing and understanding users for more than 10 years. She is Head of Product at Mallzee, a retail tech company with a popular shopping app that allows retailers to gain actionable insights on early-stage product performance. Hilde has previously worked at Skyscanner, Google, Macs Adventure and as a strategic marketing consultant. Hilde believes that if you put the user first (and maybe give them some cake), everything else will follow - although you have to work hard to get there!
“But what do you really want? 7 top tips to get practical insights about your users and their needs and desires”
How do we understand our users and what they want from our products? Creating enjoyable, sticky user experiences that audiences keep coming back to is hard. But we can make it easier by making sure we don’t plan, design and build our products in isolation. Talking to our users, gaining insights from their behaviours, digging into the data and making educated guesses that we can test and verify - that’s the secret sauce of building better products. Hilde will tell you 7 practical, tactical and strategic actions you can do - right now! - to give your customers a better experience of your business and your products, and give you that competitive edge.
2: Neil Crawford, Head of Technology, Findmypast
Neil is Head of Technology at Findmypast. He care's deeply about continuous improvement and how they can create sustainable and happy technology teams that have space and freedom to innovate. He came up through games qa, then games programing then made the jump to web technology for the past 10 years. He blogs on the Findmypast tech blog and is an active member of the local meetup scene in Dundee, Scotland.
"True North & Technical debt"
At Findmypast we constantly bickered about the way we worked, what problems we had and how we should fix them. What we needed was a direction and absolute clarity for decision making when it came to improvements to our system of work. We settled on creating our own True North, a set of guiding engineering principles. In this talk I’ll explain how we reached consensus on our True North principles, and how we’re putting them into practice today.
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup Episode 16.
Mode 2 is a regular meetup about IT innovation within large companies across central Scotland. We're sponsored by Infinity Works and episode 16 is hosted by ... (tbc)
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: Hilde Frydnes, Head of Product, Mallzee
Hilde has worked with product, marketing and understanding users for more than 10 years. She is Head of Product at Mallzee, a retail tech company with a popular shopping app that allows retailers to gain actionable insights on early-stage product performance. Hilde has previously worked at Skyscanner, Google, Macs Adventure and as a strategic marketing consultant. Hilde believes that if you put the user first (and maybe give them some cake), everything else will follow - although you have to work hard to get there!
“But what do you really want? 7 top tips to get practical insights about your users and their needs and desires”
How do we understand our users and what they want from our products? Creating enjoyable, sticky user experiences that audiences keep coming back to is hard. But we can make it easier by making sure we don’t plan, design and build our products in isolation. Talking to our users, gaining insights from their behaviours, digging into the data and making educated guesses that we can test and verify - that’s the secret sauce of building better products. Hilde will tell you 7 practical, tactical and strategic actions you can do - right now! - to give your customers a better experience of your business and your products, and give you that competitive edge.
2: Neil Crawford, Head of Technology, Findmypast
Neil is Head of Technology at Findmypast. He care's deeply about continuous improvement and how they can create sustainable and happy technology teams that have space and freedom to innovate. He came up through games qa, then games programing then made the jump to web technology for the past 10 years. He blogs on the Findmypast tech blog and is an active member of the local meetup scene in Dundee, Scotland.
"True North & Technical debt"
At Findmypast we constantly bickered about the way we worked, what problems we had and how we should fix them. What we needed was a direction and absolute clarity for decision making when it came to improvements to our system of work. We settled on creating our own True North, a set of guiding engineering principles. In this talk I’ll explain how we reached consensus on our True North principles, and how we’re putting them into practice today.
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 15, sponsored by Infinity Works!
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: Moca Habibi, IT Delivery Analyst, Sainsbury's Bank
Moca has been with Sainsbury's Bank since December 2017 where he has been working in the Digital Programme. Previously worked in Baillie Gifford, Agenor Technology and Jabil. Moca is a Heriot-Watt University graduate with an MA (Hons) in Business Management.
Always curious about fancy new tech, gaming and e-sports fan and also a marathon-movie watcher.
"Is business analysis dead?"
The role of the traditional business analyst is changing. Adoption of agile ways of working, technology advancements in the financial services and the increasing focus in customer experience, require to rethink this role.
2: Tim Leslie, CTO, Float
Tim joined Float as CTO in January - a little company with a big heart that helps small businesses survive and thrive through effective cash management. Prior to this he managed the development team at Sumdog. He loves his family, his garden and his tractor very much.
"Building a Collaborative Engineering Culture"
Those of us who have been fortunate enough to work in a collaborative environment know how productive it feels. If we’ve been unlucky we know collaboration isn’t always the default state. The bad news is collaboration doesn’t just happen when you put the right people in the same room. The good news is a collaborative culture can be intentionally created. In this talk I will explore why a collaborative culture is so important and I’ll share my take on how to foster one.
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 14, sponsored by Sainsbury's Bank!
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: Jeff Swan (Head of Digital Engineering), Sainsbury's Bank
Jeff is Head of Digital Engineering at Sainsbury's Bank. He has over 25 years of experience in developer, architect and management roles in Financial Services including Bank of Scotland, Tesco Bank and Standard Life. An avid learner who is now somewhat opinionated! Also likes golf, coffee, a good bargain and the odd craft beer.
I'll share what I've learned so far as I've followed the path from development to management roles. If you're a developer thinking about your career path or already a manager of development teams, I'm aiming to help!
2: Kate Ho, Head of Innovation Labs, Sainsbury's Bank
Kate Ho is the Head of Innovation Labs at Sainsbury’s Bank. She’s passionate about creating user experiences that engage and delight people. Previously, she has worked in FreeAgent, Scottish Government, and founded education apps company, Tigerface Games. Her academic background is in Computer Science, and navigated through academia with a BSc (Edinburgh), MSc (Manchester) and a PhD in Requirements Engineering at Edinburgh University.
"What should we work on next?"
Providing clear direction on what to work on next and why is a core part of the Product Manager’s job. In this talk, I’ll cover some of the ways to get to understand how to prioritise work, as well as some of the tools and techniques to get consensus for stakeholder management.
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 14, sponsored by Sainsbury's Bank!
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: Jeff Swan (Head of Digital Engineering), Sainsbury's Bank
Jeff is Head of Digital Engineering at Sainsbury's Bank. He has over 25 years of experience in developer, architect and management roles in Financial Services including Bank of Scotland, Tesco Bank and Standard Life. An avid learner who is now somewhat opinionated! Also likes golf, coffee, a good bargain and the odd craft beer.
function evolveMyCareer (input_role developer) returns manager
I'll share what I've learned so far as I've followed the path from development to management roles. If you're a developer thinking about your career path or already a manager of development teams, I'm aiming to help!
2: Kate Ho, Head of Innovation Labs, Sainsbury's Bank
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 14, sponsored by Sainsbury's Bank!
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: Jeff Swan (Head of Digital Engineering) & Kate Ho (Head of Innovation Labs), Sainsbury's Bank
Talk Title TBC
2: Moca Habibi, IT Delivery Analyst, Sainsbury's Bank
Been with Sainsbury's Bank since December 2017. Previously worked in Baillie Gifford, Agenor Technology and Jabil.
Heriot-Watt University graduate with an MA (Hons) in Business Management.
Always curious about fancy new tech and also a marathon-movie watcher.
Design Thinking - What I learned in the last 12 months.
A newbie's journey in understanding Design Thinking and how it might apply in Financial Services.
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 13, sponsored by SolarWinds!
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: Samantha Bedford, Head of Innovation and New Ways of Working, CYBG
Samantha has 20+ years experience working in digital innovation and transformation in both the US and UK. Samantha was the first UK Managing Director of Match.com which she grew exponentially, making online dating acceptable and developing a new category. She led digital at Vodafone bringing new experiences and services to customers to help them to self serve and buy online. She has consulted with a number of start-ups helping them to identify technology to develop innovative business models and mentored a number of accelerators.
How to be a start-up on the inside of a corporate
Samantha currently leads new ways of working at CYBG (Clydesdale Yorkshire Bank Group). With a broad remit Samantha’s role straddles technology and innovation using agile start-up methodologies to deliver new customer experiences at pace.
2: Eileen McLaren, COO - Cognitive Geology
Eileen McLaren, Chief Operating Officer at Cognitive Geology is one of the best known faces in the Scottish IT scene. Previously VP of Engineering at FanDuel and Development Manager at Skyscanner, Eileen joined Cognitive Geology as their VP of Software Engineering in 2017 before being promoted to COO and joining the board.
Eileen was short listed for the prestigious Women In IT Awards 2018 Business Role Model Of The Year.
How to scale a Unicorn - or ‘lessons learned from the start-up roller coaster’!
Eileen will share some experiences and lessons learned from her early days in SkyScanner and Fanduel, and her early experiences from Cognitive Geology. These will focus around the possible growing pains and how to avoid them. This should lead to plenty of discussion!
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 (http://cyber-dojo.org/) that will run as people arrive from 6 sharp. If you want to take part, please bring a laptop.
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 (http://cyber-dojo.org/) that will run as people arrive from 6 sharp. If you want to take part, please bring a laptop.
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.
"Neural Diversity"
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 (http://cyber-dojo.org/) that will run as people arrive from 6 sharp. If you want to take part, please bring a laptop.
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.
"Neural Diversity"
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.
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: Sallyann Freudenberg, Director, Cucumber Ltd
With more than 25 years in the world of software development, Sal uniquely blends over ten years of doing, coaching and teaching Agile approaches with her research into the psychology of programming.
An experienced and popular speaker, most recently she has been speaking out to the tech industry on neurodiversity and how to support the different kinds of brains our industry needs. Her talks include keynotes at Oredev, CAST, GoTo (Berlin) and Lean Agile Scotland. She has also spoken several times at the US Agile conference, the XP20XX series of conferences in Europe, QCON, London Lean Kanban Days, various European Scrum Gatherings, The symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing and the symposium on Cooperative Systems Design Conference (COOP). This year you can catch Sal as keynote speaker at DevOps Days Atlanta and The EuroStar conference.
"Neural Diversity"
Blurb TBC
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.
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 11, sponsored by Standard Life!
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: Blake Wellman, Digital Strategy Senior Consultant, Monitor Deloitte
Blake Wellman has worked with Deloitte for 5 years, two in Canada and three in London. Prior to Deloitte, he worked in investment banking helping get access to capital for new Ventures and unproven businesses. He is now one of the leaders on Deloitte’s global Venture Path team, which focuses on helping large corporates build and test new ventures, and improving operating models to create more sustainable environments for innovation. In the last few years at Deloitte he has helped build innovation functions for a range of businesses in different sectors, and has launched over 10 new corporate ventures to market.
"Successful Lean Startup Innovation for Large Companies"
Blake’s talk will cover the challenges many large corporates face when trying to apply Lean Startup to new proposition development. He will also talk about the lifecycle of a new business idea in a corporate context, drawing on his experience of watching ideas succeed and fail in large companies to facilitate a discussion around how companies can create better environments to foster sustainable innovation.
2: Matt Wynne, Founder & CEO, Cucumber Ltd.
Matt is one of the world's leading BDD practitioners. A programmer, coach, trainer, and popular international speaker, he was as invited to join the Cucumber core team in 2009. Together with Aslak Hellesøy, he's co-author of The Cucumber Book, Behaviour-Driven Development for Developers and Testers and a co-founder of Cucumber Ltd, the company behind Cucumber.
"Why BDD can save agile"
Matt is frequently asked to consult with organisations who want to introduce Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). Time after time, he meets teams who are trapped doing half-arsed agile. They do the easy, obvious, visible agile practices, and none of the powerful, hard-to-master, hard-to-see ones.
When these teams ask for help learning BDD, we get a chance to remind them how important conversations and collaboration are in software development. We teach them to write tests before they write code, as a way to explore and discover the hidden details of a requirement just before they dive in and start building it. This talk will make you wince with recognition, laugh with despair, and inspire you with stories of teams that have finally, after years of flaccid scrumming, discovered the true collaborative heart of agile software development. You’ll see patterns you recognise from your own teams, and gain insights about how to fix them.
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 11, sponsored by Standard Life!
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: Blake Wellman, Digital Strategy Senior Consultant, Monitor Deloitte
Blake Wellman has worked with Deloitte for 5 years, two in Canada and three in London. Prior to Deloitte, he worked in investment banking helping get access to capital for new Ventures and unproven businesses. He is now one of the leaders on Deloitte’s global Venture Path team, which focuses on helping large corporates build and test new ventures, and improving operating models to create more sustainable environments for innovation. In the last few years at Deloitte he has helped build innovation functions for a range of businesses in different sectors, and has launched over 10 new corporate ventures to market.
"Successful Lean Startup Innovation for Large Companies"
2: Matt Wynne, Founder & CEO, Cucumber Ltd.
Matt is one of the world's leading BDD practitioners. A programmer, coach, trainer, and popular international speaker, he was as invited to join the Cucumber core team in 2009. Together with Aslak Hellesøy, he's co-author of The Cucumber Book, Behaviour-Driven Development for Developers and Testers and a co-founder of Cucumber Ltd, the company behind Cucumber.
"Why BDD can save agile"
Matt is frequently asked to consult with organisations who want to introduce Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). Time after time, he meets teams who are trapped doing half-arsed agile. They do the easy, obvious, visible agile practices, and none of the powerful, hard-to-master, hard-to-see ones.
When these teams ask for help learning BDD, we get a chance to remind them how important conversations and collaboration are in software development. We teach them to write tests before they write code, as a way to explore and discover the hidden details of a requirement just before they dive in and start building it. This talk will make you wince with recognition, laugh with despair, and inspire you with stories of teams that have finally, after years of flaccid scrumming, discovered the true collaborative heart of agile software development. You’ll see patterns you recognise from your own teams, and gain insights about how to fix them.
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 11, sponsored by Standard Life!
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: Blake Wellman, Digital Strategy Senior Consultant, Monitor Deloitte
Blake Wellman has worked with Deloitte for 5 years, two in Canada and three in London. Prior to Deloitte, he worked in investment banking helping get access to capital for new Ventures and unproven businesses. He is now one of the leaders on Deloitte’s global Venture Path team, which focuses on helping large corporates build and test new ventures, and improving operating models to create more sustainable environments for innovation. In the last few years at Deloitte he has helped build innovation functions for a range of businesses in different sectors, and has launched over 10 new corporate ventures to market.
"Successful Lean Startup Innovation for Large Companies"
2: Matt Wynne, Founder & CEO, Cucumber Ltd.
Matt is one of the world's leading BDD practitioners. A programmer, coach, trainer, and popular international speaker, he was as invited to join the Cucumber core team in 2009. Together with Aslak Hellesøy, he's co-author of The Cucumber Book, Behaviour-Driven Development for Developers and Testers and a co-founder of Cucumber Ltd, the company behind Cucumber.
If you need his Twitter handle, it's @mattwynne and we're also at @cucumberbdd.
"Why BDD can save agile"
Matt is frequently asked to consult with organisations who want to introduce Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). Time after time, he meets teams who are trapped doing half-arsed agile. They do the easy, obvious, visible agile practices, and none of the powerful, hard-to-master, hard-to-see ones.
When these teams ask for help learning BDD, we get a chance to remind them how important conversations and collaboration are in software development. We teach them to write tests before they write code, as a way to explore and discover the hidden details of a requirement just before they dive in and start building it. This talk will make you wince with recognition, laugh with despair, and inspire you with stories of teams that have finally, after years of flaccid scrumming, discovered the true collaborative heart of agile software development. You’ll see patterns you recognise from your own teams, and gain insights about how to fix them.
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 8, sponsored this time by Standard Life Aberdeen.
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: Alistair Hann, Former CTO (Skyscanner) & Stuart Davidson, Enginering Manager (Skyscanner)
From 26 to 2.6 million releases per year
As Skyscanner scaled from an engineering team of 30 with one website and three services to a team of 100 engineers, release frequency halved. This is the story of the turnaround as the company went on to grow to 400 engineers, with over 100 services, releasing at hundreds of times the previous rate. The next goal is 10,000 releases per day – this talk will share how Skyscanner is approaching that and the implications for tooling, processes, and how the company thinks about writing software.
Testing between apps is hard? It doesn't have to be! In this talk we'll go over the age old problems of microservice integration testing and the toolkits and frameworks used to solve it.
Getting to Standard Life House
The building is on Lothian Road, and you can enter under the main stairs at the doors in the walkway that cuts under the building.
Technology is evolving at an amazing rate, and customer expectations with it. Headlines are dominated by tech companies disrupting the world with new technology and fearless business models.
However many of the organisations we work in are far older than the Internet. Legacy technology, organisational silos and hierarchies are all around. Every decision involves many stakeholders and complex processes are everywhere. Change of any kind can be slow and difficult.
Can Silicon Valley thinking translate to our established, risk-exposed, regulated organisations? Should it? In any case, how can we apply technology and creativity to delight our customers and avoid being overtaken by competitors or disruptors?
We're aiming to create a friendly, relaxed environment where we can discuss the reality of innovation in larger organisations. There will be two short talks per month, with plenty of opportunity to network afterwards over free beer/wine and pizza. The talks will cover a broad range of topics about technology, business and culture change.
We need ideas and volunteers for future talks, although the golden rule is: no sales pitches! We're also looking for venues for future events, so please let us know if you are able to host a meetup.
We'd love to build a diverse audience representing the increasingly blurred line between IT and business across different industries: financial services, public sector, energy, consultancies etc.
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 7, sponsored this time by Hymans Robertson
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: Scott Finnie, Product Architect, Hymans Robertson
#agilerobocloud: 3 years behind the buzzwords
In January 2014, Hymans Robertson embarked on delivering a new “Robo-advice” offering using cloud-based, agile delivery. 3 years later we have a successful product that’s won several industry awards. In this talk, we’ll take a frank look at the journey behind the product: what went well, what didn’t; what we’ve learned and where we still have puzzles.
2: Paul Makin, Digital Finance & Identity Consultant, Trouver
Despite the presence of some very bright people, the established financial sector does not have a reputation for innovation. During this short presentation, Paul will explore why this is the case, and how - and if - it can be addressed. He’ll be drawing on his experience of working with teams developing innovative services in banks and other corporates, looking at where this has gone well, where it has failed, and what lessons can be drawn.
Paul has been working in fintech since long before it got that name, from the truly innovative (various precursors to Bitcoin) to the mundane (variations of card products for banks). His principal claim to fame is as the concept developer for M-Pesa in Kenya, by far the most successful non-bank financial service in the world. He has worked with banks, non-banks, financial regulators and others across Africa, South Asia, Europe and North America. Sometimes his ideas have survived the process.
Getting to Hymans Robertson
You can enter Hymans Robertson via the main entrance on Semple street.
Technology is evolving at an amazing rate, and customer expectations with it. Headlines are dominated by tech companies disrupting the world with new technology and fearless business models. However many of the organisations we work in are far older than the Internet. Legacy technology, organisational silos and hierarchies are all around. Every decision involves many stakeholders and complex processes are everywhere. Change of any kind can be slow and difficult.
Can Silicon Valley thinking translate to our established, risk-exposed, regulated organisations? Should it? In any case, how can we apply technology and creativity to delight our customers and avoid being overtaken by competitors or disruptors?
We're aiming to create a friendly, relaxed environment where we can discuss the reality of innovation in larger organisations. There will be two short talks per month, with plenty of opportunity to network afterwards over free beer/wine and pizza. The talks will cover a broad range of topics about technology, business and culture change.
We need ideas and volunteers for future talks, although the golden rule is: no sales pitches! We're also looking for venues for future events, so please let us know if you are able to host a meetup.
We'd love to build a diverse audience representing the increasingly blurred line between IT and business across different industries: financial services, public sector, energy, consultancies etc.
(Please note that space at this event is limited, so if you are unable to attend could you please cancel your order!)
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 5, sponsored this time by Royal London
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:
Stuart Barlow, Senior Systems Developer, Standard Life
Fear and Testing in Edin-Vegas
A story of process, technology, people and how visible, repeatable testing starts to shine a light and open the doors to a maintainable system.
Rob Howell, Senior Javascript Engineer, Tesco Bank
React in the Enterprise
React has proven to be a very popular tool for web application development, but within enterprise-scale businesses it presents a unique set of strengths and challenges. I would like to give a basic introduction to what React is, why companies are using it, and provide some insight into how it fits in the enterprise.
Getting to Royal London
The building is on the corner of Thistle street and North St David Street, very centrally located off St Andrew Square.
Technology is evolving at an amazing rate, and customer expectations with it. Headlines are dominated by tech companies disrupting the world with new technology and fearless business models.
However many of the organisations we work in are far older than the Internet. Legacy technology, organisational silos and hierarchies are all around. Every decision involves many stakeholders and complex processes are everywhere. Change of any kind can be slow and difficult.
Can Silicon Valley thinking translate to our established, risk-exposed, regulated organisations? Should it? In any case, how can we apply technology and creativity to delight our customers and avoid being overtaken by competitors or disruptors?
We're aiming to create a friendly, relaxed environment where we can discuss the reality of innovation in larger organisations. There will be two short talks per month, with plenty of opportunity to network afterwards over free beer/wine and pizza. The talks will cover a broad range of topics about technology, business and culture change.
We need ideas and volunteers for future talks, although the golden rule is: no sales pitches! We're also looking for venues for future events, so please let us know if you are able to host a meetup.
We'd love to build a diverse audience representing the increasingly blurred line between IT and business across different industries: financial services, public sector, energy, consultancies etc.
Hope to see you there!
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 5, sponsored this time by Registers of Scotland!
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:
Tom Meade, Digital Director, Registers of Scotland
Edge of the Abyss - Registers of Scotland's rise from the IT depths
Climbing from the depths of explaining IT mis-management to the Public Accounts committee, to becoming an exemplar for Agile delivery isn’t an easy adventure. It’s not to say it can’t also be fun. It’s hard. It takes a lot of bright people and bright ideas. It takes a lot of discipline and a lot of engineering skills. It takes a lot of support, a lot of stamina and it takes a lot of hard decisions. In the last 2 years we have changed utterly and become a great place to work – and critically deliver great outputs to our users. But you can’t have the sexy stuff without the unsexy. I’ll explain.
Greg Urquhart, Founder, Agile 4-12
How to work at scale and remain Agile; alternatives to what we’re told will work but don’t.
Over 3.5 years Skyscanner’s Product Development team scaled from 60 people in Edinburgh to more than 650 people in 8 offices world-wide, launched many new products (such as Hotels search and a travel platform that now powers 400+ partners, including MSN and Yahoo! Japan) and massively increased their agility (from 6 weekly release trains to on demand blue/green deployments). Many of the approaches we tried out to support this transformation are being actively promoted as industry best practice – yet we found they just didn’t work. I’ll tell you about what didn’t work and the alternatives that did.
Getting to the Registers of Scotland
The front door to the building is situated on London Road
Lothian Buses 26, 5, 15, 44, 45, 4 pass the front door of the building.
There is also parking available via the entrance to RoS at Smokey Brae, just round from London Road
Technology is evolving at an amazing rate, and customer expectations with it. Headlines are dominated by tech companies disrupting the world with new technology and fearless business models.
However many of the organisations we work in are far older than the Internet. Legacy technology, organisational silos and hierarchies are all around. Every decision involves many stakeholders and complex processes are everywhere. Change of any kind can be slow and difficult.
Can Silicon Valley thinking translate to our established, risk-exposed, regulated organisations? Should it? In any case, how can we apply technology and creativity to delight our customers and avoid being overtaken by competitors or disruptors?
We're aiming to create a friendly, relaxed environment where we can discuss the reality of innovation in larger organisations. There will be two short talks per month, with plenty of opportunity to network afterwards over free beer/wine and pizza. The talks will cover a broad range of topics about technology, business and culture change.
We need ideas and volunteers for future talks, although the golden rule is: no sales pitches! We're also looking for venues for future events, so please let us know if you are able to host a meetup.
We'd love to build a diverse audience representing the increasingly blurred line between IT and business across different industries: financial services, public sector, energy, consultancies etc.
Hope to see you there!
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 5, sponsored this time by Registers of Scotland!
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:
Tom Meade, Digital Director, Registers of Scotland
Edge of the Abyss - Registers of Scotland's rise from the IT depths
Climbing from the depths of explaining IT mis-management to the Public Accounts committee, to becoming an exemplar for Agile delivery isn’t an easy adventure. It’s not to say it can’t also be fun. It’s hard. It takes a lot of bright people and bright ideas. It takes a lot of discipline and a lot of engineering skills. It takes a lot of support, a lot of stamina and it takes a lot of hard decisions. In the last 2 years we have changed utterly and become a great place to work – and critically deliver great outputs to our users. But you can’t have the sexy stuff without the unsexy. I’ll explain.
2nd Speaker TBC
We're in the process of finalising our 2nd speaker, watch this space!
Getting to the Registers of Scotland
The front door to the building is situated on London Road
Lothian Buses 26, 5, 15, 44, 45, 4 pass the front door of the building.
There is also parking available via the entrance to RoS at Smokey Brae, just round from London Road
Technology is evolving at an amazing rate, and customer expectations with it. Headlines are dominated by tech companies disrupting the world with new technology and fearless business models.
However many of the organisations we work in are far older than the Internet. Legacy technology, organisational silos and hierarchies are all around. Every decision involves many stakeholders and complex processes are everywhere. Change of any kind can be slow and difficult.
Can Silicon Valley thinking translate to our established, risk-exposed, regulated organisations? Should it? In any case, how can we apply technology and creativity to delight our customers and avoid being overtaken by competitors or disruptors?
We're aiming to create a friendly, relaxed environment where we can discuss the reality of innovation in larger organisations. There will be two short talks per month, with plenty of opportunity to network afterwards over free beer/wine and pizza. The talks will cover a broad range of topics about technology, business and culture change.
We need ideas and volunteers for future talks, although the golden rule is: no sales pitches! We're also looking for venues for future events, so please let us know if you are able to host a meetup.
We'd love to build a diverse audience representing the increasingly blurred line between IT and business across different industries: financial services, public sector, energy, consultancies etc.
Hope to see you there!
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 4, sponsored this time by RBS!
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:
Rachel Willmer
Firebase and what it can do for you
Firebase was an easy-to-use real-time database. And then Google bought
the company. This year, Google repositioned Firebase as a complete
mobile platform that helps you quickly develop, deploy and monetise
high-quality apps. In this talk, Rachel will give you an overview of
what Firebase can do for you, and a frank opinion of what's good (and
not so good) about it.
Rachel Willmer has been working at the “bleeding edge” of technology for
30 years, as programmer, network engineer, manager, startup founder.
She remains insatiably curious about how today’s new technology gives
birth to tomorrow’s new business opportunity.
She is a freelance consultant and a Google Developer Expert for Firebase.
Udita Banerjee, RBS
Open Innovation, APIs, and how RBS is the #BankOfAPIs
Udita works for the RBS Solutions Innovation Engineering team and is helping create and communicate the API strategy for the bank. She is a serial Hackathon organiser and an online and social media marketer. She has led initiatives to communicate RBS’ strategy internally and externally and is focussed on fostering and developing relationships with FinTechs.
Getting There:
This time round, we’re excited to announce that the event will be sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland and hosted at their Gogarburn facility. This is a very impressive building and is well worth a visit - as well as being the bank’s global HQ it is also home to their new Entrepreneurial Centre and Open Experience.
It’s easy to get to Gogarburn by bus or tram. Several of us will be meeting at the tram stop on Shandwick Place at 17:30 to head out to Gogarburn, we’ll see you there if you want to travel together. We’ll also be getting the tram back into the city centre after the event, and heading to the pub as usual!
We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 4, sponsored this time by RBS!
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:
Rachel Wilmer
Talk on Firebase - more details TBC
Udita Banerjee, RBS
Open Innovation, APIs, and how RBS is the #BankOfAPIs
Udita works for the RBS Solutions Innovation Engineering team and is helping create and communicate the API strategy for the bank. She is a serial Hackathon organiser and an online and social media marketer. She has led initiatives to communicate RBS’ strategy internally and externally and is focussed on fostering and developing relationships with FinTechs.
Getting There:
This time round, we’re excited to announce that the event will be sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland and hosted at their Gogarburn facility. This is a very impressive building and is well worth a visit - as well as being the bank’s global HQ it is also home to their new Entrepreneurial Centre and Open Experience.
It’s easy to get to Gogarburn by bus or tram. Several of us will be meeting at the tram stop on Shandwick Place at 17:30 to head out to Gogarburn, we’ll see you there if you want to travel together. We’ll also be getting the tram back into the city centre after the event, and heading to the pub as usual!
We're aiming to create a friendly, relaxed environment where we can discuss the reality of innovation in larger organisations.
There will be two short talks per month, with plenty of opportunity to network afterwards over free beer/wine and pizza. The talks will cover a broad range of topics about technology, business and culture change.
We need ideas and volunteers for future talks, although the golden rule is: no sales pitches! We're also looking for venues for future events, so please let us know if you are able to host a meetup.
We'd love to build a diverse audience representing the increasingly blurred line between IT and business across different industries: financial services, public sector, energy, consultancies etc.
Hope to see you there!
Expired changed:Not ExpiredEdited at by Sarah Lister
New!Title changed:Mode 2 MeetupTwitter changed:mode2meetupEdited at by jarofgreen