Haydn Peterwald

Building a platform for Software-Defined Vehicles

Decoupling automotive software and hardware development while ensuring seamless deployment of software functions to test and production fleets is key as the industry moves from hundreds of discrete ECUs to high performance computing (HPC) vehicle architectures. Software-defined vehicles will see the worlds of embedded electrical/electronic systems merge with cloud-native computing over the next decade. Join me for an overview of the Continental Automotive Edge platform being developed on AWS to deliver this change.

Chris Brown

Cryptography: The maths behind encryption

In this talk we will take a look into how symmetric and asymmetric encryption actually work behind the scenes. Specifically we will take a step by step walkthrough for AES and RSA encryption, before learning about how we can exchange keys using the Diffie-Hellman key exchange method.

Hugh Kaznowski

Distributed Systems: a very broad overview of their problems

When people think of distributed systems, their first thought is probably something like REST APIs. The topic, obviously, is significantly larger than that. I will present many dimensions to the problem of distributing computation, the pitfalls and fallacies, giving explanations to some of the algorithms for solving the challenges, and highlighting some of the parallels with concurrent programming on a single computer. If you are a specialist in the area then this won’t be of particular interest, but to anyone who feels they are yeeting APIs and messages without consequence I would like to share some thoughts on challenges to be mindful of in your next designs.

Colin Eberhardt

GitHub Copilot - Life with an AI-powered pair programmer

Last month GitHub released Copilot, an AI powered tool that provides surprising accurate suggestions ranging from a few lines of code to entire functions. Copilot uses a vast and powerful AI model that is trained on billions of lines of open source code from GitHub. This, combined with the context provided by your code and comments, allows it to provide amazingly accurate suggestions. This is no simple autocomplete, this is pair programming with a robot! From my experiences so far, while Copilot has a real "wow" factor, there are some limitations, most notably the unpredictability of its suggestions and the cognitive load required to review the code it generates. This tool also opens up many interesting debates, from licencing concerns (is this really fair use of open source code? and what about attribution?), to the existential - are we going to be replaced by robots? If you're interested to see a glimpse of what AI-assisted programming might look like in the future, then come along. The robots are coming...

Danilo Poccia

What Can You Do with Serverless – In 2021!

Serverless is always evolving (faster than any definition) and each year new capabilities simplify existing workloads and enable new applications to be implemented in an easier, more efficient way. At AWS, we focused our efforts to increase performance, give options on how to package and deploy, optimize costs for faster interactions, and simplify service integrations. Looking at some recent launches, we introduce the reasoning behind the new features, and how to use them to reduce architecture complexity, including real world examples of what AWS customers are doing, so that you can focus on creating value for YOUR customers.

Dave Farley

Scaling Up!

As Fred Brooks so famously said in "The Mythical Man Month" "You can't make a baby in a month with 9 women" so how do we scale software development? What does it take to build complex systems on a massive scale? What should we scale and what shouldn't we? Spoiler, the answer is not bigger, more complex procedures and processes, stand aside SAFe! This stuff is about applying information theory and engineering principles to software development.

Jon McNestrie

Do leaders dream of mental well-being?

Over the last year leading teams and indeed being part of them has been a little different. We'll look at how leaders can help teams to cope with difficult times? We'll explore how the role of leaders & managers in tech teams has changed in a remote world & consider the mental health continuum & really looking after people. Let's also have a little peak into what might come next as we start to get back together in the real world.

Ali Spittel

Create an Application Backend in Clicks with the Amplify Admin UI

There's a lot that goes into building a modern application: the frontend for users, data persistence, user authentication and authorization, business logic, cloud deployment, and much more. The AWS Amplify Admin UI allows users to create and deploy an offline-ready application backend in clicks and then extend it with code, lowering the complexity of fullstack development for frontend and mobile developers. We'll build a fullstack application backed by multiple AWS services including Cognito, Appsync, and S3 in minutes.

Cameron Trotter

ML for Conservation: Who's Fin is This?

In this talk, we will take a deep dive into the world of conservation tech, an emerging area of applied machine learning. Focussing on marine conservation, we'll examine how ML can be a force for good in helping protect some of the world's most vulnerable species and better inform conservationists about the animals they study, specifically through the use of Siamese Neural Networks, an exciting and developing subset of more traditional Convolutional Neural Networks

Steven Waterman

I built a website to automatically edit audiobooks

Using 6 experimental web APIs and some Soviet maths

I built https://narration.studio as a way to automate the process of editing the narration for my blog posts. As it turns out, that's not a simple task, and it's even harder when you want it to happen in pure Javascript. This is how I did it.

Paul Featonby, Nick Martin, Olly Marsay and Kate Trimble

Bump: We sprinted the London Marathon

As I’m sure you’re aware, the headlines of 2020 have largely been centred around the COVID-19 pandemic. It has therefore been necessary to apply social distancing in public and in the workplace. This can be tricky so why not use technology to our advantage and turn social distancing into an effortless, trackable system? This talk is about a new and innovative social distancing system called “Bump”. The system aims to keep people safe during the COVID-19 pandemic and it even supported the 2020 London Marathon, helping to reduce risk and improve the track & trace capabilities during the event. Part of the team from Tharsus, who were responsible for creating Bump, will demonstrate and give a deep dive into its logic and implementation. Let’s see how they sprinted the London Marathon and didn't lose their breath.

Faye Ellis

Tips and Best Practices for the AWS Security Specialty Certification

Get the lowdown on how to prepare for the AWS Security Specialty Certification and pass this difficult and sought after certification exam the very first time!

We will identify the benefits of gaining the certification, explore the Security Specialty exam guide and the amazing free resources that can help you to prepare for the exam including looking at some sample questions and my own tips for studying.

Jim Hooker

Cyber Security in the Supply Chain

Your next hack is coming from your friends

Whilst you can have great security technology and processes in your business, your suppliers might not be so careful with your data. In this talk I will tell you a story of where there may be flaws in your data security and what you should be mindful of in your next tech venture.

Jason Bell

UX Horror Stories

It's Halloween, let's share some terrifying UX stories from product and service development

What's the worst thing you've ever heard in a meeting? The thing that makes you want to curl up into a little ball and weep. We've all had them, but have yours ever been bad enough to turn into a talk? Jason will share some of the worst things he's heard and how you and your teams can avoid them. We spend so much time trying to engage users, how can we get teams engaged with our users? How do we best incorporate UX teams and research into agile teams? So join Jason, 'take it offline', 'peel back the onion', and 'let's take a 20,000 foot view' of the horrifying things we hear in meetings, and how we can survive the night.

Helena Hill

Dashboard UI: Technology vs. User?

Designing dashboards for people

From drop shipping to fintech and ecommerce to recruitment, user dashboards are a common tool for allowing users an element of ownership in a journey they have with a process or brand. However, time and time again, companies put the end user last when designing dashboard interfaces. We'll take a look at what is required to ensure users not only enjoy using a dashboard but how to create an experience which ensures long term use and customer advocacy.

Leigh Rathbone

The future of tech, and the role of the mobile phone

Is the mobile phone dead?

I'll bring to life my journey through tech, and why I do that is so I can predict what tech is going to look like like in the future, the role of the mobile phone, and what skills will be needed in order to survive.

Phil Johnson

Chatbot Engines with Google Dialogflow

Automate yourself with a Facebook Messenger account hooked up to a Google DialogFlow chatbot engine. Train your automated self and add intelligence using webhooks to custom webservices.

Jon Skeet

Crash, bang, wallop: miscellaneous lessons from exploring a drum kit

In the summer of 2019 I bought an electronic drum kit. I'm thoroughly enjoying playing it (badly) but I've spent even more time talking to the kit over a USB MIDI connection, in an application which allows you to load, edit and save the drum kit configuration. Personal projects are always fertile grounds for learning and reflecting, unburdened by deadlines and other external forces. This session looks at specific aspects of the (C#) code - particularly mutability and efficiency - but more importantly, it reflects on the nature of personal projects and how we can use them to become more effective in our professional coding lives.

Stephen Powers

Limitations of Sentiment Analysis

I'm sorry I don't do sarcasm

Sentiment Analysis has become an increasingly popular tool for businesses, public bodies and researchers in aiding decision making by mining data for useful information. With a rush of natural language processing service providers entering the market, we must ask ourselves ‘how accurate can sentiment analysis really be?’. This talk sets out to explore this very question by looking at data containing political opinions, which exposes one of sentiment analysis’s greatest weaknesses – sarcasm. We will discuss briefly the methodology of building a simple API to collect tweets, the algorithm used in this study to analyse sentiment and the key findings.

Colin Eberhardt

Build Your Own WebAssembly Compiler

For more than 20 years JavaScript has been the only 'native' language of the web. That's all changed with the release of WebAssembly. In the coming years, you'll see people writing web apps in Rust, C#, C++ and all manner of other languages. But just what is WebAssembly? And what’s all the fuss about? WebAssembly is a low-level compilation target, which means that it is unlikely you’ll use it directly. However, as developers and hackers, we love to know how technology works! In this talk, we will look at some of the internals of WebAssembly, explore how it works ‘under the hood’, and look at how you can create your own (simple) compiler that targets this runtime.

Bartosz Jedrzejewski

The journey to DevOps

I will talk about meaning of DevOps and a practical way teams can embark on the journey to adopting the mindset and practices. The talk is based on my experience introducing DevOps to people and organisations over the past 3 years.

Steven Waterman

Solving Minesweeper in Polynomial Time

A talk written before learning that minesweeper is NP-Complete

By modelling minesweeper as a set of constraints, we can reveal new information by looking at how they interact with each other. Brief explanation of minesweeper, followed by explanation of constraints and how they can interact with each other, then audience-partipation to do a game of minesweeper as a group.

Mark Jose

30 Minute App

React, Firebase and VSCode carnage

Let's build a [fully] functioning PWA in 30 minutes. Watch me squirm while you all become realtime testers, a shouty-outy, typo-ridden crash course in hacking together a React app for Firebase. I know, it'll probably all fail miserably, but at least we'll have some fun.

Paul Graham

The Computer Skills of Average Joe

Worse than you think.

When producing software it is expected to receive support queries and issue reports from the user base. It is surprising just how many of these turn out to be questions about how to achieve something within your application. However, if you look into this a little deeper, it should not be *that* surprising that our users find something difficult that we, as IT professionals, may consider easy. A survey of 33 developed countries found that the majority of people are unable to complete medium-complexity tasks, and only a small percentage of the population has high level computer-related abilities. This is something we all need to take into account when building software. But it can’t be all that bad, can it? This talk will show a summary of the results of the survey, along with some key points, to help people visualise the ability levels of the average user.

Automated Music Genre Classification with WhatGenre

We classify music into genres manually. But what if we could classify them based of what they SOUND like?

As part of my dissertation in University, I researched audio analysis and built and app around this. The app can listen to a track and classify it into a genre. Sort of like Shazam but with more AI thrown into it.

Testing Progressive Web Apps

How to achieve api-ness

First proposed by Google in 2015, Progressive web apps (PWAs) are now in the infant stage of their development. As with any child, people are curious about which developmental direction the technology will take. A couple of years ago, we entered a programme of work that intended to produce multiple PWAs for the financial industry. Never having worked with them before, we did a lot of research and asked industry colleagues for help in understanding the tech. However, there was little to no help forthcoming on how to test for this type of app as the tech was so new. This meant we had to come up with our own! Drawing on comparable experience, trial, error (lots of error) and some tools, we formulated a series of heuristics, automation, methods and processes for testing which we are here to share. As a part of the talk, we will pull apart the layers of a PWA and define what they are. This will draw out how this approach impacts the testing that needs to be done to prove the functionality of an app of this type.

Altitude Foundation: Smashing Barriers to Digital and Tech Careers

This talk will explore how Altitude Foundation, a brand new tech-focused charity based in the North East, will unlock young people's potential to excel in their careers. I will outline the charity's vision, its work in the pilot year, and its ambitions for the future.

Holly Grace Williams

Hacking for a Living.

Stories from my most memorable work breaking into companies. Including a couple of demos of how the hacks works. Looking at both technical hacks and physical access attacks. .

A Kubernetes cluster on Raspberry Pi?

This talk introduces Kubernetes as a technology, why you might want to use it, what it gives you and what it takes to set it up yourself but instead of doing it on Cloud infrastructure, it shows how you can do it yourself using Raspberry Pi devices.

PHP Is Not Dead

PHP gets a lot of criticism and is described as being a dead language. But, PHP has grown up. I hope this talk gives you a bit of an insight into how PHP has lots of modern features, but is also quite a performant language.

Dan Pudwell

How we built a production application with Serverless and AWS for under $100.

No servers allowed

I'll go over the application architecture, some design decisions, how it all works together, and all the costs associated with building, testing, and running.

The fresh prince of the Leeds Test Atelier

My experiences helping to create and run the awesome Leeds Test Atelier. A practical experience report of how to create awesome tech communities people love. Loads of takeaways.

A rap! How I started an amazing testing conference and what makes people love it and come back year after year. We sell the tickets out in less than 24hours! Completely run in our own time. Diversity, Drawing, Inclusivity, Building your community team and who should be involved, Fun, Games, Retrospectives, Things we learned along the way, funny mistakes

Will Mac

Estimates are estimates

Given as stripped down version as an ANE lightning talk, exploring the difficulties of predicting the future and how to best handle giving and receiving news that plans must change.

Using Visual Aids

This talk is focused on what draws human attention and how we can use that in presentations and in daily life. There is a balance to be drawn with a visual aid dominating and distracting from the talk and being obsolete.

Graham Odds

Beyond a more capable web

Our vision of how we interact with most productivity, line-of-business and data systems has remained largely the same for the last two decades while we have been busy moving them from the desktop to the web. Throughout, we have needed to compromise the idealised experience to accommodate the constraints of the web's capability. However, browsers increasingly are no longer the constraint they once were. Maybe now is the time we need to stop hiding behind the excuse of technology, and start truly exploring how we might interact with complex systems?

Adabox - An Awesome Adventure

In Retrospect

Why we perform retrospectives, where we go wrong, how to make them right

I've seen a lot of projects where retrospectives have failed to deliver incremental change. In this talk I take a look back into history to understand the cross-disciplinary evidence for iterating on feedback, reflecting on how this is the "engine" of Agile development.