This month we have two fantastic talks from Dylan Beattie and Seren Davies. Plus we've got free food and drinks provided at the event thanks to our sponsors.
Everyone is welcome and there are no tickets required. Just turn up - it's free!
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of APIness: The Secret to Happy Code
Dylan Beattie
We spend our lives working with systems created by other people. From the UI on our phones to the cloud infrastructure that runs so much of the modern internet, these interactions are fundamental to our experience of technology - as engineers, as developers, as users - and user experiences are viral. Great user experiences lead to happy, productive people; bad experiences lead to frustration, inefficiency and misery.
Whether we realise it or not, when we create software, we are creating user experiences. People are going to interact with our code. Maybe those people are end users; maybe they're the other developers on your team. Maybe they're the mobile app team who are working with your API, or the engineers who are on call the night something goes wrong. These may be radically different use cases, but there's one powerful principle that works across all these scenarios and more - and it's called discoverability.
In this talk, we'll draw on ideas and insight from user experience, API design, psychology and education to show how you can incorporate discoverability into every layer of your application. We'll look at some real-world systems, and we'll discuss how how discoverability works with different interaction paradigms. Because, whether you're building databases, class libraries, hypermedia APIs or mobile apps, sooner or later somebody else is going to work with your code - and when they do, wouldn't it be great if they went away afterwards with a smile on their face?
About Dylan
Dylan wrote his first web page in 1992 and never looked back. He's been building data-driven web applications since the late 1990s, and has worked on everything from tiny standalone websites to complex distributed systems. He's the CTO at Skills Matter in London, he's a Microsoft MVP, and he's a regular speaker at conferences and user groups, where he's spoken about topics from continuous delivery and Conway's Law to the history of the web, federated authentication and hypermedia APIs. When he's not wrangling code, Dylan plays guitar and writes songs about code. He's online at www.dylanbeattie.net and on Twitter as @dylanbeattie
Accessibility Is More Than Supporting Screenreaders
by Seren Davies
Seren Davies
All too often we think about accessibility as just meeting the needs of those who rely on screenreaders, but it's a far wider issue than that. In this talk, Seren will explore how people with cognitive, physical, hearing and sight difficulties experience the web, and how the decisions we make affect their experience.
About Seren
Seren is a Software Engineer at Elsevier working on the ecommerce team. In between co-organising JSOxford and promoting accessibility she can be found doing the occasional bit of nail art. Seren is also on the Code First: Girls Ones to Watch list 2018.
Win Stuff at Tech Nottingham!
This month at Tech Nottingham we’ll be giving away a copy of the book Clean Code. Attend and tweet on the #TechNott hashtag to be in with a chance.
We'll also be giving away two 1 year subscriptions to a JetBrains product of your choice, including Resharper, IntelliJ and PHPStorm. You know the drill: attend and tweet on the #TechNott hashtag to be in with a chance!
Join in with the Nottingham Tech Community online
The Tech Nottingham Slack group is a bustling chat community of Nottingham tech folk sharing ideas, jokes, stories and helping one another. We'd love for you to join in and be a part of it!
Sponsors
