Reflecting on TWO Great Events in ONE Week!!

Introduction:

This week’s blog post reflects on 2 amazing events that I was able to attend over the past week.

Find out what I got up to as well as how they went!

As always, before we get into the content, please make sure to applaud, comment and share with your friends.

Happy Reading!

BBC Tech Meetup:

Ran by the BBC, this event brought together a variety of people into 1 place.

They also seemed to do things a bit differently compared to most events:

For example, they limited the number of people deliberately. Typically, events want as many people as possible (Within reason) however the BBC clearly limited the number of people that could come to this event.

Secondly, talks at these kind of events can sometimes turn into lectures (One person, talking to an audience, in silence). The BBC does this differently by placing an emphasis on interactivity! They make it clear that they want to create discussions amongst everyone and this was especially prominent throughout the whole event.

Touching on the technical content, there were 3 great talks:

The first one touched on how Large Language Model’s (LLM’s) are using semantic models when it comes to searching. Typically Lexical Search is the go-to technique however nowadays, LLM’s can make use of techniques like Vector-Based Search (Vector Embeddings) as a different approach to searching.

The other 2 talks were less technical, but still valuable. Touching on innovation and AR, it’s always great to hear from people with different perspectives as there’s always something that can be learnt.

The event finished with a great chat with the engineering manager, talking about tech, future events as well as some of the huge events that BBC have been able to attend.

Hearing From Burendo About Agile:

The next event was hearing from an exciting IT Consultancy about how they levaraged tools like Jira and Azure DevOps (ADO) to revolutionise project management within retail.

This event was a little different as the emphasis was slightly more on Project Management (While still levaraging tech!!). There were some interesting points that came up with the key being about maximising the benefit of the different technical tools that are out there.

Key Concepts:

Conway’s Law.

Inversed Conway’s Law.

Towards the end an interesting point about agile was raised. Perhaps all the different ceremonies that compose agile actually prevent us from being agile. I’ll leave that up to you to decide but it’s definitely an interesting discussion point.

Conclusion:

Both events were great in their own different ways and I look forward to many more.

I definitely like the variety of dev/cloud/project management events. There are so many different perspectives and it’s great to hear from everyone.

These events have a mix of a common group that attend many events as well as new tech professionals and it’s nice to hear about different experiences within tech.

Final Things:

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this article!

All my links are here!