Bristech, the one-day tech conference featuring eighteen wide-ranging tech talks, returns this year on 7th November at the Watershed.
With talks covering software & tooling, DevOps & Cloud Native, Big Data & ML, as well as process and soft skills, there should be plenty of opportunities for both learning and networking.
“I am thrilled to announce the line-up for 2019. Our speakers cover a fascinating array of different subjects and are a mix of both home-grown talent and those further afield. In an industry that is continually accelerating, I wholeheartedly welcome the opportunity to spend a day with people so clearly passionate about sharing their craft.” – Nic Hemley, Co-founder Bristech
The full-line up of speakers (alphabetical by surname) and talk titles are given below:
Peter Allen – Re-rendering perceptions with Svelte
Peter is a freelance front-end developer hailing from the North West who has an unhealthy obsession with both performance and animation.
Krzysztof Cieślak – LSP – magic behind your IDE
Chris is a software developer and consultant. He’s author of Ionide , Forge, Fornax) and project owner and maintainer of VSCode-Elm. Chris is an international speaker who tries to convince developers around the world that OSS and FP are good, pragmatic choices for writing software. GitHub. Blog.
Sebastian Coles – Security Cultures and Cheap Talk
Sebastian is a software engineer who leads a team of engineers at the UK Hydrographic Office pushing the boundaries of marine geospatial intelligence and data services. His speciality is application security, with skills built with a misspent youth and strong sense of duty of care to the data that flows through their systems.
Daniel Cook – Winning Atari Games with AI
Dan is an independent Technical Architect. He’s just delivered a novel mobile phone indoor positioning system fusing WiFi signals, gyroscope and accelerometer data to give a position fix accurate to 5m in airports and shopping centres. Previously, he led the development of a Hadoop-as-a-Service offering and built software streaming frameworks before the rise of open source tools such as Apache Spark and Storm.
Matthias Endler – Wonderful WebAssembly and the future of computing
Matthias is a curious tinkerer who is interested in scalability, performance and distributed systems. He is an advocate for the open web and a back-end engineer writing Rust and Go for Trivago.
Adam Harwood – Spatial interaction in XR
Adam is the Capabilities Team Lead at Ultraleap (formerly Ultrahaptics), the world’s leading spatial interaction company. He is passionate about R&D, particularly in emerging tech such as XR. His background is in software engineering, with most of his career focused on using the Unity engine and C# to create interactive experiences.
Paul Jones – Infrastructure as Software
Paul is a software engineer with a background building and deploying microservice applications in enterprise environments. His repertoire spans application development, cloud infrastructure and container orchestration, whilst also being an advocate for XP practices.
Ant Kennedy – A journey into Cloud Native Machine Learning
Ant is CTO at Gapsquare where he is currently focusing on growing the engineering team, establishing best practice in the processes being used, the future architecture and growing Gapsquare’s AI/ML capabilities. Previously he has worked at JustEat, Adarga and Boeing focusing on full-stack engineering and distributed systems.
Jorge Marin – Testing in production: ideas, experiences, limits, roadblocks
Jorge is an advanced QA engineer passionate about robotics, automation, statistics and mountains. With a degree in Telecoms Engineering he tried to help drones to navigate indoors where GPS position is not available or inaccurate. He got “dragged” to the cloud and has been working since then automating-the-hell-out-of-anything-he-touches.
Steven Pemberton – Moore’s switch
Steven is a researcher at the CWI in Amsterdam. He wrote part of the gcc compiler, co-designed ABC, the programming language that Python is based on, and many web technologies, including HTML, CSS, XHTML, and XForms. He was chair of the W3C HTML Working group for a decade, and is still chair of the XForms working group.
Will Richmond-Coggan – Coming of age: a grown up perspective on privacy
Will is a director at top 50 law firm Freeths LLP. He provides strategic data protection advice to tech businesses from startups to multinationals.
Emily Rigby – Making 10% time effective
Emily is a Software Engineering Manager at OVO Energy. Once a software engineer (C++), she now focuses her time on building teams that enjoy working together and solving problems with a mixture of organisation, empathy and code
Amir Safavi – All your estimates are awful
Amir is a software engineer at Google. He leads a team focussed on developing features to help small business owners build their online presence and connect with their customers
Dylon Sivam & Rowan Smith – Delivering a large scale serverless project in an enterprise environment
Dylon is a Senior Software Engineer at CACI and has contributed to projects with a diverse range of software stacks. He is particularly fascinated by all-things AWS and is currently leading the development of the next generation weather observations platform for the Met Office.
Chris Skardon – Graph Databases: What and Why?
Chris is a freelance software engineer specialising in Neo4j and .NET. He has worked in a variety of industries from Finance to Property and a variety of organisations from Start ups to established Enterprises (and those in-between).
Tom White – Single Cell. Big Data
Tom was one of the first Apache Hadoop committers, and wrote a book about it. More recently he has been using big data tools (e.g. ScanPy) to analyse large bioinformatics datasets.
Mark Woods – Using Robotics and AI to explore harsh spaces
Mark leads the Autonomy and Robotics group at SCISYS UK specialising in applications which enable autonomous exploration, survey or analysis of complex environments. He has over 20 years’ experience as an innovator leading, researching, developing and commercialising Robotics, Autonomy, Computer Vision and Machine Learning Based Applications from low to fully operational (industrialised) Technology Readiness Levels.
This year, Bristech is an anchor event in the Bristol Technology Festival (BTF), a series of tech-flavoured events (Saturday 2nd – Sunday 10th) that will be happening during the week of the conference.
The festival is a new programme of activities which joins together events across the city in technology to reach new audiences, showcase the tech cluster and celebrate our successes. Nick Sturge, Chair of BTF, said “Bristech is an important pillar in the Bristol Tech Festival as the key event for technology practitioners to learn, share and network from within the industry.”
The feedback on the conference from 2018 was stellar, with delegates and exhibitors both extolling the event as a great place to learn and share. Phil Beresford, Development Capability Lead at BJSS said, “Bristech 2018 provided a well-organised and vibrant platform for a mix of technical, social, ethical (and even quantum!) talks … it proved to be one of the stand-out conferences last year.”
Tickets on sale now at https://2019.bris.tech – only 69 left at time of speaker announcements.
