Lightning Strikes Thrice

13:50-14:20, Conference Room 1

Chloe McAteer David Cutting Steven Ringland

Due to our original speaker being unfortunately unable to attend, three of our Lightning speakers, Steven Ringland, Chloe McAteer and David Cutting, have very kindly agreed to deliver their talks in this slot instead.

Steven’s talk is “Creating a JavaScript library and why you should”:

Why bother creating libraries? What can you learn? Well my aim is the answer both in this short dive into creating JS libraries and publishing them.

I’ll cover everything you need to create them, covering common build tools, useful libraries, writing solid tests and docs along with how to version them properly and publish them to NPM.

Chloe’s talk is “Worst case scenario they say no!”:

I have recently realised the importance of taking as many opportunities as possible especially as a student. In the tech industry there are so many different ways to get involved in the local community, such as going to hackathons, meet ups or even conferences. All of these are great for finding other people in similar situations to yourself or finding people to learn from. Throughout my talk I want to explain why this is so important and my experiences in getting involved.

David’s talk is “Oh FOSS It - Free helpers through open source”:

In 2008 I replaced a bunch of disconnected ageing scripts that monitored my servers with a single simple network monitor… and released it open source in case anyone (or two) might use it. Over the next ten years it grew thanks to free community involvement both in terms of testing, suggestions, code submissions, community support, and everything else. Along the way it’s spawned two independent FOSS projects which are spun-off components of the monitor which have their own lives now.

This talk will be a brief journey through this story and the lessons I’ve learnt that encourage me to release everything I can as FOSS - mainly to help me build the product if for no other reason!