Speakers
Alan Stirling
IT Trainer, developer and consultant working to help digital companies achieve their best. Owner of Alderhill Digital.
Open Data, Open Source ... Open Development
Alison Coote
Alison is a product leader @ Kainos and has been fulfilling the Product Manager role for about 5 Years. Over the years Alison has played many roles on client engagements covering everything from being a Developer, Tester, through to Project Manager. Alison loves learning new things so regularly brings people to together to share experiences and is the co-founder of ProductCamp Belfast.
Product Management - why everyone needs to get involved
Andrew Bolster
Technologist, founder of multiple technology-based groups and organisations, an award winning researcher, community leader, and an occasional public speaker.
Currently Data Scientist at AlertLogic, using advanced data mining and machine learning to analyse potential hacking and malware attacks on cloud infrastructure.
Recently completed PhD Research at The University of Liverpool (formerly at Queen’s University Belfast’s ECIT Institute) investigating Trust and Reputation in Marine Communications for Autonomous Systems of Systems under the joint Anglo-French Defence Research Group, established at the 2010 Anglo-French Summit
Founding Director of Farset Labs, Northern Ireland’s First Hackerspace, located in Weavers Court Business Park, Belfast, developed while I was finishing off a Masters in Electronics and Software Engineering at QUB. Farset Labs now provides the technical and entrepreneurial community with a place to share resources, knowledge and experience in a relaxed atmosphere, laying the foundation for the next wave of Northern Irish industry-leading technologists and business leaders.
Idiots Guide to (Open) Data Science
Arnaud Roger
A relatively old software developer who worked in many industries - finance, media, security - with a particular interest in Java, the JVM and performance. He likes to play with byte-code generation and indulges in looking at the ASM generated by hotspot.
You don't need scrum to be agile
Ceara McCurdy
Ceara has worked with Rapid7 in Belfast since January 2016, and in UX for a total of 7 years. She studied Interactive Media Design, followed by a Masters in Service Design both at the University of Dundee. Passionate about providing a good user experience, especially in often tricky situations, a move into Rapid7 and the world of security made sense. As part of the Rapid7 design team Ceara helps tackle problems involving large quantities of data, security breach alerts and providing consistent experiences across product offerings. In previous roles she has worked in the world of American healthcare and advised on accessibility.
Confidence through Design: Helping users defeat hackers
Chris Nixon
Programming language nerd with an interest in everything from Formal verification and type systems to embedded development.
Ciaran Conliffe
Ciaran is a technologist at Liberty IT; a Belfast and Dublin based company that focuses on creating world class IT solutions for parent company Liberty Mutual. There he’s been working in the space between development and security for the last seven years after ten previous years in development. He has previously spoken at DevSecCon Boston on the challenges of managing a Secure Development program for a large company.
In his spare time, Ciaran writes a weekly history column for the Dublin-based cultural website HeadStuff. He also enjoys guesting on podcasts and occasionally pops up on stage in the Workman’s Club in Dublin talking about some of the stranger corners of history.
What Is DevSecOps? Where Security Meets Agile
Claire Wilgar
Claire Wilgar is a frontend developer with a passion for accessibility, currently working for Bazaarvoice Belfast.
She is an avid speaker at conferences & meetups, and organises local events and groups such as Women Techmakers Belfast, Women in Tech Lean In Belfast, Global Game Jam and BelfastJS.
Claire is also the Community Manager for Farset Labs and has worked with the CoderDojo and other local and education events.
The Benefits and Dangers of Design/Component Libraries
Conall Bennett
Conall is a Test Lead at CME Group Belfast working in a cloud migration team involved in the enterprise adoption of DevOps practises, cloud native technologies and micro service architecture. Prior to this Conall has worked in consulting and in various financial enterprise organisations in a variety of Agile and testing leadership roles. Conall has been involved locally in co-organising the NI tester meet up and contributing to various other local tech meet ups in Belfast. He spends most of his time evangelising on Agile and testing practices, tinkering with emerging technologies and trying to find new ways (or rediscover old ways) of causing trouble via testing while exploring new technologies.
Consumer driven development for your micro services
Conor Woods
Conor has over 18 years’ experience working as a “full stack” software developer.
His development roles include working as a senior software engineer for the BBC, Verint and several high profile companies in both the public and private sector (clients in include UK Home Office, TFL, Scottish Power, PowerNi, Met Police, Network Rail).
His wide spectrum of experience has led him to lead diverse I.T. projects from community based collaboration platforms for disaster stricken citizens, to big data search portals to find relevant information for journalists.
His technical experience includes a wide knowledge of mobile, web and server technologies.
Visual Programming - Should Coders Stop Writing Code And Start Drawing Code?
David Anderson
As Director of Technology with Liberty IT, working on many Liberty Mutual key systems, David has exposure to a wide range of technologies and techniques covering Architecture, UX, Dev, Test, DevOps, Analytics & Cyber-Security. A life-long programmer, David brings deep technical knowledge along with strong collaboration and teamwork skills to deliver business value. Since 1997, Liberty IT has created complex world class IT solutions exclusively for Fortune 100 U.S. parent company, Liberty Mutual Insurance, developing a wide range of enterprise scale, Customer Focused solutions which leverage cloud technologies, agile engineering and disciplined practice to enable highly dynamic business needs. Software Development is a critical component of digital transformation.
Serverless says: 'This is your time'
David Cutting
David Cutting is a lecturer in computer science at Queen’s University Belfast having previously worked in England and completed a PhD in Software Engineering. Outside of academia he works as a consultant and is involved in a number of businesses in the technology space. In his spare time he develops poor open-source software that the community makes better.
Desy Kristianti
Desy Kristianti works in Technology Consulting at Deloitte. Her specialisation is within Enterprise Integrations using middleware tools such as Dell Boomi and MuleSoft to create a network of applications that communicate with each other. Early in her career, she has delivered a 6-month digital transformation programme building integrations to reduce architecture complexity and deliver a customer centric business strategy.
Outside of work, Desy is a City Leader at Women Who Code (WWCode) Belfast, which is a non-profit organisation dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers. She is responsible for organising meetups, building relationships with local companies and organisations, and building a strong WWCode community.
Desy also co-founded Women of Indonesia (WIN) Career Network and acts as the Events VP. WIN is a non-profit global network aiming to empower Indonesian women in achieving their professional objectives.
Middleware Integrations: An Innovative Approach to Connecting Enterprise Applications
Diarmaid McGowan
Diarmaid McGowan is an enthusiastic IT professional with 22 years of experience working with both proprietary and open source software. Diarmaid was a Full Stack Software Engineer as part of Allstate’s agile innovation hub @CompozedLabs and recently moved into an Application security engineer role.
Application Security and the OWASP Top 10
Emma Mulholland
Product Manager with a mission to make people passionate about Product, and the use of Product Management theory and tools, to create software that not only meets users needs, but also delights.
Product Manager @ShopKeep, and Trainer for Mind the Product. Previously worked in an XP (extreme programming) lab for Allstate where she used lean techniques and Design Thinking to solve business problems across the enterprise. Prior to that Emma worked as a Product Manager in eCommerce, working on the Search and User Experience for Marks and Spencer, and Tesco
Co-founder ProductTank Belfast and ProductCamp Belfast
Introduction to Product Management (ie. WTF is 'product'?)
Garth Gilmour
Garth Gilmour gave up full time development back in 1999 to teach and mentor full time. Since then he’s delivered well over a thousand courses and workshops to all kinds of programmers from all kinds of backgrounds. He started teaching C++ to C coders, then Java to C++ coders, then C# to Java coders and now teaches everything to everybody, since we work in an industry pathologically incapable of making up its mind. Although self employed for most of this career he came to roost five years ago as ‘Head of Learning’ at Instil. When not at the whiteboard he coaches Krav Maga, lifts heavy weights and fights nerf wars with his kids.
Jason Bell
Jason Bell is a practitioner of Big Data, Machine Learning and high volume streaming application and speaks regularly about putting these technologies together. In 2014 he wrote author of Machine Learning Hands on for Developers and Technical Professionals published by Wiley.
Breaking Down Algorithm Design Problems Using Poker
Jason Lawson
Jason is a software engineer at Liberty IT, working on a small agile based team that provides cloud native solutions for parent company Liberty Mutual Insurance Group.
He particularly enjoys collaborative code, refactor, clean mob sessions.
Outside of development he likes chocolate, hiking and photography – which he often combines into one activity in the Mournes.
Joan McAleer
Joan is a Senior Software Consultant for Deloitte Digital, having just returned from a year leading a product Development team for Deloitte Ventures. She a has a diverse career spanning 13 years with experience in delivery of large scale financial enterprise systems, product development and integration software. She is very passionate about women in tech particularly encouraging more women to be developers. She is currently on maternity leave with newborn twins and a toddler.
Leading software development teams to success
Kevin Gannon
Kevin has over 14 years experience working within the Technology and Software Engineering scene. He is currently a Solutions Architect and lead blockchain engineer at PwC’s Belfast Blockchain Lab. He designs solutions for clients across multiple industries and leads the build out from PoC and beyond. As an avid agile practitioner and advocate of continuous improvement, he strives to do the right thing in the right way.
Kris Jones
CTO at Secure Broadcast. Passionate about Tech and Product.
The Balancing Act of Tech, Business and Customers
Louise Craven
Louise Craven is a Product Designer at Liberty IT, working on developing a B2B product for Liberty Mutual Surety. She is passionate about all things product and evolving creative solutions that work for business and the end user.
Discovery & Framing – What’s that about?
Maciej Wyrodek
“I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good”
Tester Specializing in Automation. Part of IT since 2011 He had the opportunity to work, among others, on projects for Dell, Volvo, Creditsafe, Jetshop, Kobo, Contium.
He became tester because outside becoming demolition expert it was only available option to get paid for breaking stuff. Even though he specialises in Test Automation, his first love is Human Testing. He loves experimenting seeing new things and how they affect his world.
Since 2016 tries to give more to the community by presenting at conferences, meetups and workshops.
In free time writing his blog thebrokentest.com. Where he aims to discuss different code smells in test automation.
Mark Allan
A saggy old cloth cat, baggy and a bit loose at the seams. Organises conferences in his copious spare time.
Stone Age To Serverless or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Platform
Mark McConnell
Senior developer at whitespace ventures
Background in building highly performant web applications for some of the world’s largest brands, including Ford, Red Bull and Google. Recently moved towards the fintech sector working with creating large scale data monitoring systems for trades. While my day to day job is working with python, I’m often found working on everything from project management to devops.
May Cheung
May has a foot in both the tech community and legal sector, having worked in the latter for the past 13 years. Likes FOSS, Farset, and fast cars.
Licences: What is all the FOSS about?
Michael Hughes
Cut his teeth as a BOFH in the early 2000s and found a passion for trying to break things. After teaching himself how to code (badly) he moved to Northern Ireland in 2010 to pursue a career as an automation engineer.
Currently enjoying his time at Bazaarvoice being encouraged to try new things outside his usual comfort zone like speaking here.
Tools and tribulations: The Road To Automating Quality Microservices
Micheal Colhoun
Micheal Colhoun is Developer, Trainer and Co-Founder of ColhounTech and Transforming People Academy.
Over the past 20 years, he has worked with clients such as The London Stock Exchange, CME group, IBM & NCR and has worked with a long list of startups and small businesses.
The Unexpected Voyage from Developer to Startup Co-Founder
Nadine O'Hagan
Nadine is a Senior Software Engineer with 7 years’ experience in the Tech industry. After 5 years as a developer at LIT, she is currently working at PwC in the Blockchain and Digital Technology team, researching the latest Blockchain technologies and building out a range of technical solutions for clients in diverse areas.
Neil McCallion
Neil McCallion is a Senior JavaScript Engineer at ShopKeep, and is also an organiser and MC for the popular BelfastJS meetup group. A long-time and dedicated ‘web person’, Neil likes to do the occasional bit of game development, audio stuff and general creative meddling in the browser, while pushing for performant and accessible user experiences. Is known to like cake.
Raising The Roof with Browser Audio Visualisation
Nicholas Shaw
Nick is currently a software engineer with Puppet.
He has worked as a developer, a support engineer, a tester and a shelf stacker! But right now he is fascinated by efficiency and loves to optimise feedback systems to be quicker, offer more clarity, as well as proving more reliable.
He enjoys the variety that working as a tester provides him with most of all. In the same day he can find himself head down in an IDE, having high-level discussions about the effectiveness of an upcoming feature to address business needs and looking over analytics to see where he should focus his testing efforts.
Nick likes to learn while helping others and does so by co-organising the NI Testers meetup as well as helping out at Code Club Holywood. You can find him on twitter @Shicky4 or at his blog www.nicholaspshaw.com
The Software Test Clinic Belfast!
Olivia McCartan
Olivia McCartan is a Product Owner at Liberty IT, working on developing a B2B product for Liberty Mutual Surety. She enjoys working as part of a product team with a user centric design focus.
Discovery & Framing – What’s that about?
Paddy Carey
Lead Engineer @ ShopKeep.
DadOps: 5 lessons having a baby has taught me about building software
Paul Barrett
Multimedia developer based in Belfast. Mainly frontend development & web design but also 3D modelling, animation, game development, etc.
Blender 3D - Create 3D Content on No Budget
Paul Hill
For over 30 years Paul has been immersed within leadership and management roles: beginning his career as an officer candidate leading to ten years in the USAF as an Officer in B-52 Operations, before going on to host multiple roles in leadership positions within the software industry. During his ten years in the Air Force, Paul has acted as a B-52 Navigator, Flight Operations scheduler, Radar Navigator, and Director of Current Operations for Minot Air Force Base. Working in the field of operations with the Air Force has given Paul the appreciation and capability of making high quality, fast-paced, critical decisions in high pressure situations. After leaving the Air Force, he used his prolific experience in leadership and Computer Science to build and lead software development teams. Paul has over nine years of experience with managing 24x7 operations for SaaS solutions. Additionally, he joined Bazaarvoice in 2014, quickly becoming a leader in R&D assisting and kick-starting its transformation into a lean and agile organization.
“I firmly believe that quality is the #1 thing when building software. Ultimately, if you sacrifice quality in order to finish a product sooner the cost to the client, consumer, and company is greater than anyone anticipates. In the past 3.5 years in which I have been with Bazaarvoice, my teams have delivered a tremendous amount of value with a ‘quality-first’ mentality and I look forward to bringing similar success into building the Bazaarvoice Belfast Office and R&D team.”
Building and Leading high quality talent
Peter Pito
Peter Pito is a technical lead at Deloitte Digital with over 20 years of experience designing and delivering software products.
An agilist practitioner, a bit of developer, a bit of manager, curious by nature; he likes to understand why things work, constantly reminded how little he knows.
Peter has worked as a software developer, consultant and managing director across a wide variety of domains and technologies. His focus is on helping software teams deliver high quality software predictably.
Rachel McKane
Rachel McKane is a Customer Success Manager for Esri Ireland. In her role she gets to partner with a diverse set of customers to deliver business solutions, helping them utilise existing data to answer critical business questions based on the science of where.
Prior to joining Esri Ireland, Rachel was the first female to be promoted to the position of Principal Mapping and Charting Officer (Grade 7) in Ordnance Survey Northern Ireland (OSNI). During her time in OSNI she managed high profile projects such as the Positional Improvement Project and the DARD Single Farm Payment Project. In these projects she managed over 100 technical staff across multiple teams, disciplines and locations to deliver a common goal.
Rachel was elected to the position of Chair of the Northern Ireland Branch of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT in September 2016. Only the second women in Northern Ireland to take up this position in its 60-year history.
Rebecca Martin
I’m a junior developer, currently working in Flexera and have contributed to open source projects such as Project Lintol. I mainly focus on Python, but I am also interested in Go, Rust, PHP and FLOSS in general.
An App for Culture Night: App Development for Events
Rebecca Walsh
Rebecca has a background in Aeronautical Engineering with nearly 10 years’ experience in innovation and design thinking with 3 years’ experience in Service Design. Rebecca currently works in the Public Sector Innovation Lab as a Service Designer and has worked on several in projects in Health and Social Care and with local councils. She loves running, travelling, working as a STEM ambassador and being a voluntary member of Code4Good NI.
Service Design in Gov - Connecting the online to the offline
Ritu Bhatt
16 years of software development experience.
Music metadata identifiers gamechangers for copyrighting
Roger Simms
Journeyman, poet, world class engineer. None of these are words that have ever appeared on Roger’s annual reviews. Words that do appear are hat wearer, whiskey drinker and “well done for putting up with Simon”.
Sarah Rudek
Sarah Rudek is a games developer and the founder of Belfast-based Shieldmaiden Studios. As a perpetual techno-optimist she strives to make the future accessible, fair, and smart for all.
Progress, Politics, and Programming
Simon Whittaker
Simon Whittaker is Cyber Security Director of Vertical Structure Ltd and has been providing security services & security training for over 10 years.
The majority of Simon’s work involves working with companies to test and improve secure coding practices, penetration & security testing and providing security consultancy to companies that are keen to improve their processes & procedures.
Simon has great experience in developing & implementing efficient and effective practices across all sections of an organisation to assist with securing and retaining external quality recognition such as ISO27001, ISO9001 and CSA STAR. This has been frequently proven through his work with clients throughout the UK and Ireland.
Simon also has a wealth of experience assisting companies with understanding their current security posture, their future goals and outlining how to achieve those goals. This has included working with companies on a long-term basis using coaching and mentoring techniques to help drive process improvement and provide external feedback.
Data (in)security in a Cloud Environment
Siobhan Gallagher
OWASP Chapter Leader, PWC Cyber Business Lead for NI, Women in Tech Exec member, keen supporter of getting women and kids into STEM and a Bring IT On Ambassador. Have delivered £15 million + in tech sales, an avid techie meetup attendee and a massive supporter of the NI Tech Community.
I truly believe we’d all do better if sales and techies could understand each other a little better.
Sales - The Last Silo (Or Why Sales & Techies need to Talk!)
Stephen Rushe
Stephen spends (what some would call) a disturbing amount of time writing software but would probably give it up for the opportunity to live on a cat island. He can often be found drinking tea, and muttering about the accuracy of cricket statistical data. He is possibly powered by sarcasm. He is uncertain about writing about himself in the third person.
Steven Limmer
Steven is an agile consultant with over a decade’s experience working in the tech industry, covering government, finance and e-commerce sectors. During that time he’s been a tester, test lead, scrum master, agile coach, and covering any other gaps that appear. His sweet spot is working with people to create high-performing, but more importantly, healthy and fun teams. He’s currently working as a Delivery Manager in Ministry of Justice’s Digital and Technology department, at the cutting edge of digital service delivery. Never scared to speak his mind, which is why he’s self-employed.
Modern Agile, make it psychologically safe
Suzanne McLaughlin
Suzanne is the Deputy Chief Survey Officer in Ordnance Survey and is responsible for Geospatial Systems & Data Management. She previously worked in developing the Open Data Strategy for Northern Ireland and setting up the OpenDataNI portal. In a nutshell she loves anything to do with data!
Thomas Swann
Tom Swann is a developer and architect who lives in Newtownards with his wife, son and two grumpy guinea pigs.
He worked for Kainos in Belfast for 12 years on a variety of projects across utilities, financial services and the public sector before moving into the world of cyber security with Anomali, working on their threat intelligence cloud platform.
He currently works as an architect for State Street bank.
Udhayakumar Rajendran
Senior Software Engineer @ Camlin Technologies, Lisburn.
Building Microservices with Spring Cloud/Netflix OSS
Unidentified Speaker
In keeping with the spirit of their talk, the speaker wishes to remain out of the spotlight.
I'm Not Trying To Be Mean, But It's Okay To Be Average
Zeki Kucuk-Kose
Software Developer - Deloitte Digital. Graduated with first class honours in Computing Science (BSc) From Ulster University (2017).
An Introduction to Open Banking
Zoe Gadon-Thompson
I’m nearly finished my first year of a foundation degree in software engineering. I started to study at 21, after working minimum wage in a call centre and having a baby. I want her to have a mum who’s successful and passionate, and I’m at least half of those things already. I’m trying to get my name known and my skills developed so I can make some of my ideas come to life through the support of the tech community.