Another week, another fantastic tech event in the East of England! IJYI were proud to be Elite sponsors of Dev://East which took place on Friday 15^th March at the Corn Exchange in Ipswich and what a great day it was. Firstly, the venue, wow! The Corn Exchange is a beautiful, iconic building in the centre of Ipswich and the events team provided a first class service.

Now onto the tech! It was great to see so many tech firms from across the region in attendance. The talks and breakout sessions proved to be truly thought provoking, inspiring and entertaining.

A highlight for all the IJYI team and I’m sure for many other attendees as well, was the talk from Mark Applegate of Creative Computing Club. What an inspiring organisation! Creative Computing Club provides young people in Suffolk with the opportunity to learn new digital skills in a fun and informal learning environment. Their charitable foundation helps young people aged 11 to 22 from low-income families in Suffolk to purchase computers and software to help with their education. It was fantastic to hear the success stories from the last 12 months.

Our CTO John Nicholson took to the stage for his Keynote session in the morning. His presentation “A Brief History of Test” got the audience involved by using a great tool called Mentimeter. This tool allows presenters to use realtime voting. Interactive tools like this are fantastic for bringing presentations to life and keeping audiences engaged. The level of engagement during John’s talk was great and we received so many brilliant comments afterwards, we would highly recommend trying it out.

Some thoughts from the IJYI team:

Our Business Analyst Robyne Birkby said “I really enjoyed the buzz in the hall and talking to so many different people. I thought it was really good to have such a spread of people with different reasons to be there – from working as a dev, to business owners, to teaching.”

Scott Davey, one of our Software Developers, particularly enjoyed Ralf Westphal’s talk on “Designing Solutions Before Coding for Mere Mortals”.

“Ralf presented a strategy for designing software solutions as a team by breaking up a feature by looking at the interactions between firstly the high level components and the user of the system, and then breaking that down to looking at the interactions between the objects themselves. Ralf demoed this with some example designs from a tic tac toe game on an interactive whiteboard. All too often teams assign features to individuals which can lead to lots of WIP (work in progress) and high cycle times, while another strategy is to swarm (multiple members of team on a single feature/story) to reduce WIP and cycle times. Splitting work up has always been something I’ve found difficult when it comes to swarming, but Ralf has provided a concrete strategy that should make swarming easier while making software design more collaborative.”

For a bit of fun we brought our Nerf Gun Challenge where participants had to knock out as many “software bugs” as possible with three nerf bullets. Our winner, Jamie Mullan of BT scored a fantastic 15 points and has won £200 of Azure credits.

Everyone at IJYI would like to pass their thanks to the Dev://East team for the hard work which they put into creating this fantastic event. Look forward to seeing you all there next year!