Tech Exeter Conference
Tech Exeter Conference describes itself as a multi-disciplinary, grassroots tech conference with an inclusive, community ethos, and friendly, welcoming vibe. As part of FDB’s commitment to continual learning, two of the development team went along to the event which was held at the University of Exeter on Friday the 7th of September. With multi tech tracks to choose from, Adam and Ben were able to select individual programs of talks that piqued their interest with topics including Artificial intelligence, Amazon Alexa, Blockchain, Data Science, Java, HMLT5 and Robotics ranging from an impressive range of companies:
Adam said of the event:
“I really enjoyed the Tech Exeter conference. The day started well, with a fascinating keynote by Andy Stanford-Clark the CTO for IBM UK on how to build robot dinosaurs and track ferry times (not at the same time I might add!), this was followed by interesting and informative presentations on diverse subjects such as building big data platforms for hydrographic information, using Elm (a functional JavaScript Library) and using low frequency wide area networks. The two highlights of the day for me were a talk on Microservices and how best to use them and Chaos Engineering (breaking things deliberately to see how your system performs under duress), both were really interesting and have given me a few ideas to investigate further.
In all it was a well organised and informative day, everybody there was friendly and helpful and I left inspired with some good ideas to bring back to the business. “
Ben, an FDB Solution lead added “I found it very inspiring. It was a great chance to meet other like-minded individuals from our industry from across a range of business sectors. The conference was extremely well organised and all of the staff from Tech Exeter were friendly and approachable. The presentations were run in three parallel tracks throughout the day and varied in the level of technical detail according to which track the presentation appeared in. I can see some practical applications to our organization for a number of the topics covered in the technical presentations.
A particular highlight for me was the panel debate around the role of the local developer community in assisting with STEM programmes in local education and improving diversity in the workplace.”
Commenting on the value Ben and Adam took from the day, Andy Collyer, Head of IT & Software with FDB said “With a team of 30+ developers working at the leading edge it’s really important to feed the passion to develop and provide opportunities for our team to hear and be inspired from other technology leaders. It’s great that the Tech Exeter Conference has started from a grassroots level and is now a pull for developers from across the South West.”
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