Events
Hello, welcome to my events page! You can find here an overview of the upcoming events I’m speaking at, some of my past talks and the events I’ll be organizing. Want me to come along to cover or speak at your event? Email me at mseckington@gmail.com.
Previous talks
Here’s a selection of some of the past talks I’ve given. My talks tend to focus on how we can improve our non-techy skills of being a developer, mixed with a good dose of pop culture and movie references. Interested in hearing more? Email me at mseckington@gmail.com or drop me a line on Twitter.
Employee Evangelism: How To Succeed at Hiring without Really Trying
Hiring good people can be hard. Keeping good people can be hard. It’s made easier though if you can set your company apart as a place that people want to work at. But how do you make the community aware that that’s the case?
Developer evangelists typically evangelise products to developers, but what if the thing you’re trying to sell is the team itself? How can you get your entire team sharing with the community what you’ve built and how you work? This talk examines why you should evangelise your team and gives concrete examples of how to encourage your team to do so.
[Slides]
The Marvel Guide for Developers
Iron Man. Thor. Black Widow. Spider-Man. Captain America.
Forget ninja developers and rockstar developers. What I’m more interested in is the superhero developer: these are the developers that do their best to help others, that try to give back to their community, and generally make the world a better place. So how can we all strive to be superhero developers? This talk looked at the lessons we all can learn from Marvel superheroes on being better developers.
Learn. Reflect. Repeat.
As developers, we’re constantly learning: whether it’s figuring out how to solve new problems and bugs, or focusing on new skills and knowledge to apply to our work. This talk will help you make learning a more integral part of your processes, and explain how to run internal events, like hackdays and lightning talks, to support this.
Un-artificial Intelligence
Most developers are familiar with the basics of AI: how do you make a computer, an algorithm, a system learn something? What most don’t realize though is that the same principles are applied to people. This talk looks at the theory behind how people learn, and maps it to real life examples of how specifically developers learn.
[Slides]
Disney Driven Development
Disney uses four principles when building their parks to create a “magical” experience, how can we apply those principles to our work as web developers?
[Slides]
Being a Social Introvert
Lightning talk about what I think being an introvert vs an extrovert means, and how introverts can still be “social”.
I’ve spoken at…
- 17th June 2016 – Joy of Coding: Celebrating the art, craft, science and joy of software development Joy of Coding is all about the love for programming. Learn about new and emerging technologies from companies and academia.
- 23rd Janaury 2016 – /dev/winter: A low cost, high value software dev event covering DevOps, Mobile, Web, NoSQL, Cloud, Functional Programming, Startups and more.
- 24th – 26th February 2016 – ConFoo: ConFoo is a multi-technology conference for web developers with 150 presentations by popular international speakers focused on pragmatic solutions for web developers.
- 13th – 15th January 2016 – NDC London
- 8th-9th October 2015 – WebDevConf: We don’t need The Avengers or the Justice League, WDC2015 has assembled the best line up that is ready to take on the world.
- 2nd-4th October 2015 – Hackference 2015: Three days of talks and panels from the best in the world, with a full weekend hackathon to top it.
- 25th-26th September 2015 – Over The Air: A tech-agnostic event for and by the developer community, featuring technical workshops where attendees can roll up their sleeves and tinker with new mobile & web platforms, operating systems, APIs & open hardware.
- 12th September 2015 – State of the Browser: We’re back for another year to talk about browsers and the web. Come and learn about the latest in browser developments and the web industry.
- 20th June 2015 – GORUCO: A one-day technical conference aimed at highly motivated programmers. Watch my talk.
- 18th June 2015 – London Web: The meetup where people listen. We cut back the noise and focus on people who can teach us, interact with us, and help us learn from being around other like-minded people.
- 13th June 2015 – OpenTech 2015: OpenTech 2015 is an informal, low cost, one-day conference on slightly different approaches to technology, experience and democracy.
- 11th June 2015 – EmberLondon: a monthly meetup for anyone interested in Ember.js and building ambitious web applications.
- 27th-29th April 2015 – Future of Web Design: A 3-day event for designers, front-end developers, and people working to make the web awesome. With a choice of four full-day, hands-on workshops, and two days jam-packed full of inspirational sessions, this is the event for anyone in the industry who wants to be on top of their game and leave the conference buzzing with excitement for your next project.
- 13th April 2015 – LRUG: LRUG is a London-based community for anyone who is interested in the Ruby programming language, especially beginners.
- 30th September 2014 – Future of Web Apps: Each year at FOWA, visionaries from around the world come together to learn about and discuss the emerging tools and platforms that are shaping the future of the web. This year, they’ll be focusing on APIs and Toolkits with numerous sessions tailored to help you become the best developer you can be!
- 27th – 28th September 2014 – BarCamp London X: After a three year hiatus, during which we’ve organised two BarCamp Berkshires and one epic-scale hack day, BarCamp London is finally back!
- 19 September 2014 – Hackference 2.0.14: Three days of talks and panels from the best in the world, with a full weekend hackathon to top it. Want to see me talk? Use the discount code SPACESHIP-SPACESHIP-SPACESHIP for 20% discount.
- 13th September 2014 – DDD East Anglia: Developer! Developer! Developer! (DDD) East Anglia is the newest event in the popular series of Developer Days events for the UK .NET Community that have run since May 2005. Although each DDD event has its own particular “flavour”, they remain immensely popular and enjoyable, regularly attracting 200-300 attendees and often selling out within minutes.
- 29th – 31st August 2014 – Electromagnetic Field 2014: Electromagnetic Field is a UK camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers.
- 22 July 2014 – Woman Who Code meetup: Women Who Code is a global nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers by creating a global, connected community of women in technology.
- 2 June 2014 – Ladies Who Code: A bimonthly meetup which brings the brightest female minds together to discuss tech, share ideas and innovate. I talked about my winning hack from AgileHack.
- Stemettes: A panel event for kids to meet woman in STEM. I talked about how I became a developer and what it’s like being a developer.
- Over The Air 2013: Over The Air is a free two day mobile developer conference and 24 hour hack competition. I gave an Ignite talk about The History of Movie Aspect Ratios.
- 300 Seconds: 300 Seconds is a series of talks by and for the digital community. I spoke about Being a Social Introvert. Watch the video or read the blogpost.
I’ve organized:
- BarCamp London 6: a free-to-attend weekend unconference for designers, developers and geeks of all types, held at The Guardian on 28th/29th March 2009
- BarCamp London 7: a free-to-attend weekend unconference for designers, developers and geeks of all types, held at the IBM Southbank on 24th/25th October 2010
- HackCamp London: a hackday to replace the postponed Barcamp London 8, held at the Google offices on 12th/13th June 2010
- BarCamp London 8: a free-to-attend weekend unconference for designers, developers and geeks of all types, held at City University on 13th/14th November 2010
- LinkedGov Data HackCamp: a hackday focused on government data, held at LBI on 9th/10th April 2011
- Geek Trip & International HackCamp: in 2011 during the weekend of the Royal Wedding, we organized a trip + hackday to the Netherlands
- Encampment London: an unconference for event professionals, volunteers and aspiring organisers, 20th August 2011
- BarCamp London 9: a free-to-attend weekend unconference for designers, developers and geeks of all types, held at City University on 29th/30th October 2011
- BarCamp Berkshire: a free-to-attend weekend unconference held on 7th/8th July 2012 at O2’s headquarters in Slough
- env[:hack]: a hack day for the Environment Agency, March 16-17 2013 at the University of Bristol
- BarCamp Berkshire 2: a free-to-attend weekend unconference held on 15th-16th June 2013 at O2’s headquarters in Slough
- HACKED: 20th/21st July 2013 at the O2, 500 developers and 2 days of learning, sharing and building cool stuff.
