Alex Lea - Is fashion in technology becoming a problem?

With new technologies surfacing quicker than celebrity sex scandals, big names pushing must-have "designer" cloudEverythings and even your toaster running Erlang over Mongo don't you feel somehow uncool?

Or could it be the world of technology has finally locked fingers in its embrace of fashion? Are our best efforts to be seen sporting latest techs really fruitful escapades or wasteful self-indulgences? And shouldn't we just accept our future as the always-in blue jeans and t-shirt of decent OO language and SQL database?

In this session Alex will discuss why you really should care about this, how not to become a fashion victim, and some of his tech-fashion experiences followed by some of yours.

The session format will consist of a talk followed by a fish bowl discussion on the topic.

Alex (https://twitter.com/aplea) is Technical Director of Esendex (http://www.esendex.co.uk/), a Nottingham based business SMS service. An agile "with a small a" exponent, over the last four years he and his team have scaled Esendex's messaging services into new territories, and through a many-fold increase in transaction volumes. He doesn't do so much coding now but fondly remembers his beginnings in retail software before moving into a startup building email, SMS and retail marketing tools at a time when IE 5 was a wonderous new thing.

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As usual, there will be drinks and nibbles.

Doors open at 6pm and the talk starts promptly at 6:30pm