April 21st

We're back at the Adelphi with two great talks.

Big Numbers and The 1Hz CPU - Tom Hudson

Working with computers means dealing with very big numbers, and humans suck at big numbers. Let's take a look at why humans suck, and make things a bit digestible by going three billion times slower.

Tom is a Principal Engineer at Sky Bet (http://skybetcareers.com/) in Leeds, draws great pictures, and has very entertaining talks that make you think. He blogs on topics such as How We Release So Frequently (http://engineering.skybettingandgaming.com/2016/02/02/how-we-release-so-frequently/) and Monitoring Virtual Sports (http://engineering.skybettingandgaming.com/2015/09/14/monitoring-virtual-sports/). When at work he helps build, fix and improve large-scale, highly-available, and real-time systems with technologies like PHP, Node.js, Redis, MySQL, Memcached, RabbitMQ, and MongoDB, which is stated on https://tomhudson.co.uk .
Find him on twitter @tomnomnom (https://twitter.com/tomnomnom).

Going Beyond Unit Tests - Tim Nash

Testing can be fun…

Most developers are familiar with the term unit tests. They may have seen tests written even if they themselves might not write such tests. Unit tests have their place but there is so much more that can be done, rather than looking just at the code’s logic we need to look at the larger application and checks it does what we, and perhaps more importantly, our boss, and stakeholder expects.

The goal is to speed up people’s development by automating the testing they already do while improving coverage of tests. I’m sure we can even find some ideas for these tests beyond simple development. Testing can be fun, or at least can save you time in the long run.

Tim Nash is the WordPress Platform lead for https://34SP.com one of the UK leadings web hosting companies. He helps to keep thousands of sites secure, high performant, and reliable. He also writes and talks about DevOps and WordPress to, well, anyone who will listen. You can find him on twitter @tnash (https://twitter.com/tnash) and, when he actually gets it back up, his site on http://timnash.co.uk .