NE:Techmas - December 2019

Our December Meetup - we know this isn't the second Thursday, but there's a good reason for the date change, to avoid Christmas party clash.

So this month we planned on doing our 12 days of Techmas lightning talks, but only 4 people came forward (Bah humbug). So we couldn't let our last meetup of the year flop. We've lined up a couple of great speakers from our sponsor Scott Logic, and Mark (He's promised he'll try his best). More info below.

In some other exciting news, we've finalised our logo, you can find it on our website here https://ne.technology and we hope to have some branded goodies appearing soon.

A festive twist on the food and drink this month too, feel free to don your Christmas jumpers and Santa hats.

Speaking this month:

Mark Jose
Tinkerer of Machines @ Scott Logic

30 Minute App (Intermediate, Development)
React, Firebase and VSCode carnage

"Let's build a [fully] functioning PWA in 30 minutes. Watch me squirm while you all become realtime testers, a shouty-outy, typo-ridden crash course in hacking together a React app for Firebase. I know, it'll probably all fail miserably, but at least we'll have some fun."

Paul Graham
Senior Developer @ Scott Logic

The Computer Skills of Average Joe (Basic, User Experience & Design)
Worse than you think.

When producing software it is expected to receive support queries and issue reports from the user base. It is surprising just how many of these turn out to be questions about how to achieve something within your application. However, if you look into this a little deeper, it should not be that surprising that our users find something difficult that we, as IT professionals, may consider easy. A survey of 33 developed countries found that the majority of people are unable to complete medium-complexity tasks, and only a small percentage of the population has high level computer-related abilities. This is something we all need to take into account when building software. But it can’t be all that bad, can it? This talk will show a summary of the results of the survey, along with some key points, to help people visualise the ability levels of the average user.

Chris Brown
Test Engineer @ Scott Logic

Automated Music Genre Classification with WhatGenre
(Basic, Alternative Projects)

We classify music into genres manually. But what if we could classify them based of what they SOUND like?
As part of my dissertation in University, I researched audio analysis and built and app around this. The app can listen to a track and classify it into a genre. Sort of like Shazam but with more AI thrown into it.