ACCU Cambridge

We’re pleased to announce the first ACCU Cambridge Meet Up of 2026, kindly sponsored and hosted by Roku in Cambridge.

Pizza, beers and knowledge sharing!

Join fellow ACCU members and local engineers for an evening of technical discussion, knowledge sharing, and networking in a relaxed setting.

This meet-up is a great opportunity to reconnect after the start of the year, exchange ideas with the community, and hear from peers working on real-world C++ challenges.

We’re delighted to kick off 2026 with the support of Roku, and we look forward to welcoming you to their Cambridge office for what promises to be an engaging and enjoyable evening.

Register now!

Agenda:

18:00 Welcome drinks, pizza and networking
Thanks to Roku for hosting and sponsoring

18:30 Introduction to ACCU - Phil Nash

18:40 Welcome to Roku - Pierre Gaston, Roku

18:55 Active Objects Design Pattern for Modern C++
Amir Alavi, Roku

19:15 Building a deterministic test suite: a case study from Undo - Tom Perry, Undo
If you’re writing complex software, and if your automated testing is comprehensive enough to catch real-world defects, then you probably have a flaky test problem. Left unchecked, this undermines developer confidence and stifles release velocity. In this talk, we explore the structural changes and technical overhauls at Undo that transformed our brittle test environment into a stable and trusted asset, enabling us to deliver releases our customers can rely on.

19:35 The Art of Compromise: Making ML Work on Constrained Hardware - Lloyd Reed, Roku

19:55 Canopy RPC with RAII and Coroutines: Edward Boggis-Rolfe, Head of Engineering | C++ | High-Performance Systems

About Amir Alavi.
Amir Alavi is an embedded software engineer and control systems researcher passionate about building solutions for IoT, smart grid, industrial control systems, and communication networks. He enjoys utilizing tools like real-time operating systems and embedded Linux, with a keen interest in model-based control system design. During his PhD at Queen Mary University of London, Amir explored distributed multi-agent control systems using wireless communication protocols. He is an active open-source contributor and currently at Roku, Amir is excited to support the development of streaming media technologies, helping enhance user experiences.

About Tom Perry.
Tom is an experienced software engineering manager, focused on developer experience, quality and reliable software delivery. He likes solving problems at the intersection of people, process and cool technology.

About Lloyd Reed.
Lloyd is an engineering manager with a background in embedded C++, CPU architecture and physics. He currently leads a small team of engineers and scientists, who add AI features to Roku's devices.

About Edward Boggis-Rolfe.
Edward has been coding since getting a ZX Spectrum in 1985. Former CTO of CloudMargin ltd and Chief Engineer of Secretarium ltd, he has worked in a variety of business sectors specialising in distributed heterogeneous integration solutions. He wrote his first IDL parser in the 90's supporting things like COM/CORBA bridges, API wrappers for remoting, with remnants of that still being used today to generate bridging solutions for large scale integrations. More recently he has been working in confidential computing and implemented RPC solutions to link SGX enclaves in a RAFT cluster, giving attested hardware protected solutions for organisations that are serious about their security. Use cases he has been involved with include running LLMs, Turing complete contracts, CBDC, trading solutions etc. He is now working on expanding this to a broader use case to be fully asynchronous, independent of transport and serialisation formats with optional RAII lifetime management of remote services and callback interfaces.