BLUG General Interest: Opening Your Business

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Ever thought of starting an indy tech business? Building your products and taking on the projects you want to? Keen to feed back your experiences?

This is relevant to all from across agile teams and development roles, whether a business analyst or building core infrastructure.

September's BLUG is a general interest talk night around going out on your own, to freelance or to create your own products, drawing on experiences of others in the tech industry. This is driven by local collaborators keen to share experiences and show what's possible, coders and others who have taken that step and discovered what happens.

While this is coming primarily from a architect/developer/coder perspective, this is aimed beyond a solely technical audience and will look at ways of collaborating between independent designers, content creators, product owners, idea generators, marketers and developers, amongst many others.

We are fortunate to have a wide range of speakers, from and beyond BLUG, who will talk for 20-25 mins each, and plenty of food to chat over too! If you have specific dietary requirements, please let us know in advance (even if we know you, in case we miss your RSVP!) to ensure that we can cater appropriately.

SPEAKERS

Angie McKeown

Angie has launched businesses as a developer, crossing web development, game design and VR, including Drink from the Vial and Silver Oak (http://silveroak.co.uk). As a community driver, Angie has also set up the NI Game Dev Network and PlayMyDemo!, helping to address needs of the local game industry, while outside IT, she runs Miss McKeown's (https://www.missmckeowns.com), an award-winning tea blender selling locally and beyond NI.

From her extensive cross-cutting experience of industries, Angie will discuss the start-up journey, how this can vary, what you should know and a few of the experiences that make it a memorable road.

Brendan Mulvaney

[Advice on starting your own business - through song lyrics]

Brendan has been a self-employed IT consultant (http://halcyonit.co.uk) since 2000, having worked in the industry since the 1980s.

Brendan will talk about setting up a business from a consultant's perspective, what to prepare for and what to expect when stepping out on your own, using the lessons of music.

Brian Douglas

Brian set up Coding Fury ( http://codingfury.com/ ) when mobile needs in Belfast were rapidly expanding, focusing on app development, training, web development and embedded systems. He is also a lecturer for BelfastMet, working to remove technological obstacles to innovation.

Brian will share lessons and experiences that helped his business develop from a start-up to an established local development provider.

Eugene Heaney

Eugene is a Collaborative Growth Executive working with InvestNI, having a background in business advice and within local businesses. Eugene specialises in helping businesses work together to tackle problems, enhancing their competitive edge, whether that is scaling or exploiting potential efficiencies.

Eugene will talk about some of the general support and opportunities Invest NI offer to business start-ups, and how Invest NI could help bring local businesses (competitors and collaborators) together into networks, to reach mutual goals.

Phil Weir (short talk)

[What's the OBIG Idea?]

Phil is a mathematician and software developer who has worked in research, through marine engineering, bioengineering & glaciology, and web development. He started Flax & Teal Limited, specialising in the use of open technologies, including open source and open data, to step ahead of a global trend in the local market, through product building and service provision.

Phil will discuss how open tech has enabled interaction between independent professionals and SMEs (informally, the OBIG group), got us to six-figure tenders, sustained new business, added value for internal and external clients, and, by proxy, how it is opening up new commercial and funding opportunities.

He will explain how you can get involved, through the Open Industry Index and, better yet, how BLUG is responsible for all of this in the first place.

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Also to touch on:

• Using open source to engage with technologists and build products

• Connecting with international clients to service technically challenging projects

• Ways of getting sustainable income that leaves you personal-project capacity to bootstrap your own ideas

This session will be sponsored by Flax & Teal Limited

[BLUG Quarterly Cycle]: Each quarter, BLUG cycles through Technical Insights, General Interest and Social events. General Interest events aim to provide something for everyone, technical or otherwise. Technical Insights events aim to delve deeper in a technical area. Socials, we make up discussion as we go along! All new and long-term attendees are welcome to all events.

BLUG is not specific to Linux, or Linux users, but is open to all who use or are interested in open source. If it can be done on Linux, we're interested :D

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