DevOps Society London Meetup @ Broadcom

Our first London DevOps Society event has arrived! We are delighted to be partnered with our hosts Broadcom (who recently acquired VMware), with a trio of really exciting speakers lined up.
Format of the meetup event will be as follows:
6pm – 6:30pm - Networking on arrival coupled with pizza and drinks provided by ReVybe IT.
6:30pm – 7:40pm – 3X 20 mins speakers with a 10-minute break in-between 2nd and 3rd speaker.
7:40pm onwards – Networking and event close.
We are delighted to welcome 3 speakers to our first event.
#1 – Vahid Mojtahed – Group Director of Data and Insights
Vahid is a pioneer in the world of Data, with a specialism in AI/ML. He has led teams throughout his career, with a focus on innovation and collaboration.
Accolades include:
2023 Invited Speaker at Data + AI World Tour by Databricks
2018 Recognized as Exceptional Talent by the British Academy for innovative work on fraud analytics and solution
2016 Invited speaker at Italian Academy of Science
Title: Think Like a Machine, Win Like a Human: How AI & ML are Transforming Businesses Across Industries
Vahid Mojtahed will kick start the evening by giving us an insight into how data, AI, and ML are empowering businesses and revolutionizing various industries. He will present examples of fraud detection in agri-food industry, financial forecasting in a global enterprise and accelerating property transaction using natural language processing.
#2 – Fernando Villalba – DevOps/DevEX/Platform Engineer
Fernando has over a decade of miscellaneous IT experience. He started in IT support ("Have you tried turning it on and off?"), veered to become a SysAdmin ("Don't you dare turn it off") and later segued into DevOps type of roles ("Destroy and replace!"). He has been a consultant for various multi-billion-dollar organizations helping them achieve their highest potential with their DevOps processes.
Title: Platform engineering must kill RTFM
Fernando Villalba will be speaking on how platform engineering must kill “read the f*ck!ng manual”.
“It doesn't matter how great your documentation is or how much you tell developers to read the manual, if your design and user experience is terrible, you will get poor performance. In this talk we will explore how and why placing an emphasis on documentation at the expense of design is a bad practice, and we will also explore how this relates to your cloud provider and your internal developer platform. Whether you are looking to build your own platform or find a compass to pick better tooling for your developers, this talk may be helpful for you.”
This talk is based on the following blog posts:
https://nandovillalba.medium.com/platform-engineering-please-kill-rtfm-72de6f01075e
https://nandovillalba.medium.com/ux-on-platform-engineering-1c7ecfaddea7
#3 – Chris Hurford – Strategic Customer Success Manager – Broadcom
Chris is a senior technical leader who has a blend of technical and leadership skills, with a push towards agile software delivery and delivery management in recent years. He is passionate about developing and supporting high quality software products and systems, whilst motivating teams using agile methodologies. Chris has over 25 years of experience in the technology space, starting off as a software developer before moving into management.
Title: An overview of the Tanzu software portfolio and Tanzu Lab's Platform Engineering services
Lastly, we have Chris Hurford, a senior figure within the Broadcom engineering team, delivering a talk on Tanzu, which helps platform engineers accelerate application development and delivery so that developers can focus on building great apps. Tanzu Application Platform is a modular Kubernetes-based platform that allows you to build quickly and ship fast.