[🏫 In-Person] Lightning Talks
Details
This event will be a special Lightning Talks Night, featuring 5–6 short talks from members of the local developer community sharing tools, ideas, projects, lessons learned, and technologies they’ve been exploring.
⚠️ This will be an in-person event, the venue is Sheffield Tech Parks.
- Google Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xm9z5Wr97QbefVCP7
- Parking: Sheffield Tech Parks have limited parking, however provide free parking to our guests! Once at the barriers phone 0114 221 1800 and they'll let you in.
Agenda:
- 🍕 Pizza/Drinks (18:15 - 18:30)
- 🗣 Introduction (18:30)
- ⚡ Lightning Talk #1 - Units Of Measure by David Betteridge
- ⚡ Lightning Talk #2 - Intro to Local AI by Daniel Heartly
- ⚡ Lightning Talk #3 - Semantic Search & MongoDB by Kevin Smith
- ⚡ Lightning Talk #4 - Dev Says, Employer Hears by Peter Gillett
- ⚡ Lightning Talk #5 - Build Your Own Copilot with Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit by Bill Ayers
- 🍻 Social @ Pub (after the talks)
👉 What are Lightning Talks?
Lightning talks are short, fast-paced presentations lasting around 10–15 minutes each. They're designed to share an idea, demo, project, lesson learned, or technology in a concise and engaging way.
Instead of one long session, you'll hear five diverse talks covering a range of topics—from AI and databases to developer tooling, business insights, and Microsoft 365. It's a great opportunity to discover something new, pick up practical tips, and hear from members of the local developer community.
Whether you're looking for inspiration, want to learn about new technologies, or simply enjoy chatting with fellow developers afterwards, Lightning Talks Night is always a fun, varied, and relaxed evening.
📏 Units of Measure – David Betteridge
Ever wished the compiler could stop you mixing metres with miles or kilograms with pounds? Discover how Units of Measure can help catch mistakes before your code even runs and make your applications safer and easier to reason about.
💽 Intro to Local AI – Daniel Heartly
Can you use local AI for software development? Join us as we explore the local AI landscape.
🔍 Semantic Search & MongoDB – Kevin Smith
Search is no longer just about matching keywords. See how MongoDB Vector Search and Voyage AI work together to find meaning behind your data using embeddings and semantic search, making it surprisingly easy to add AI-powered search experiences to your applications.
🌩️ Dev Says, Employer Hears – Peter Gillett
Looks at why businesses often reject the “obvious” developer choice: refactoring, bugs, training etc. It explains the employer view of cost, risk, impact and trade-off, helping developers frame technical concerns in business terms
🧑💻 Lightning Talk #5 - Build Your Copilot with Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit – Bill Ayers
Extending Microsoft 365 Copilot is a great way of getting your custom applications in the hands of business users, because you're making it available right where they're working. But there's quite a bit of setup involved in getting up and running - or rather there was. By using the Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit we can quickly get a Copilot Declarative or Custom Engine Agent built and delivering awesomeness, because the tooling does all the configuration grunt work, leaving us to focus on what we do best - code!