LDNUG June 2025 with Magui Santos Silva and Tony Edwards

For our June meetup, we're at FundApps offices in HYLO, Bunhill Row, with guest speakers Magui Santos Silva talking about the state of web development and Tony Edwards having fun with MIDI and .NET MAUI

Tony Edwards: Midi Birds: Playing games with .NET MAUI
Can you use a MIDI controller to host TV game show games with the help of an event audience? Does bird song offer the perfect dataset for these games? Will a rainbow clown wig really offer protection against minor head injuries when the audience throws things at the host?
In this session, Tony hopes to answer these questions that no one has ever asked.
Using a 500 item data set of bird sightings and recordings curated in recent years, he'll guide the audience through the creation of a few games as part of a MacCatalyst App using .NET MAUI. As well as exploring the high level benefits and drawbacks of choosing MAUI for cross platform development, the session will touch on the mental health benefits of stepping away from a screen and spending time in nature, using our non-tech hobbies to support technical upskilling, and offer a jump off point for anyone looking to explore the worlds of MIDI, MAUI, and ornithology.
No knowledge of any of the topics, nor a desire to use MAUI, is required to take something away from this talk.

Tony Edwards is director and lead software engineer at That Seagull Bob. He creates engaging mobile and desktop apps using the .NET MAUI framework and occasionally modern JavaScript tools. He teaches the next generation of developers at Plymouth University, and co-organises the UK outing of the MAUI Day conference, and potters around the garden rapping to him self constantly.
With a background in community events management, a multi award winning career in the education sector, and a long history of making a fool of himself, Tony's sessions are sure to engage the audience and spark conversation amongst attendees. They'll certainly remember them!

Magui Santos Silva: Where's my WYSIWYG?
(or how I thought web development would be better by now... )

It's December 1995 and the Internet is booming. Everywhere you look there's a sprawl of websites under construction; the foundations of digital skyscrapers erupting in a thriving networked metropolis.

It's an intoxicating moment and you're aglow with the possibilities that lay before you. You're immersed in HTML, CSS, and a new concept of programming for browsers is emerging: JavaScript!

With stars in your eyes, you just can't help yourself - you want to know where this is all headed. You jump in your time machine and speed forward 30 years, eager to see how far everything has progressed. And this... is what you find.

This talk is not a history talk although we will go on this journey together. We will reflect on how ten fateful days saved us from an Internet built on Visual Basic, and how the promise of web-development accessible to all set the course for where we currently are.

We will look at what we have and ask: could we have it so much better than this? What would a world of web-development look like if it followed good design principles, and how close to that world are we? Finally, we will consider whether, three decades on from now, we might look back at what we have built and feel pride, or yearn for those simpler days of 1995.

Magui Santos Silva is a software engineer and lifelong nerd. She spent over a decade in policy roles in the public sector but her long-standing love of programming was a siren song she could no longer resist.

She’s an ardent believer in automating everything that should be automated, so that we can get to the good part. Her intense upskilling, passion, and curiosity drives her to analyse how software is built. She loves asking awkward questions and challenging how things are done, in the pursuit of understanding what makes good software.

She loves to talk about technology and to get in over her head building things in any medium, be it code, wood, metal, plastic, or all of the above at once.