LDNUG February 2026 with Guillaume Faas and Jenny Martin

Happy 2026! Our first meetup of the year will be back at Zühlke's offices near Old Street, with Guillaume Faas talking about better ways to handle exceptions, Jenny Martin talking about taming complexity with OOPSI, plus the usual drinks, snacks, and plenty of time to chat. Doors 18:30, the first talk starts at 19:00 and we'll be done and heading to the pub at 21:00 to continue the conversation.

Guillaume Faas: Throw exceptions... out of your codebase

Throwing exceptions is often used to handle errors, validations, and other specific use cases. It is considered by many to be the standard way of indicating a failure and providing feedback to the caller. However, this approach can cause significant issues like being hard to detect, obfuscating the flow or leaving the system invalid.
In this talk, I want to show you a faster alternative that offers more transparency and predictability. We will see how to integrate ideas from the Functional paradigm, such as "Monads", into an Object-Oriented codebase using a real-life project: Vonage's open-source .NET SDK. This talk will be the perfect opportunity to show you what they are and how easy they are to use.

Guillaume Faas is a Senior .Net Developer Advocate at Vonage, based in Thionville, France. In recent years, Guillaume has focused on sharing my experience through mentoring, public speaking, and open-source contributions; all aimed at helping teams grow and build sustainable software. With nearly 15 years of experience in .NET development, he's worked across industries as an engineer, coach, and now developer advocate. His current focus is on developer experience: building SDKs, writing approachable technical content, and speaking at conferences around the world.

Jenny Martin: OOPSI: Making Sense of Complexity

OOPSI stands for outcomes, outputs, process, scenarios, inputs. It’s a flexible, easy-to-use collaboration framework that helps agile and product development teams cut through complexity and focus on value.
OOPSI is timely because it maximises the intrinsically human aspects of effective delivery, helping teams understand how and when to collaborate, while producing lean, example-driven artefacts that clarify scope and intent so both people and automation can work more effectively. In this talk, you’ll learn how to apply OOPSI to strengthen shared understanding, clarify assumptions, and support testable delivery, using a detailed, end-to-end example.

Jenny Martin is a practitioner, facilitator, and product discovery specialist with over 25 years’ experience working at the intersection of technology, delivery, and human behaviour. She has spent more than 15 years working with Agile and modern product development teams, helping them make sense of complexity and build shared understanding. Known as The Collaboration Coach, Jenny focuses on practical collaboration that supports effective delivery. She is currently writing a book on OOPSI.