We're excited to welcome these fantastic speakers to the MK Geek Night lineup, and we're very grateful for their time.
MKGN #22 will be held on Thursday September 7th 2017 - doors open at 19.00 with our first speaker on stage around 20.00. The talks usually finish around 22.00 to 22.30, but do hang around for drinks and chat. We're usually around until quite late!
What a clever bunch we are! Between us we have an impressive body of collective intelligence: mathematicians, engineers, scientists – and some of the best technology talent in the UK.
And yet. There are parts of our brain that are underdeveloped, mind muscles in that require exercise, cognitive capacities that are limited. The result is that we are at risk of self-combustion. We are anxious, stressed, depressed and burnt out. More people than ever are quitting their jobs in pursuit of more meaningful, challenging and enjoyable roles. And in pursuit of more control over their working lives again.
The robots – and AI - are coming. So that what makes us truly human is fast becoming our most precious commodity. It’s time to learn more about our internal operating systems in order to maximise our value in the job market.
In this talk Amanda will expose some of our bad habits and our mindlessness, and recommend ways of developing a healthier, happier and more controlled mind.
Amanda Davie is a professional coach who helps individuals and organisations find bold and brilliant ways of doing better business.
A fellow geek, Amanda’s first career began in 1998 as one of the pioneers of Internet advertising in the UK, where she worked with dot.com entrepreneurs to build highly successful digital media and marketing services firms for the ten years. And in 2008 Amanda flexed her own entrepreneurial muscle and built and ran a successful, international digital management consulting business.
In 2013 Amanda embarked upon her second career by training in psychology of coaching, qualifying to become a member of the Association for Coaching and launching her own executive coaching and leadership development firm.
Amanda’s clients range from middle to senior management in global professional services, media and technology firms like WPP, CGI, GBG, IBM, Google and Facebook through to founders and leaders of SMEs and start-ups.
A passionate feminist, Amanda also works with The Bird Table, a coaching and leadership development organisation that helps women fly high in business. And in 2017 she helped launch its sister business Equal Talent, a creative coaching firm for the tech sector, where gender diversity is a BIG problem.
Founder and CEO of BeerBods Matt Lane will talk us through how he turned a beer tasting club in a garden shed into the UK’s first (and still the best) beer subscription service.
He’ll also share what he thinks BeerBods really sells… and it’s much more than beer.
Matt founded BeerBods in his spare time in 2012 with one simple aim; to get more people drinking better beer. The concept was a simple one. One beer and the story behind it, delivered to you at home for £3 a week, with an online tasting for the BeerBods community to chat about that week's beer every Thursday night. The business now employs 6 people and is based on an old pig farm in rural Worcestershire. It’s all very high-tech. Or not. BeerBods currently has 4,000 subscribers in its beer club plus 20,000 members who buy beer on a less frequent basis and is a community of beer lovers that are discovering, learning about, and enjoying beer together.
Jessica’s talk is about user experience in the development world and beyond. It will give a brief intro to UX, talk about its importance through development and how to use it to improve your code, development processes and ultimately, your life.
Jessica is a User experience consultant from Milton Keynes, currently living in Amsterdam and working for booking.com as a UX designer.
She’s worked with publishers, universities, small businesses and more, but the consistent factor is the use of empathy and user experience practices to increase business success and user enjoyment.
A quick discussion about how you can add greater individuality to your branding and web design projects.
Rory likes to call himself a ‘brand strategist’ which is a fancy way of saying he does a bit of everything (or a whole lot of nothing depending on who you speak to). He has a special interest in the way that brands communicate both visually and verbally.
In the course of recent history fish have been relatively untroubled by the Internet of Things, but it’s time for that to change. Armed only with a soldering iron, some JavaScript and ideas above his station, PJ will show us how you can build a simple IoT device and how the whole enterprise can spiral out of control. Highlights include a Scottish toilet emergency, an aquarium featuring military-grade security and an extinction-level event in the suburbs of Milton Keynes.
PJ Evans is a freelance web application developer based in Milton Keynes. When not changing the world one JavaScript exception at a time, he can be found at The National Museum of Computing, where he runs the Milton Keynes Raspberry Jam and gives talks on Colossus, the world’s first programmable computer. Hobbies include vintage computing, putting Raspberry Pis where they frankly shouldn’t be and protecting his fish at all costs.
Milton Keynes Geek Night is made possible by the generous support of our partners and sponsors. If you would like to support MK Geek Night please get in touch - we have a range of opportunities and always open to new ideas.