Off Script - Episodes Tagged with “Conferences”

Episode 47: Behind the scenes of running a tech conference

Hey! Presents — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 14:30:00 +0100

How do you structure and run the perfect tech conference? What things are involved behind the scenes that attendees don’t see? What advice would you give to someone looking to start their own event?

We’re glad you asked! This episode is an All Day Hey! Special where hosts, Josh and James spill the beans on what goes on behind the All Day Hey! conference curtain, how we can collectively safeguard the future of events and what makes running a tech conference like this so special.

Join us in Leeds on Thursday, 1st May for this year’s All Day Hey!
Tickets and schedule at https://heypresents.com/conferences/2025

00:00 How to run a conference
01:00 Why start a conference? - The aim behind All Day Hey!
02:00 What do you want to provide for the audience?
03:00 Avoiding trends and providing backed knowledge
04:00 How to plan the day of talks to keep people engaged?
05:00 Dealing with technical blunders
07:00 Process of picking speakers and who to contact
08:00 Avoiding talks being sponsored ads
11:00 Getting diversity of topic and idea
12:00 All Day Hey! is community focussed - how to create this?
13:00 How to open up the networking and make it welcoming
14:00 How to close a conference to provoke questions
15:00 Tips for other organisers
16:00 Investing in production quality
17:00 Setting up a conference in 2025
19:00 Keeping the indie conference alive

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Episode 46: How to plan and run a discovery workshop

Hey! Presents — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

What is a discovery workshop and how can they be used to work through problems in your business? In this episode, James and Josh discuss how they've run them in the past and offer some tips and tricks to getting the most out of these sessions.
Listen now for a brand new instalment of Off Script!

00:00 Introduction
01:00 What is a discovery workshop
02:00 Using Miro
02:30 Slideument - slide deck with a documents worth of content
03:00 Use the right medium to foster discussion
04:00 Break workshop sessions into two
05:00 Use other physical spaces to inspire
06:00 Framing the problem but not steering
07:00 Amazon's idea - Write the Press Release
08:00 What are the challenges, resources, and politics?
09:00 What would the bad press be?
10:00 How to be honest and open?
11:00 Creating a safe environment
14:00 Find out what they want from the session
16:00 90 min cycles of energy
17:00 Risk register
18:00 Walk and talk to reenergise
20:00 Keeping discussions on track
21:00 Capturing and processing the data
22:00 Using AI to digitise and distribute
23:00 The next steps
23:30 One Two Three All
26:00 Handy thing to do to unblock

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Episode 45: 2024 developer round-up

Hey! Presents — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 16:00:00 +0000

It’s time to reflect and plan ahead! James and Josh look back at a tumultuous 2024 in tech and ask the big questions about where things are heading.

What were the highlights?
What lessons can we learn?
How do we prepare for 2025?

Listen now as we kick-off the year with a brand new instalment of Off Script!

In praise of indie conferences
The struggles of smaller events
AWS re:Invent conference
Multi Cloud
Distributed SQL - DSQL
Tough time for tech in 2024
All Day Hey!
Publishing platforms
Tech Influencers
Complete CSS - Any Bell
Learn with Jason
The state of the tech economy
Whisper Flow
CrowdStrike outage
AI, Automation, valid JSON, OLLAMA , Constrained Sampling
AI Agents, Cursor IDE
SASS is in danger?
Adobe Podcast
New Ruby on Rails
Laravel 11
Deno
BlueSky

References

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Episode 44: Future of software engineering leadership - Part 2

Hey! Presents — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Part 2 has landed! For this outing of Off Script, Josh and James explore the ‘Future of engineering leadership’.

This is an episode born from Q&A discussions and ideas at the recent Off Script Live event in Leeds. Dive into the modern challenges and the future direction of leadership in software engineering.

AI Sustainability
Company energy offset
Energy demands of AI vs speed of innovation
AI on device
Apple Siri LLM on device?
Loneliness in leadership positions
Talk with peers in other companies
Lattice HR for feedback
Finding your role
Event culture
Consistency creates community
Organiser sets the tone
Challenges for future leaders
Addressing the gap between vocal and and non vocal team members
Communication types
Generating positive feedback culture

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Episode 43: Future of software engineering leadership - Part 1

Hey! Presents — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000

"It's not enough just being right. You've got to actually convince people of your way of thinking and take other people on the journey".

Off Script is back with Josh and James hosting the first episode in a massive two-parter!

They take lessons and hot topics from the recent Off Script Live event in Leeds. Dive into the modern challenges and the future direction of leadership in software engineering in this episode.

Part 2 out soon! Subscribe so you don’t miss it.

Recorded: 27th November 2024

Recap
re:invent festival
AI announcements
Event themes
Remote & Hybrid working
Slack working dynamics
Methods of communication
Importance of communication
Huddle to convey tone of information
Reduce crosstalk and chatter
Mandating behaviour vs Encouraging participation
Sarah Wells Talk - Nudge Theory - LINK
Make it easy for people to do the right thing
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
Hiring policies
Soft Skills in hybrid working
Empowering vs washing hands of decisions
AI
Important to understand the black box
Using AI for leadership decisions

Reference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxcgywwC4u8

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Episode 42: Imperfect innovation

Hey! Presents — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 13:00:00 +0100

The historically popular development process of “move fast and break things” has got the biggest companies in the world far. In the age of AI, can we still take these risks in the name of progress or are the potential repercussions too great? Josh and James are joined by guest Jack Sails to discuss.

Recorded: 17th July 2024

02 Open AI fearless implementation
03 Is developing in a vacuum worse?
04 Google move fast and break things becomes more dangerous
05 OpenAI haven't lost trust yet
06 How did OpenAI get its data - Mira Murati
09 Scraping the internet for data
10 A open internet vs private companies
10 ARC browser hover LLM description
11 Imperfect innovation, where does it come from?
11 Innovating to solve a problem vs innovation into unknown areas
12 Microsoft Copilot AI
13 ChatGPT taking over Google as the go-to for questions
16 Kodak & digital images
18 Humans bring value and craft
19 The iPhone was a ipod killer
20 Fearing innovation and protectionism
21 Nokia's lack of smartphone innovation
25 Theranos - Fake it till you make it in medicine
28 Now no one will touch the Metaverse
29 Zoe smart patch and gut tracking
35 Lime Scooters late night testing for alcohol
36 Innovation that's not required
37 Coke's new flavour
39 Segway
42 Cars
43 Napster's innovation

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Episode 41: WWDC 2024 round-up

Hey! Presents — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 06:30:00 +0100

Jack Sails (IMA) is back with James & Josh to discuss the recent WWDC24 Apple Developer conference. Was AI the word of the conference? Find out as they work through everything revealed this year and how it will affect their products going forward.

In this episode:

00 Intro
01 Apple Intelligence
02 AI & Apple’s Privacy first approach
04 SIRI & Natural language AI integration
06 Natural language vs pre scripted
09 Image Playground AI image creator
10 SIRI x Open AI
12 Genmoji
12 IOS 18
16 Transcribed calls
17 New apps
18 New password app
21 Sequoia macOS
23 Does the UK follow the EU restrictions
24 Supporting old hardware
29 Vision OS 2

References:

https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/wwdc/

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Episode 40: Shifting security left

Hey! Presents — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Inspired by reading ‘Investments Unlimited’ and other books built around the principles of storytelling, James and Josh dive into DevSecOps and the bigger picture of shifting security left in this new episode of Off Script!

In this episode:

00:00 Fictional Bugs - Investments Unlimited
01:00 DevSecOps
02:00 Moving security testing to the beginning
03:00 Reducing the friction of releases
04:00 Go through pain points early
05:00 Strict linting, function length, no unused variables
06:00 Early automated tests to prevent Git leaks
08:00 Making it easy for the developer
10:00 Bearer
11:00 Concise reporting
12:00 Dependabot
13:00 Secret Management
14:00 Making it easy to do the right thing
16:00 Having pride in your security
17:00 What if your language doesn’t have much security support?
19:00 Dynamic & Static languages
20:00 Language agnostic tools
21:00 Key takeaways

References:

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Episode 39: The beauty of side projects

Hey! Presents — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 10:00:00 +0000

What do fish donuts, a passion for cooking and elaborate recipes have to do with productivity? Are you getting enough of a creative outlet around your busy schedule? Josh and James discuss the importance of side projects and how the variety they add to your week benefits your work-life balance and output!

In this episode:

00:00 Welcome
01:00 What are our side projects?
02:00 Coding
03:00 Cooking
04:00 Josh’s chef stage experience
11:00 Service state - Flow state when coding
12:00 Find your creative outlet
13:00 Find the time
16:00 Adding variety to life
17:00 Book - One Thing
18:00 Having side projects when being a leader
19:00 Consistency

References:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Thing-Surprisingly-Extraordinary-bestselling/dp/1848549253

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Episode 38: AI risks

Hey! Presents — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 07:00:00 +0000

What are AI risks? What do we need to consider when looking at our projects? Josh and James are are back for another episode of Off Script to dig deeper into this important topic!

00 - ISO 42001 Regulation
03 - What are the risks
04 - Hallucinations
05 - How do we critically assess the output
06 - Human in the loop
08 - Authorised API integrations
13 - Prompt Injection
14 - Sleeper agent LLM
18 - Denial OF Service models
22 - Exact phrasing on outputs
25 - Rabbit.tech

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Episode 37: 2023 developer round-up

Hey! Presents — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 11:30:00 +0000

It’s time for our annual review of the year! In this episode, James and Josh discuss the many twists and turns that the last 12 months brought in this 2023 developer round-up.

Thank you for listening this year. We’ll be back with more episodes in the New Year!

01 A look back at the year
03 The year AI went mainstream
05 Tech layoffs
07 Open AI x Microsoft partnership
08 M2 Apple Mac chips
09 Google Bard
12 Stephen Wolfram wrote "What is ChatGPT doing.. And why does it work?"
13 Web IOS & Ipad
15 ChatGPT Plus & Whisper API's
15 Parallax hosted "stories on the road"
19 React.dev
21 Apple vs Epic Games
22 Meta fined 1.3B
23 EU Cookie policy
24 Final Cut & Logic Pro on IOS
27 Advent of code
28 Chrome added web GPU support
29 Native to web based apps
30 All Day Hey 2023
31 Fluency Bot
32 SEC sue Coinbase & Binance
33 NASA lost connection to Voyager 2
34 Microsoft Type Chat
36 Meta Launched Threads
38 Temporary disabilities
40 Josh joins Glean as CTO
41 Apple launched Name Drop
42 Air traffic control meltdown
43 Hyperdx
44 Webflow Conf
46 WCAG 2.2
47 M3 Macs
49 re:invent
50 Deno KV
51 StyleX
53 iA writer
54 CloudFlare year in review
55 Spotify Wrapped

References:

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Episode 36: Tech leadership misconceptions

Hey! Presents — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Are all leaders extroverts? Does agile development mean there is no plan or documentation? Do leaders have to be the best developer? Following on from a recent in-person talk, James and Josh discuss more common tech misconceptions in the area of leadership.

01 Misconception in leadership
01 Leadership is the only way for progression
02 Tech path vs management path
03 Dual track progression
04 Good code is all that matters
05 How teams interact
06 We'll cross the bridge when its comes to it
09 Have to be the best engineer to be a leader
10 It’s not about you
11 Tech skills trump company culture
12 Diversity
14 More developers = more velocity
17 Documentation is less important for agile teams
19 Agile development means no plan
22 All leaders are extroverts
25 Leadership is lonely
27 You don't need a mentor or peers

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Episode 35: Understanding emotional states

Hey! Presents — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Any team will have a variety of emotional states when responding to problems. How do you analyse, understand and make meaningful decisions based on these differences? In this episode, James and Josh discuss different methods of understanding a team’s characteristics and how taking these into account can lead you to getting the best out of everyone.

01 SDIs
01 Strength, Deployment, Inventory
02 Stress states
05 Trickle down management
06 Myers briggs
07 Performance, Process, People
08 Dissecting Josh’s results
12 Using the results within a team
13 Strengths and weaknesses
14 What brings out the best in you
15 Being accountable
16 Applying the findings

Resources:

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Episode 34: Building communities

Hey! Presents — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 15:30:00 +0000

What are the steps to building a thriving community? What challenges might you face along the way? In this episode, James and Josh draw on their experience of creating and building communities online and offline, sharing their insights on how to make it a success.

04 Starting a community
06 Building trust
08 Give value, not a sales pitch
10 Josh on building a conference
12 Creating a welcoming environment
15 Letting people know your weaknesses
16 Trust
17 Empathy
18 Dealing with conflict
20 Don’t fear conflict
22 Lack of commitment or direction
23 Inclusion
24 Avoidance of accountability
26 The enemy of accountability is ambiguity
27 Shared ownership
30 Rethinking views
31 Diversity

Resources:

https://www.executiveagenda.com/resources/blog/five-dysfunctions-team

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Episode 33: AI ethics

Hey! Presents — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 08:00:00 +0100

AI ethics - a hot, divisive topic and rightly so. James and Josh are back with a brand new episode of Off Script to dig in and explore a space that is impacting our lives more and more.

01 Intro
02 Applied AI event
03 Bethan Vincent's talk
03 Jack Sails’ talk
06 Outcomes are not determined by intentions
07 EU Cookie law
09 Tech can’t be decided by those who know the least about the tech
10 Regulation
11 AI marking of papers
12 Only as good as the dataset it is trained on
13 Why as a company would we use this?
14 Disclaimers
15 AI Consultancy
18 Risk
19 Oxford Uni CapAI implementation
20 What happens when things don’t go right?
22 Accountability
25 The Trolley problem
27 Deontology
28 The moral machine self driving car
29 7 Things to consider when implementing AI in your business
30 Fluency bot for Slack and confluence

References

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Episode 32: Static site generators

Hey! Presents — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 16:00:00 +0100

James and Josh explore the world of SSGs (static site generators)! The differences between SSGs and full stack frameworks, the associated technologies out there and what to consider with your project when deciding what is best for it.

[Recorded 13th July, 2023]

01 Intro
02 The Personal Website
02 Static Site Generators
02 ASTRO
03 Content driven site vs Logic and functional site
04 Jekyll
04 Webapps
07 Full stack frameworks
08 MPA vs SPA
10 Islands
15 It’s a cms without the cms
16 Flexible data structures enforced via TypeScript
20 Deployment - compilation step, already do this on most frameworks anyway
22 Still require a rich runtime environment of JS deps etc
25 Bring your own db and cache
26 Environmental impact
27 New SSGs

References

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Episode 31: Blockchain

Hey! Presents — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 12:00:00 +0100

What is the blockchain? How has it changed over time? Is it still killing the planet? James and Josh discuss various types of blockchain systems and how they might have some real world applications for social good.

[Recorded 13th July, 2023]

1 Blockchain
02 How did it start
03 Bitcoin
03 Ethereum
03 Proof of work vs Proof of stake
05 Hardforking
06 Web3 bros
06 Masterdon & De-centralisation
07 Microservices
10 Real word aplications
11 Music Industry
12 Coinbase
14 Wallet management
17 User identity
18 Social good smart contracts
19 Blockchain kickstarter
20 Bored Ape
21 Digital art

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Episode 30: WWDC 2023 round-up

Hey! Presents — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 17:00:00 +0100

James & Josh discuss the recent WWDC 2023 conference and break down some of the announcements. Dive in to the episode to hear all their thoughts on the latest developments coming out of Apple HQ and the impact it may have on us.

[Recorded 9th June, 2023]

05 - Apple Vision Pro
09 - Product reveals
11 - MacOS Sonoma
12 - Paprika
13 - Safari Profiles
15 - ARC Browser
18 - Widgets
19 - Presenter Overlays
20 - Installable Webapps
21 - WatchOS 10 & promoting health
23 - Apple & AI Spacial Computing
24 - Squid Soup
24 - Spacial audio
25 - Apple Vision Pro
30 - New dev tools and experiences for headset
35 - Nest Cameras & Starling Hub
37 - JPEG XL
40 - The future of Apple development & products

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Episode 29: The future of large language models

Hey! Presents — Thu, 11 May 2023 11:00:00 +0100

Returning podcast guest Jack Sails joins James and Josh to discuss developments in large language models! Over this episode they discuss how LLMs are being used, Open AI and its current offerings, tips on how to use them and any concerns they may have around this new technology.

[Recorded 19th April, 2023]

02 - Metaverse & Crypto
03 - Online virtual spaces
04 - Chat GPT evolution
05 - GPT-4
06 - Apple audiobooks
06 - SIRI + LLM
07 - A GPT does not understand you
09 - What are LLMs and how do they work?
10 - 1 word = 1 token
11 - What is temperature in the context of LLMs?
13 - OpenAI Playground
14 - Clippy on crack
16 - Should we be concerned about the flaws? It can’t even add 2+2
18 - Siri Skills
19 - How can we lean into this technology to improve our productivity
20 - Decision paralysis
20 - Good prompt writing is key
22 - Megaprompting
23 - How can you learn how to reprompt to get the output you’re looking for
24 - Privacy concerns
26 - Bias
27 - D.A.N
31 - NPCs in games
34 - How do we remain ethical in a world of generated content?
35 - UK Chancellor using it to craft a speech
41 - How can we use this today, in our everyday lives?
44 - Example prompts
45 - Becoming an editor

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Episode 28: Tech misconceptions

Hey! Presents — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 14:00:00 +0100

There are a lot of misconceptions in the tech world. In this episode James and Josh shine some light and dispel some common myths!

01 - Private browsing is private
04 - Agile development means no planning
06 - Adding more developers speeds up projects
09 - Code should be optimised right form the begining
12 - Usability testing is done once the product is ready
14 - Adding more features makes products better
16 - AI will replace developers

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Episode 27: Engineering culture

Hey! Presents — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Off Script is back! This episode, James and Josh discuss engineering culture and some of the best practices and processes they’ve implemented for reliable development cycles. What’s the release process? How do you monitor the application and ensure robust code quality? How do Infrastructure and security considerations affect the development? All covered in this episode!

02 Release process - Continuous integration
03 Feature flagging
05 Versioning
07 Application Monitoring & alerting
09 Flare error message mishap
10 Centralised Dashboards
11 Shipping a better product
11 Tips for a new hire
12 Linting
13 Versioning
15 Testing
17 Reduce the feedback loop
20 Architecture review
22 Programming patterns
25 Infrastructure
26 Tooling setup and access (Consul, Vault, etc)
28 Infrastructure as code
30 Data residency and regional deployments
32 Security
33 Secret storage and environment specific configuration
34 Regulatory compliance (e.g. ISO 27001, GCloud expectations
35 Dependency review
36 External security review
37 On-boarding/off-boarding Documentation
38 OpenAPI documents
40 Slack
44 Communication is key

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Episode 26: 2022 developer round-up

Hey! Presents — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 09:00:00 +0000

The state of the world, green engineering, James' wedding, Elon's meltdowns. To round off the year, James and Josh look back at the many ups and downs from the world of tech and beyond.

00 - State of the world
01 - Good to be back in the office
03 - Figma & its Adobe acquisition
04 - Mozilla started to accept Crypto then halted
05 - Web3
06 - Google Fonts Privacy & GDPR breach
07 - Reducing the web's carbon footprint. Optimising & green engineering
08 - Building a Greener Web talk by Michelle Barker
09 - Netify sponsoring open source eleventy
10 - MDN Mozilla Dev Network refresh
11 - '5 Web things that you don't need Javascript for'
12 - CSS Tricks acquired by Digital Ocean
13 - US announced plans to make daylight saving time permanent
15 - Devs for Ukraine
17 - Twitter embeds
18 - Duck Duck Go for Mac & other Chromium forks
20 - US court reaffirmed that web scraping is legal
21 - All Day Hey! 2022
22 - Blogging making a comeback - Own your own thoughts
23 - Is Mastodon any good?
25 - Mailing lists are back
25 - CSS Day is back
26 - Internet Explorer was retired
27 - Stranger Things had a hacking scene that featured Flexbox
28 - WWWDC - Human interface guidelines
29 - Apple Passkeys
30 - W3C became a public interest not-for-profit enterprise
31 - UK Online Safety Bill - a disappointment that targets individuals not big tech
33 - Cookie Pop-up failure of policy
34 - Heroku down all the time
36 - James got married
37 - Chrome version 105
38 - No Code Tools Article
40 - Don't throw away code - article
40 - GitHubs - What's your first github contribution
42 - Source code webkit is now managed on GitHub
43 - Heather Burns - Data Privacy Book
44 - Chris Coyier - Talk 'The web is good now'
45 - Cloudflare SVG support for images
46 - Leeds Digital Festival - DALLE event
48 - btconf - Berlin Trip
48 - PassKey Support by Google
49 - CSS Working Group - The View Transition API + Scrolled Linked Transitions
51 - Way Back Machine Turned 21
53 - Hey! Presents Social in Leeds
54 - ffconf pod episode
54 - Advent of Code
55 - Josh on 'Another Idea Podcast' - Creative Podcast
55 - Web Sustainability Resources
56 - Practical Accessibility Course
57 - re:Invent episode
57 - 'Engineering management for the rest of us' - book by Sarah Drasner
58 - Google switching to a continuous scroll
59 - 25 years since Microsoft FrontPage 98
61 - Parallax won many awards this year
62 - Chatloop

Resources:

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Episode 25: AWS re:Invent 2022 round-up

Hey! Presents — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 16:00:00 +0000

James is back from his Vegas trip for AWS re:Invent! In this episode, they discuss James’ impression of the city, the hot topics of the talks and James’ exploration of the variety of American fast food joints.

00 - What Vegas is like
01 - Elastic vs Serverless
02 - Event overview
06 - Redshift Serverless
07 - Zero ETL
08 - Aurora into Redshift
09 - DataZone
10 - QuickSight Q
11 - Keynote: Swami Sivasubramanian
- Fully managed databases
- AWS Glue Data Quality
- The new geospatial capabilities in Amazon SageMaker allow data scientists to predict natural disasters, manage relief efforts, and navigate roads using satellite imagery and pre-trained neural networks.
- DataZone, governance for data lakes, data viruses, and machine learning
15 - Keynote: Dr. Werner Vogels
- Parallelism and concurrency
- Event-driven architectures
- AWS Application Composer

Resources:

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Episode 24: The evolution of GPT and ChatGPT

Hey! Presents — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 13:00:00 +0000

Following on from the previous conversation about GPT-3, James & Josh discuss the explosion of ChatGPT's popularity. In this episode they explore how it's different from previous iterations, the way its features are impressing the tech community and also where its limitations may lie.

00 - What does it do differently to GPT-3
01 - Maybe prompt writing won't be a job of the future!
03 - A helpful debugging companion
04 - A new way to interface with Stackoverflow
06 - It doesn't know how to be evil... yet
06 - Finding flaws in Smart Contracts
08 - Live Captioning
09 - What are the roadblocks in AI development?
10 - We can learn a lot from it
12 - AI writing its own prompts or feeding into DALL-E
13 - Where to put checks and balances?
14 - Try asking it a Google question
15 - Book Recommendation: Life 3.0
17 - Teething issues with the new technology
18 - Safeguarding & the online Safety Bill considerations

Resources:

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Episode 23: GPT-3 and the future of AI

Hey! Presents — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 08:00:00 +0000

What is GPT-3 and how does the future look? How will AI affect work? What ethical dilemmas must we consider? James & Josh talk about all things GPT-3 and the recent surge in the use of AI from business applications to experimental art.

01 - What is GPT-3
01 - DALLE 2
02 - The future of the company
03 - Use Cases
04 - How prompts work
05 - AI Idea generator
06 - Used in GITHub co-pilot
07 - Summarise.tech
09 - Translation AI
11 - AI targeted advertising
12 - Conversational applications
15 - How do you train an AI model on ethics
16 - Misuse of AI
18 - Costs
20 - How to get involved
21 - The future of the platform and GPT-4

Resources:

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Episode 22: ffconf 2022 round-up

Hey! Presents — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 12:00:00 +0000

In this episode, Josh and James explore Josh’s recent trip to ffconf 2022 in Brighton. They discuss the talks, all the highlights and takeaways raised during the conference.

2 - ffconf hacked gameboy game in gift pack
5 - Talk: Florence Okoye - Designing as we want, to create the experiences that we need
6 - Design justice framework
9 - Talk: Heydon Pickering - Capitalism, The Web, And You
11 - The Gig Economy, Slavery, Uber & Exploitation
13 - Talk: Lex Lofthouse - Design for Developers
14 - Bootstrap
16 - Talk: Sophie Koonin - This Talk is Under Construction: a love letter to the personal website
17 - Back to blogs
18 - “The Modern web is not for creators, it’s for consumers”
19 - “Building a website is a radical act in this day and age”
20 - Talk: Lily Madar - Programming with Yarn
23 - Talk: Natalia Waniczek - Working towards a greener world from behind the keyboard
24 - Green engineering principles
25 - Music streaming greenhouse gas emissions
26 - Optimising for region hosting
27 - Talk: Sareh Heidari - Digital exclusion in healthcare & how to change it
28 - The digital device bank
29 - Plain english consortium
30 - Silktide breaks down reading age
31 - Internet Access as a human right
32 - Talk: Ruth John - Day Disco
33 - Using audio web apis to create fun things
33 - Digital TR 909 to program in browser
34 - Web Midi

Resources:

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Episode 21: Modern API design

Hey! Presents — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 08:00:00 +0100

What is and isn’t an API? How has the technology changed over time? What are new considerations that have arisen? Hosts James & Josh discuss a variety of APIs and the benefits and faults that help refine the APIs of today.

00 - What is an API?
03 - S.O.A.P
05 - Restful API
06 - RSS & JSON
07 - Public API’s
10 - Documentation driven development
13 - React API & GitHub
16 - Graph QL
19 - Twilio
20 - Stripe Payment
23 - Paypal
24 - Web hooks
27 - Pusher
30 - Modern API Considerations
31 - Cloud Front/ API Gateway
34 - Documentation - What is design without documentation
37 - Facebook & Open Graph
40 - PAW MAC API
44 - 3D Secure

Resources:

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Episode 20: Beyond Tellerrand Berlin 2022 round up

Hey! Presents — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 08:30:00 +0100

This episode of Off Script, Josh and James explore Josh’s recent trip to Berlin to the single-track conference, Beyond Tellerrand. They discuss and break down all the hot topics for us.

01 Intro
03 Venue
03 The Pac Man Rule - Always leave a gap in your circle!
04 Live subtitles at the event
06 All together now by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino
15 Inviting People In by Michelle Chin - Different ways we were forced to collaborate during the pandemic.
20 If You’re Not Scared, You’re Not Living by Vic Lee
24 Make it sound by Tiziana Alocci involving the use of non speech audio to convey information.
28 Dragon slayer by Espen Brunborg - How to be a better web designer
32 The reinvention of normal by Dominic Wilcox - About creativity and being creative.
40 Stand in talk - Pragmatic Sketching
45 Visualising connections by Nadieh Bremer including bringing open source constellation maps to life.
50 The Content Design of Civil Discourse: Turning Conflict into Collaboration by David Thomas - What does a productive conversation about a topic look like
54 Less thinking. More tinkering by Gavin Strange - Create a space for creativity to happen
57 Making by breaking by Dina Amin - A book is not a book. It’s paper, string, words, letters
101 Making the impossible possible by Janis McDavid - Who are we when we are alone, who are we when no one is watching

Resources:

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Episode 19: Why you should use React Native

Hey! Presents — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 10:00:00 +0100

What are the benefits of using React Native to build mobile applications over platform specific frameworks? Where did it come from and why might it be a good choice for your next project? Hosts James & Josh discuss their use of React Native and how it’s helped streamline app development.

01 How it enables quick UI Iterations & rapid app development
02 Significant use cases
03 Where did you first hear about it?
04 How native UI is used
05 Improved debugging features
07 Patching your app
08 Lotte animation library
09 JSON definitions of animation
10 Xcode simulator
19 Ethos of Open Source
20 Haptic libraries
21 React query & axios
23 Flipper & error messages

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Episode 18: Internet of Things

Hey! Presents — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 16:00:00 +0100

How has the Internet of Things changed how we build internet connected devices, and does this approach sometimes overly complicated things? Hosts James and Josh discuss the world of IoT, its real world applications and some of the pitfalls projects fall into.

00 - History of IoT
01 - Anything can be connected via a ESP32 controller
02 - ‘Making things more complex than they need to’
03 - Petnet IoT Cat Feeder
04 - A Single point of failure ‘Starve your cat as a service’
05 - Street lights in Aberdeen & how they store the schedule on the light
06 - IoT Dependencies
07 - Ring / Canary / Nest
08 - Nest works standalone off Wifi
09 - Smart Bins for N Yorkshire Council
12 - ‘Smart’ Plugs - hot wire toaster
13 - Asthma Studies
14 - Security & updating IoT devices
19 - Boring SSL - Less config the better
19 - Apple pass key + Signal
22 - Avoiding DDOSSing yourself

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Episode 17: All Day Hey! 2022 round-up

Hey! Presents — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 08:00:00 +0100

Off Script is back with a special episode as hosts Josh and James reflect on another successful All Day Hey! conference in Leeds and via live stream. Running through the talks and the dynamics of the day, listen in for a breakdown of how it all went and their thoughts on the talks of the day.

Hey! Presents are uploading all of the content from the day over the next few weeks so make sure to head over to their website to check out the talks from this year’s fantastic speakers.

01 - Intro & thanks
04 - Benefit of IRL conversations
06 - Emily Cressey’s Design Systems talk and Sketch
10 - Different designs for different levels of complexity
11 - Power user vs Casual
12 - Design system manager
13 - Github
13 - 'Evaluate what design elements you use and delete what does not get used'
14 - Stephanie Stimac’s talk on ‘Progressive Webapps’
20 - Live code streaming
22 - 3D CSS Stopwatch
27 - Luke Murphy’s illustration system in Figma
28 - 'Illustrations guiding emotional state'
35 - Functional Programming
38 - Responsive Design
39 - 'Let the browser do the heavy lifting'
40 - Utopia fluid type generator

Resources:

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Episode 16: SXSW recap

Hey! Presents — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 08:30:00 +0100

On this episode of Off Script, James runs us through his recent trip to South By South West (SXSW) and analyses what it all means with Josh. What were the main talking points? What were the new trends worth noting? Our hosts give us their thoughts on Zuckerberg's appearance & the exciting but possibly dystopic future the new tech could lead us to.

The programming of the event
Emerging tech trends
Our role as leaders
Robin Hood app & Gamification
Overvaluation of some tech companies
Is this a bubble?
Candle Media buying Youtube channels
Silo'd Metaverse experiences
Video games have been doing this for years
AI
Deepfakes
WAB AR/VR
Zuckerberg
Synthetic Biology
Tech Warfare
Flexible working & culture changes relating to equality
Digital IDs
HoloRide test
All Day Hey

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Episode 15: Over-engineering

Hey! Presents — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 10:00:00 +0000

What can we learn from the success and simplicity of Wordle? How can we be more aware of when we’re likely to over-engineer a solution?

Hosts James & Josh discuss when to add complexity, when it’s not needed and scenarios where you’re more likely to encounter over-engineering difficulties.

Simplicity of Wordle
Hosting & Data Responsibility
Basecamp
Webflow
Microservices
Governance
Splitting Applications
GraphQL
Shopify

Find out more about Stac and Parallax:

Episode 14: What is the metaverse?

Hey! Presents — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 16:00:00 +0000

What is the metaverse and what has it got to do with Facebook? How do NFTs fit into it? Is it all 3D and gaming or is there more to it with business applications? Hosts James & Josh speak with our guest, Jack Sails and discuss where to begin with it and how to make sense of it all.

What is the metaverse?
What could it be?
Where's the transparency?
Turning off in these digital space
NFTs
When iPhone apps were new
Centralisation
VR / XR / AR
LIDAR
Hardware to support
Business application
Connected Wellbeing
How to get involved in the metaverse
Building an open framework and much more.

Find out more about Stac and Parallax:

Episode 13: 2021 developer round-up

Hey! Presents — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 07:00:00 +0000

2021 has been an eventful year! From January's launch of the AVIF format, April's Basecamp employee speech controversy and the web hitting 30 years old plus much more. Hosts James & Josh take us on a journey through the highs and lows of the year.

Thanks to Cooper Press’ Frontend Focus and Ruby Weekly, invaluable resources that helped us go back in time to compile the monthly breakdown.

Google Cloud Functions adds Ruby support
GitHub makes it easier to rename branches
Google migrating Puppeteer to TypeScript
AVIF
The Web didn't change, you did
Edge Kids Mode
Sonic Pi 3.3
Homebrew 3.0
10 Years of Open Source D3.js
Basecamp's Employee speech controversy
All Day Hey! Live
25 Years of CSS
Sublime Text 4
Prawn library update
Tim Berners-Lee NFT
Github Codespaces
Chrome Removing IFRAME support
30 Years of the web
Decline of Firefox users
Cloudflare outages
Netlify
Dev tooling
LOG4J

Resources:

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Episode 12: Productivity & mental health

Hey! Presents — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 10:00:00 +0000

How do you avoid burnout and keep productivity high? What methods can you use to help produce an efficient flow state? How have companies addressed these issues around hybrid working? Productivity and mental health go hand in hand but how do you manage it? Hosts James & Josh explore these issues around creating a positive motivated team.

Burnout
Time boxing
The side effects of being unproductive
Mental health
Exercise
Setting boundaries
Setting time limits on software and social media useage
The benefits of side projects
Mental health as the world reopens
Hybrid working
Empowering a team

Resources:

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Episode 11: Leadership

Hey! Presents — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 12:00:00 +0000

What leadership style do you have? How do you foster a productive culture? When do you give people autonomy and when do you put your foot down? The decisions around how to lead a team can affect how successful a project delivery is. How did the pandemic and working from home impact things? Hosts James & Josh explore these questions and look at ways to engage the team.

Different leadership styles
The value of delegating
How to keep people invested in the project
Boundaries when working from home
Tooling the team for the current times
Giving autonomy
Putting your foot down
The curse of analysis paralysis
How team structure affects leadership styles
Creating a positive culture around leadership when starting a business
Open Source software leadership
How different management styles anchorage flow state
Confluence
Showing vulnerability from the leader
Ensuring a work / life balance

Resources:

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Episode 10: Software estimation

Hey! Presents — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 16:30:00 +0100

How long will a project take to complete? How can you get this as close to reality as possible? Software estimation is an essential part of the development process and one that many people don’t know how to approach correctly. Is your team equipped with the right tools? Is there a shared understanding of the process within your team? Hosts James and Josh explore these questions and look at practical solutions to get it right.

Mapping the user experience
Demystifying the quote process with the client
Understanding your team and the time estimates they give you
Setting expectations
Internal communication and the quote process
Making tradeoff decisions
Adapting the tools you use as a team
Reusing code
Time management with client tweaks
Previous project analysis
The cost for updating and maintaining a project in the future
Early understanding of the client’s system
Building trust
Keeping devs on track via meetings
Creating a shared understanding between front and back-end developers
The value of face-to-face communication and more.

Resources:

Planning Poker

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Episode 09: Application performance

Hey! Presents — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 10:00:00 +0100

What would your first steps be when working on application performance? What tools can you use to help you through this process? What are the challenges when you overly optimise your application? Our hosts James and Josh dive into these questions and outline their thoughts on the following and much more:

Baselining where you are and establishing your starting point
Monitoring and improving performance
Speeding up your app speeds up dev time
Chrome dev tools
Game-changing services
Image optimisation
Reducing friction
Unlearning best practices
Testing
Worker related scripts
Lazy loading
Preloading

Resources:

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Episode 08: Web application security

Hey! Presents — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 10:00:00 +0100

Today, Off Script hosts Josh and James discuss all things web application security. It’s something that is getting more and more important to get right. More cyber attacks. More ransomware attacks. They address good application hygiene and the common pitfalls they are seeing people fall for. Big data breaches can lead to losing customer trust so it’s so important to makes sure you’re running a tight ship with security.

Basic security maintenance is essential but what can companies and individuals be doing to make sure their web applications are secure during a time of high value bug bounties being offered to people for finding vulnerabilities?

Bug bounties. The positives, negatives and relevancy to different sized agencies
The use of bots to find MongoDB vulnerabilities
Encrypted vaults
The Slack issue
How hard is it to put secure processes in place from the start?
Canary and environment variables
If you’re a security researcher, what do you do with responsible disclosure?
The fine line between helping the hackers and helping the community
What makes a good, secure app?
Package managers
Modern libraries making it obvious when you are doing a bad thing
Open pull requests
Get your house in order with OWASP
Frameworks and the early standards they set with password management and security hygiene
Importance of rotating keys
Human interfaces and the floors surrounding them
What can we learn from Twelve-Factor?
Github Workspaces and recreatable environments
The issues of convenience
Macs vs dev accessibility and Windows catching up
Github and Atom
Good, automated test suites
How to have a good view on what makes a good security test
Falling into the trap of feeling productive
Sitting down with the team to discuss testing value and priorities
The creativity of SQL injection
Reinventing the wheel
Dangers of writing an encryption tool and importance of getting an external security company

Resources:

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Episode 07: Career progression

Hey! Presents — Wed, 28 Jul 2021 18:00:00 +0100

We’re happy to welcome James Hall to Off Script as a new co-host alongside Josh Nesbitt in our new podcast format! The topic today is ‘Career progression’.

Josh and James have known each other for many years and have a lot of professional experience in tech at the top level between them, ranging from agency work through to consulting. Josh runs Leeds-based software consultancy Stac whilst James runs Parallax - a digital agency specialising in websites, apps and much more. This gives our co-hosts different perspectives on the tech topics they’ll be getting into in the coming episodes and gives the listener a balanced take on today’s top topics in tech.

If you enjoy this episode, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next one! In today’s episode, Josh and James explore:

How do you define a career path?
The changes you experience as a developer as you progress up the career ladder within an agency and as a consultant.
Knowing where to invest your time as a junior in tech to ensure suitable progression for yourself.
What opportunities and challenges does remote working create for employees and employers?
What can employers do to retain employees and create a rewarding career path for their staff?
How often should companies speak to employees about progression and what frameworks are effective for this?
Zoom fatigue and remote working.
What does the future look like for offices with a mixture of remote working and people wishing to spend their time around people in person?

Find out more about Stac and Parallax:

Episode 06: Why the cyber security industry needs to hire more anthropologists

Hey! Presents — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Why does the cyber security industry need to hire more anthropologists? Because the criminals already are.

By 2025 it is estimated $10.5 trillion will be lost to cyber criminals. Hacking humans is a very lucrative business.

Social engineering is one of the easiest and most effective ways to access a secure system. Cyber criminals know this, and they are increasingly leaning on the research and techniques of the social science disciplines to leverage the human element into letting them into our lives, our businesses and our bank accounts. Yet, while the security industry is always striving to be ‘one step ahead’ of the criminals in terms of technical capabilities, it often neglects the need to consider the very social nature of hacking.

As more of our lives are now online, how can security practitioners increase security awareness and build up our resilience to unite against malicious actors looking to leverage our weakest, but what could be our strongest, defences in cyber-warfare - our people?

This discussion puts people and social science at the centre of the solution. Utilising anthropological theories and methodologies - such as reciprocity, participant observation and tribalism - Lianne will demonstrate why cyber security teams need to hire beyond technical expertise and look towards the social sciences for the next advancements in cyber fortification to respond to this ever-increasing threat.

To face this threat, we need to readdress the fact that technology does not exist without human interaction. Cyber security practitioners must cater for a wide breadth of expertise, capabilities, experiences, cultural norms, along with all equalities and disparities that frame these individuals. This task is not one for the computer scientist alone and it highlights the urgency to address this problem from an anthropological perspective.

Episode 05: Empathy at work

Hey! Presents — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 17:00:00 +0000

We welcomed Sharon Steed to Hey! Live as our guest in November for a special, free live-streamed lecture. Sharon and Hey! Founder, Josh Nesbitt explored "Empathy at work".

Transformational culture starts with empathy. But how do you make that happen? How do you create a culture that everyone feels heard in? Respected? Where each individual knows them and their ideas are valuable to not only their coworkers, but the company at large?

These are the ideas Communilogue’s founder and principal Sharon Steed examines in her ebook "Empathy at work". Communilogue is also an empathy consultancy, so we can't wait for Sharon's insight into this fascinating topic at our live-streamed event.

Sharon speaks at companies and conferences globally on empathy at work. Her story is unique in that she got her start speaking and consulting in a non-traditional way.

Sharon is a life-long stutterer, and she uses her speech impediment to teach what empathy is and how to use it as a foundation for positive and effective communication. Stuttering has informed her view of communication as a result of years of being both terrified to speak but also fascinated with the the intricacies of conversation. She has spoken about empathy and communication, vulnerability and her experiences as a stutterer at conferences and companies globally.

"Empathy at work" is a topic Sharon has fantastic insight into. She has written an ebook about it facilitates a training course of the same name.

Episode 04: It's never too late to get into technology

Hey! Presents — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 11:30:00 +0100

We're happy to welcome Lu Liu, software engineer from Fintech industry to Off Script by Hey! Radio.

This is a story with practical lessons about how it's never too late to get into technology. Lu shares her journey into tech, how she got into the industry and how she overcame the difficulty and obstacles she encountered at the beginning of her career. She extracts key advice and takeaways she's learned that will be useful for people who are trying to change their career path into tech or students who want to pursue a career in tech.

There are lessons in Lu's talk that also benefit anyone with more experience in the industry who wants to reconnect with what that journey feels like if say, you manage a team with people who are. It's easy to lose sight of what the beginning feels like so there is something in this for all levels of industry experience.

Episode 03: Using the web for social good

Hey! Presents — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 10:00:00 +0100

In this discussion with Laura and Hey! founder Josh Nesbitt, we’ll cover technologies that improve our everyday lives as well as powering online movements, and how those same technologies can be used against us. Over the past few years, Laura has invested her time fighting for the regulation of surveillance capitalism, while building alternatives in her work for the Small Technology Foundation. In today’s world, activism increasingly relies on technology, making now a more important time than ever to discuss how technology can be used quickly and safely to spread facts and support action.

Do you have any thoughts on the topics covered or your own experiences? Join the conversation and let us know with a review or via our social media channels. Subscribe for future episodes.

Episode 02: Running a conference

Hey! Presents — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 11:00:00 +0000

In this episode of Off Script, All Day Hey! co-founders Josh Nesbitt and Harry Roberts break down what it takes to run a conference and how it came to be. We discuss:

How All Day Hey! Came into existence and why we do it
The responsibility of hosting people and bringing them into the city
This year’s ADH lineup and how we curate it
Reflecting on an event

References:

Do you have any thoughts on the topics covered or your own experiences? Join the conversation and let us know with a review or via our social media channels. Subscribe for future episodes.