Category: News

GGD#57 $@>U#%? – Security is all around you by Gudrun Fedorowich

Our February Girl Geek Dinner is hosted by LLoyds Banking Group

Thursday February 16th 

Although Information and Cyber Security are headline news the stories we see and hear reveal little about this field which can have so much influence on our lives. This talk looks to redress the balance by giving an overview of the key building blocks that this discipline is based on and the career opportunities these present.

  • Triangles and chains – the basics of information security

  • Behind the headlines – using news stories to show how security works and what happens when it fails

  • Internet of Things – securing the things that are part of your every day life

  • Careers in Information and Cyber Security

    IOT

Gudrun Fedorowich

Gudrun has 20 years experience in Information Technology 10 of which have been spent in the field of Information and Cyber Security culminating in her current role at Lloyds Banking Group. She holds a Masters degree in Information Security from the University of the West of England. IT is her second career as Gudrun holds an undergraduate degree in the History of Art and her early working life spanned roles in sales, marketing and management development.

After the presentation and any questions we will open the floor up for a discussion,  if anyone feels like they would like to bring along any ppt’s or links that they want to share for discussion then please bring it along on a USB or mail the team with info and we can share this during the discussion period. Don’t forget – you don’t have to work in the industry or be a geek, this is a group for anyone with an interest in the subject!  Do come along for pre-presentation mingling as we will be there from 6.30pm. 

Where

The food and hosting is kindly sponsored by LLoyds Banking Group who are based in the LLoyds ampitheatre Building on Bristol Harbourside – details will be posted on the exact building entrance on the meetup page once we receive it

Bristol

BS1 5LL

When

Thursday 16th  February 6.30/7  – 9pm

Sign Up

As always, we welcome men to our group, but to keep our audience predominantly female, we ask that all men are accompanied by a woman (just add a +1 on the meetup) here Girlgeekdinners Meetup https://www.meetup.com/Bristol-Girl-Geek-Dinners/

 

Womens Tech Hub Midwinter Social

As you are all aware we are taking a break this xmas but have a great february event in the planning and also wish to invite you all to our wthub xmas do – have a great xmas and look forward to seeing you all in the new year!

You are cordially invited to the  in conjunction with Desklodge

On the 19th January from 6-9pm @ Desklodge, 1 Temple Way, Bristol BS20BY 

WTHub ~ Bristol  want to say thank-you to all the people who have supported us in our start-up year, especially the Desklodge team, who have hosted numerous F3Fridays ~ see http://www.wthub.org/category/news/  to get an idea of the outcomes of our weekly sessions.

Our  Midwinter Social is free, and a great chance to meet and mingle with a whole bunch of talented and diverse people.

WTHub is a social enterprise that exists to support individual women with their careers in tech, and connect them with local womens tech groups and industry. We also encourage women to attend and speak at mixed events and like to share news about all the great things going on out there in Bristol and the South-West. We are actively working with local companies to create a more diverse workplace culture.

If we haven’t persuaded you already with the idea of free wine and beer and some free crisps, here are a couple of reasons to come to our Midwinter Social:

For meetup organisers it’s a chance to network with local women in tech groups and find out what else is happening in the region.

For tech businesses, do feel free to bring information about opportunities with your company, or just come and talk to some great and interesting women about their experiences of working in tech.

If you’d like to bring info about a meetup group or recruitment or relevant events then please let us know in advance. We will set up a revolving presentations slideshow if you and send us a one page ppt slide.

So sign up here [https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/midwinter-social-tickets-29985162428] and please pass this invite any women you know who currently work in tech, are interested in the idea or a woman interested in meeting more people working locally – the more the merrier!

Constance & Serrie wthub.org

Tom Thanh Jamie & Sam desklodge.com
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re:BOOT and returnships

screenshot-2016-12-09-at-20-10-14The great news is that not only have we @ wthub.org had our first returner successfully started @ Habu – more of which we will post later. But we have also been talking to a few companies interested in the re:BOOT scheme.
 
Oracle have just released this publicly and we have some possible candidates already in mind. If you want to understand more then feel free to chat to us on [email protected] or go directly to Michael .. he’s very friendly!
 
“I’m interested in speaking to people who are seeking a return to Software Engineering having had an absence from the industry. Maybe you, or someone you know, has left the industry to have a family or simply take a break and you’re interested in returning but unsure how to fit it around your commitments?
 
Oracle Bristol is offering Returnships. These are paid positions which can be full or part-time, 10 weeks to 10 months, we’re flexible.
 

GGD#56 Be the CEO of your own career by Rula Arbash

Our November Girl Geek Dinner is hosted by Blu Wireless

Wednesday November 16th 

Bio

Rula Arbash, originally from Jordan, lived in the Middle East, Madrid and London.

MSc graduate in Mobile and Personal Communications from King’s College London, and BEng Hons degree in Communication Networks Engineering from Brunel University. I have a strong passion and commitment to Engineering and Technology. Currently I am a Junior Front-End Design Engineer, working on Blu Wireless, System on Chip (SoC) HYDRA multi-gigabit wireless baseband IP; 60GHz WiFi mm-Wave technology for consumer and telecom backhaul applications. My role involves coding at both RTL and System-C level from specification, building test-bench models and performing block level RTL synthesis.

In my free time, I love to go play football and tennis, along with Zumba and Salsa.

 

rula-arbash

I will be speaking about

  • Where I’ve been, my inspiration, education and  personal accomplishments

  • Be the CEO of your career, most of us begin our technology career through some combination of education, opportunity, and experience. When we are young, we just need a job. At some point though we want to take some control and direct our career

  • Technology options

  • Key questions to ask yourself, What Do I Enjoy / Not Enjoy – i.e. what do I find engaging? What are my VIPS, (values, interests, personality and skills) and how does these translate into my work

  • Work and Lifestyle

  • Compensation

  • Employee and Employer relationship

After the presentation and any questions we will open the floor up for a discussion,  if anyone feels like they would like to bring along any ppt’s or links that they want to share for discussion then please bring it along on a USB or mail the team with info and we can share this during the discussion period. Don’t forget – you don’t have to work in the industry or be a geek, this is a group for anyone with an interest in the subject! 

Do come along for pre-presentation mingling as we will be there from 6.30pm. 

Where

The food and hosting is kindly sponsored by Blu Wireless who are based at desklodge in Bristol on the corner of old market

DESKLODGE
5TH FLOOR, 1 TEMPLE WAY
BRISTOL
BS2 0BY

Directions to desklodge

When

Wednesday 16th  November 6.30/7  – 9pm

Sign Up

As always, we welcome men to our group, but to keep our audience predominantly female, we ask that all men are accompanied by a woman (just add a +1 on the meetup) here Girlgeekdinners Meetup https://www.meetup.com/Bristol-Girl-Geek-Dinners/

Social Media Week Bristol

Hi Bristol Girl Geek Dinners, 
I wanted to let you know that Social Media Week Bristol is all go next week.  Here’s the link to the schedule. http://www.bristolmedia.co.uk/socialmediaweek
Over 45 events – from £5 to £35 – from 14th to 18th November geared to help, inspire & support organisations & individuals looking to learn & be inspired.
Hear from social media royalty at keynote lectures, attend knowledge building master classes & develop know-how at practical skill-up sessions.
Twitter, Buzzfeed, Facebook &  GlassDoor will be paying Bristol a visit. Sessions will be dedicated to YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Instagram. Aardman, Yogscast, Yahoo and Arthritis Research UK will share transformational case studies.
Hot topics as broad as analytics, gaming, metrics, measurement, data science, strategy, storytelling, law, compliance, personal brand building and information security will be covered. And, after all that learning, don’t forget to come and let your hair down at our closing party!
Popular sessions that I thought your network would find interesting:
– How to build or transform a business through YouTube, Facebook Live & Twitch – with the Yogscast crew, Aardman, Yahoo, Torchbox
– The only rule is that there are no rules! Media disruptors BuzzFeed & Bristol24/7 discuss the future of cross platform global & local news & entertainment
– Planning For Success – how your brand can unlock the full value of social with Head of Planning, Twitter UK, Head of Planning, Facebook Northern Europe, Director of Content & Publishing Strategies, H+K London &  Head of Strategy, Poke London
Interested? Get involved on Twitter @Bristol_Media. #SMWiBristol.
Lis

 

GGD#55 ‘ Catching the Hackathon bug’ by Charlotte Bella and UX with Rachel Eardley

Charlotte has been working in IT for eight years and made the transition from IT trainer to Digital Project Manager in 2012 after taking on an internal web project for a former employer – going in blind and coming out with a sense of career direction. Since then she has worked at several London agencies and is now working for children’s cancer charity CLIC Sargent here in Bristol.
At the start of this year Charlotte took a keen interest in hackathons and attended a course run by the NHS Innovations team. This enabled her to create materials, organise, run and facilitate a hackathon with CLIC Sargent’s service users and staff – with just three weeks notice – as part of the NHS Transformathon series of events.
Having caught the hackathon bug she then went on to assist a group of women in Bristol who wanted to run their own hackathon for finding ways to assist refugees in Bristol using technology, and helped to create, organise and run the first ever Bristol Refugee Hackday which ran as part of the Refugee Week series of national events.

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Catching the hackathon bug

 Having once been a high intensity event attended over 24-48 hours, by pizza and Red Bull fuelled coders, hackathons have now become an alternative and accessible way to approach workshop style sessions to collaboratively find solutions to problems across an organisation, industry or theme.

Hackathons are incredible events that can be held cheaply, or for free, and can be a great way to manage collaboration between service users, customers, designers, developers and key stakeholders to co-create solutions to a problem in the digital and physical worlds.

In this talk Charlotte will be discussing the benefits of holding your own hackathon and what she has learnt from past experiences in both attending and organising hacks.

UX with Rachel Eardley

Rachel Eardley is a user experience designer who has spent time on various research projects with Hewlett-Packard Research laboratories, Microsoft Research in Cambridge and Brunel University. She has also worked in industry for just over 10yrs, working for Skype, Friends Life and start-ups such as HouseTrip, Ticket.com and MovieGlu. She currently works within the technology agency Somo 4 days a week and spends 1 day a week on research for her PhD. 

racheleardley

After the presentation and any questions we will open the floor up for a discussion,  if anyone feels like they would like to bring along any ppt’s or links that they want to share for discussion then please bring it along on a USB or mail the team with info and we can share this during the discussion period. Don’t forget – you don’t have to work in the industry or be a geek, this is a group for anyone with an interest in the subject!

Please sign up on our meetup page here MEETUP

Do come along for pre-presentation mingling as we will be there from 6.30pm. As always, we welcome men to our group, but to keep our audience predominantly female, we ask that all men are accompanied by a woman (just add a +1 on the meetup).

Where

The food and hosting is kindly sponsored by Somo Global who are based at desklodge in Bristol on the corner of old market

DESKLODGE
5TH FLOOR, 1 TEMPLE WAY
BRISTOL
BS2 0BY

Directions to desklodge

When

Thursday 20th  October 6.30/7  – 9pm

GGD#54 ‘ Virtual Machine vs. Container’ with Kate Mallichan

Our September Girl Geek Dinner is hosted by HP labs

Wednesday September 21st 

Kate Mallichan graduated in 2007 from the University of Bristol with an MEng in Computer Science. She worked for 5 years in industrial software engineering across a broad spectrum of fields that included mobile apps, aerospace systems and roadside sensor equipment. She has experience in an equally wide range of software development languages and tools. A thirst for more creative freedom led her to join HP Labs  in 2012 as a Research Engineer. Since that time her focus has been on rapid prototyping in the areas of cloud computing, cyber-security and more recently container technologies.

20160706_173701

 

 

 

Virtual Machine vs. Container

Virtual machines are essentially a software emulation of a complete computer system, including hardware and OS. They have existed in some form since the 1960s, though they were not widely adopted until technologies matured in the 2000s and they became a primary enabler of the cloud computing paradigm.

Containers can be thought of as a light-weight form of virtualisation. Like virtual machines, they have existed for some time, but their widespread adoption is more recent and still rapidly growing and evolving. Containers bring exciting benefits in terms of performance, portability and more agile computing paradigms, but also certain trade-offs, the most commonly acknowledged being their security.

In this talk Kate will summarise the key differences between virtual machines and containers and identify their main pros and cons over a cross-section of applications. I will then look to the future and explore the potential I see to address new and increasingly complex technological challenges with container technology as it continue to mature.

 

After the presentation and any questions we will open the floor up for a discussion,  if anyone feels like they would like to bring along any ppt’s or links that they want to share for discussion then please bring it along on a USB or mail the team with info and we can share this during the discussion period. Don’t forget – you don’t have to work in the industry or be a geek, this is a group for anyone with an interest in the subject!

Please sign up on our meetup page here MEETUP

Do come along for pre-presentation mingling as we will be there from 6.30pm. As always, we welcome men to our group, but to keep our audience predominantly female, we ask that all men are accompanied by a woman (just add a +1 on the meetup).

Where

The food and hosting is kindly sponsored by regular GGD supporters HP, there is free parking and feel free to mail or comment on the meetup if you need a lift.

Directions to HP Lab: http://www.hpl.hp.com/downloads/HP_Labs_Bristol.pdf

When

Wednesday 21st  September 6.30/7  – 9pm

Oracle and Bristol GGD talk #52

As promised I am going to try and get a bit more active with the blogs for the GGD’s so heres the first of hopefully many!

We had a great talk last night – kindly hosted by Oracle in their new swish offices, Thom Legget was kindly given the pleasure of managing us as Jude and Phil who set it up had run off to Glastonbury, looking at the mud pics earlier in the day I think I was happier with free wine and pizza and talking Data!  So Thanks Thom!

We had talks from Jen Williams from Networked Planets, Martha King from Knowle West media Centre and Katherine Rooney Bristol City council and managing the Cuncils Open Data work.

The Dinners are only a success thanks to members attending and we had a great turnout last night – we had a lot of interest in the data management, Helen Woodcock was there discussing their free training offer KETL training

Oracle also have a free training offer – we’ll follow up on whats involved there as they are just putting it together.

Katherine Rooney from Bristol City Council’s ‘City Innovation team’ manages the Council’s Open Data work, offered up our members a special free open data institute membership ODI membership

“When asked if you are affiliated with a Node, please select Bristol! – It may look just like the normal ODI membership page, but it’s a unique link for the Bristol complimentary membership so you should be able to complete your membership without making any payment.” (i’ve just joined and she’s right it is free!!)

Lastly we introduced Dana who regularly attends our affiliate support group Womens Tech Hubs F3F see the events page WTH events page.  Dana is helping set up the TEDx Bristol event next year and they are looking for speakers and helpers so please take a look TEDx Bristol WTH post

We have next months talk planned – but currently nothing planned for post the summer break, HP are looking to host one but if anyone has any offers for speakers or hosting then please get in touch with us.

 

Hopefully see you all at the next event

tedxbristol-featuredO_redbox_clr

GGD#53 ‘Body as Interface’ and ‘Interpreting the body’

Our July Girl Geek Dinner is hosted by Scott Logic 

Wednesday July 20th

In July Tamara Chehayeb Makarem will be presenting on, ‘Body as Interface’, exploring that notion in user interactions. Jennifer Gaudion will be presenting on ‘Interpreting the Body’ examining the ways we can interpret data from the body.”

Tamara

TamaraChehayebMakarem-PhotoTamara Chehayeb Makarem is a User Experience Designer at Scott Logic. Before moving to London, she worked in New York where she designed cross-platform mobile applications for clients such as Microsoft, MDLIVE, and Songza.

At the Bristol Girl Geek Dinner, Tamara will be presenting her talk ‘Body as Interface’, exploring that notion in user interactions.

Tamara came up with the notion of using the Body as an interface while analyzing the work of artists in the field of Design and Technology and creating her interactive art installations. While people usually associate interfaces with devices or applications, Tamara suggests that the body itself is an interface.

In her talk, Tamara will expand on her idea of “Body as Interface” and link it to the body senses to show how it can allow us to create alternative experiences for users. She will explore the plausibility of the use of the body as an Interface and how it might have practical effect using examples in art installations, wearable technology and day-to-day interactions.

Tamara believes that there are two categories in which the body is used as an interface: the first one is within a controlled environment. The second one is when the device becomes part of the body. She believes that by viewing the body as an interface, we can stop designing interfaces and start designing experiences. She has recently published a blog post articulating her view http://blog.scottlogic.com/2016/05/25/Body-as-Interface.html

Jenny

SL-B-31Jenny Gaudion will be presenting her talk “Interpreting the Body” examining the ways we can interpret data from the body. Jenny is a Software Developer for Scott Logic and helps find solutions to real-life problems using software. Having got into computing from a degree in Maths and a love of puzzles she thinks that interpreting the body presents an exciting challenge and is looking forward to innovations in this area making it feel like we are living in the future.

After the presentation and any questions we will open the floor up for a discussion,  if anyone feels like they would like to bring along any ppt’s or links that they want to share for discussion then please bring it along on a USB or mail the team with info and we can share this during the discussion period. Don’t forget – you don’t have to work in the industry or be a geek, this is a group for anyone with an interest in the subject!

Please sign up on our meetup page here MEETUP

Do come along for pre-presentation mingling as we will be there from 6.30pm. As always, we welcome men to our group, but to keep our audience predominantly female, we ask that all men are accompanied by a woman (just add a +1 on the meetup).

Where

Scott Logic, 25 King Street, Bristol, BS1 4PB map

When

Wednesday 20th  July 6.30/7  – 9pm