This meetup features Ying Zhou, Senior Director at Oracle.

Ying presents a fascinating talk on ‘Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned When Building AI SaaS Solutions’. They started building their first AI SaaS solution in 2016, there are countless things they learned on this journey.

In this talk, Ying shares with us the mistakes they made. How they almost failed? What lessons they learned? Why they made the current design decisions?

Ying is head of the OCI AI framework in Oracle. She works with the senior leadership teams to deliver Oracle AI SaaS solutions. Before Oracle, Ying has worked in both financial and telecom sectors to transform legacy systems with modern big data architecture.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Java at Speed: Building a Better JVM’ here:

iO Associates consultants Michael Collins and Ellie Taylor host this important meetup.

This session features Martin Beeby, Principal Adovcate at AWS, who presents a very interesting talk on ‘Developing with .Net Core on AWS’.

Martin uses lots of demonstrations during this meetup to walk us through the latest techniques, tools and libraries for developing a .Net application on AWS. From within Visual Studio, Martin presents us with three different ways to run a .Net applications and shows us how to integrate with various AWS services, including Logging, Managed SQL Server and Machine Learning Models. This session covers ways to build and run serverless and containerised applications, as well as showing you how you can move legacy .Net apps to the cloud.

About the speaker:

Martin is a Principal Advocate for Amazon Web Services, travelling the world showcasing the transformational capabilities of AWS. In total, Martin has spoken at over 200 events and meetups, whilst also producing blogs, tutorials and broadcasts. Developing applications since he was 16, Martin has over 21 years experience, working on projects with many companies and well-known brands. His primary focus is on .Net applications and has worked as a C# and VB developer since 2001. Prior to joining AWS, Martin worked for Oracle and Microsoft as a developer evangelist and software development engineer.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Developing with .NET Core on AWS’ here:

iO Associates are pleased to bring the next instalment of our Java Virtual Meetups.

This meetup is presented by Steve Poole, Developer Advocate at RedHat, who gives a very interesting talk on “Cybercrime and the Developer: How to Start Defending Against the Darker Side”.

The world of the cybercriminal is closer than you realise. Steve talks about how at risk our Java applications may be and shows us practical examples of how we can inadvertently leave doors open. He then walks us through actions we could take to create a more secure Java application for the cloud.

About the speaker:

Steve Poole is a Developer Advocate, DevOps practitioner, long-time Java developer, leader and evangelist, working on Java SDKs and JVMs since Java was less than one year old. Steve has also found time to work on other things including being a representative/lead on various JSRs and working on various open source projects including ones at Apache, Eclipse and OpenJDK. He is also a member of the Adopt OpenJDK group championing community involvement in OpenJDK, a seasoned speaker and regular presenter at international conferences on technical and software engineering topics.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Cybercrime and the Developer’ here:

This meetup is presented by iO’s Daniel Erasmus and Software Tester Callum Akehurst-Ryan, who gives a fascinating talk on how to introduce exploratory testing into your teams.

This session looked at what exploratory testing actually is, including how you could plan and report on it and also to get it to work in your teams.

About our speakers:

• Dan is a Software QA Recruitment Specialist who prides himself on deep market knowledge and a genuine passion for Tech and Software QA. This passion has led to him assisting many companies throughout the South West in building their Test teams and refining their QA Processes.
• With 13 years of experience across multiple domains, Callum is experienced in advocating for the introduction of agile testing into teams.
• With a keen interest in full stack exploratory testing and human factors he frequently discusses his ideas on his blog and on Twitter @cakehurstryan.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Modern Testing’ here:

This meetup features Edgar Rivera, Technical Director/Cloud SME, who gives a fantastic talk on ‘Native Java Micro Services in Google Cloud Run’.

In this session, Edgar Rivera covers Cloud Run concepts and shows us how to deploy native java microservices (compiled with GraalVM ahead of time) that can start very fast and scale in seconds.

Google Cloud Run it’s a great choice to deploy microservices in the cloud, supporting https, scale down to zero, fast auto-scaling base on load and integration with hybrid and private clouds using Google Anthos (on-premises Kubernetes cluster).

About the speaker:

With over 20 years of experience as a Java Software Engineer, Edgar is a hands on Technical Director, with a strong experience in banking sector and Cloud SME (PaaS and IaaS platforms). Edgar is an NLP Master Practitioner, International Speaker with excellent coaching and mentoring skills.

iO Associates, tech and digital recruitment specialists, have always been a very active member of multiple Meetup groups across the UK. We’re really keen to help keep our community positive and engaged hearing from the best speakers on the topics of your choice so please get in touch if you have any suggestions on future topics or speakers!

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Native Java Micro Services in Google Cloud Run’ here:

We are joined by Sjoukje Zaal, CTO at Capgemini, who gave an amazing talk on ‘Azure AD B2C: Application Security Made Easy’.

Sjoukje walked us through securing your custom applications with Azure Business-to-Consumer, a Cloud identity service on Azure. She took us back to the basics showing us how to set up an application using Azure B2C for authentication, using built-in policies and creating a custom policy.

About the speaker:

Sjoukje Zaal is a CTO Microsoft, Microsoft Regional Director and Microsoft Azure MVP with over 20 years of experience providing architecture, development, consultancy and design expertise. She works at Capgemini, a global leader in consulting, technology services and digital transformation. She mainly focusses on Cloud, Security, Productivity, and IoT. She loves to share her knowledge and is active in the Microsoft community as a co-founder of the user groups Tech Daily Chronicle, Global XR Community and the Mixed Reality User Group. She is also a board member of Azure Thursdays and Global Azure. Sjoukje is an international speaker and involved in organising many events. She wrote several books and writes blogs. Sjoukje is also part of the Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Azure AD B2C: Application Security Made Easy’ here:

Our latest meetup features Erik Schmiegelow, CEO at Hivemind Technologies, who presents a fantastic talk on ‘Intro to Apache Kafka and Kafka Streams’.

In this session, Erik gives an overview of Apache Kafka, explaining its architecture and design principles, giving us a better understanding of its benefits for stream oriented applications and event processing use cases.

He also walked us through Kafka Stream, showing us how it works and how well it integrates into Kafka when building message driven applications. About the speaker Erik is a functional developer, engineer, software architect and entrepreneur. Erik has been building software platforms since the 90s, enjoying solving difficult problems at scale.

He is the CEO at Hivemind Technologies, a remote-centric European engineering consultancy with people in the UK, Portugal, France and Germany. They help people design better systems, migrate their workloads to the cloud, build scalable data-centric platforms and learn new concepts and gain new skills.

In his spare time, Erik enjoys hiking, a good book and coffee, as well as music. ​iO Associates, tech and digital recruitment specialists, have always been a very active member of multiple Meetup groups across the UK. We’re really keen to help keep our community positive and engaged hearing from the best speakers on the topics of your choice so please get in touch if you have any suggestions for meetups in the new year!

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Intro to Apache Kafka and Kafka Streams’ here:

 This session features Praveen Kumar Purushothaman, FullStack JS Developer and Lead Consultant at Virtusa, who presented a talk on ‘React State(less) Functional Components Migration’.

When React 16.8 update was released, a new feature called hooks was added to function components. Now with this feature, you can leave Class Components for the performance of Functional Components with Hooks support. In this session, Praveen discussed how we can convert Class Components into Functional Components with the same functionality but with more efficiency.

About The Speaker:

People call me Praveen or PravMan. I am an ailurophile, vegetarian, and an experimental chef. Well, I would like to experiment as much as I can, on food and my life. My body is made up of HTML & CSS, which is literally me! This defines me as a Full Stack Web Developer (Front End, Back End, Middleware, Whatever…).

Oh yeah, I am a highly motivated, passionate hard-core web developer with diverse experience in developing web applications, hybrid mobile apps, and cloud computing solutions ranging from working on cute layouts, payment gateways etcetera and the list goes on till making a clone, better than Facebook. Yup, you heard it right. I did make a clone of our favourite social network from scratch.

Once upon a time, I was consistently ranked as top 0.01% developers in Stack Overflow. I stopped contributing much after achieving 100k reputation points. I am also a Pluralsight Mentor, Thinkful Mentor and a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in the field of Visual Studio & Development Tools.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘React State(less) Functional Components Migration’ here:

Our latest meetup featured Venkatesh Balakumar, Founder and CTO at Amzu, who presented a fantastic talk on ‘Fuelling Start-Up with Reactive Java’. 

In this session, Vankatesh gave an overview of the journey to create the server-side components for our HRTech Start-Up using Spring Boot and Webflux, a reactive framework.

​​​About the speaker:

Venkatesh has been in the IT Industry for the past 23 years. He has consulted as CTO, Chief Architect, and Head of Engineering in the UK and the USA. Venkatesh is the Founder and CTO at Amzu, a Technology Consulting Service, partnered with Google Cloud and AWS. They provide Digital Transformation, Enterprise Architecture and Cloud Management Services to start-ups and enterprises. is a functional developer, engineer, software architect and entrepreneur. Furthermore, Venkatesh is also the Co-Founder at HRTech Start-Up. This involves working on AI, Machine Learning Based Human Resource solutions and services.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Fuelling Start-Up with Reactive Java’ here:

This meetup features Prasad Rao., Senior Partner Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services, who presented a fantastic talk on ‘Port That .Net Framework Application to .Net5’.

.NET 5 represents a new era within the .NET ecosystem. New development on the .NET Framework has ended, and while it is still a viable application framework, the writing is definitely on the wall as there is no reason that any new development projects would use the v4.x .NET Framework. Instead, they would most likely be on .NET 5 or .NET Core 3.1. This could end up with projects within a company being scattered across various development frameworks as your team manages both current applications and new systems.

In this session we look at how to port your .NET Framework application. We used the Porting Assistant for .NET (an open source AWS-created application) to evaluate the level of effort needed to convert the applications as well as work through several of the most common porting issues and concerns.

About the speaker
Prasad Rao is a Senior Partner Solutions Architect for AWS based out of the UK. His focus areas are .NET Application Modernization and Windows Workloads on AWS. He leverages his experience to help AWS Partners across EMEA for their long term technical enablement to build scalable architecture on AWS. He also mentors diverse people who are new to cloud and would like to get started on AWS.

​Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Port That .Net Framework Application To .Net5’ here: