​Matt Tyler, IR35 Consultancy Manager at Kingsbridge Insurance discusses 3 key points that have been highly requested and answers your questions on all things IR35.

The key areas of discussion are:

– The nuances of the substitution clause and how it works in practice.

– How the remote element of a role effects the IR35 status.

– If you need deliverables written into a contract to ensure the role is outside IR35.

Matt Tyler is the IR35 Consultancy Manager at Kingsbridge. He has been dealing with IR35 for over a decade at this point, speaking to contractors, clients, and agencies alike in order to mediate and resolve IR35 issues that have arisen. Within this role, he has also provided advice and guidance to companies on the public sector reform in 2017, and the private sector reform in 2021 to help navigate them through the murky waters of IR35.

Discover more .NET talks here.

iO Associates were joined by Cliff Agius, who gave his talk on .NET MAUI What/How and Why.

You may have heard the Buzz about .NET MAUI or maybe you have heard of Xamarin and all the monkeys but in this session we will cover.

What – What was Xamarin and now .NET MAUI and how can they help you develop Apps for your business/clients. And what the hell does MAUI stand for as it’s not that nice sunny island we all want to go on holiday too…

How – How you as a .NET developer can use your existing .NET C# skills to develop and build Apps that run not just on the desktop but also on mobile platforms like the phone in your hand.

Why – There are 5 Billion mobiles in use around the world split between the App Stores of iOS and Android but do you want to learn Java/Kotlin for Android and then Swift/ObjectiveC for iOS? Do you really want 2 separate codebases? No of course you don’t your a .NET Developer so lets use MAUI.

• The session will show how to build a Mobile app how all the parts come together and how to deploy the App to the device in your pocket.
• We will show how to get the tooling set-up and then how the Single Project is leveraged to run your C# code and using tools like Hot Reload we can live debug on actual Mobile Devices.
• A fun session playing with Mobile Apps and for added geekery Aircraft facts and Figures because why not…

Clifford Agius, Freelance .NET Developer and also blogs from time to time, is currently a two-time Developer Technologies MVP, specialising in Xamarin/.NET MAUI and IoT. By day, an airline pilot flying Boeing 787 aircraft around the world and when not doing that, Clifford freelances as a .NET developer. An active member of the .NET community, he is a regular speaker at conferences around the world.

Discover more .NET talks here.

How do fluctuations in the UK economy affect the outcome of Central Government DDaT spending?

This Meetup is a lively discussion with 3 panellists. Our speakers were Paul Spanner, (Principal Consultant at Pcubed), Jeremy Renwick (Managing Director for Innovation at Fimatix), and Vicki Webb (Deputy Director for Change Implementation at Department for International Trade).

Debating the important topic of Public Sector spending during fluctuations within the UK Economy, we touched on some key questions such as:

– Should DDaT budgets be increased at the turn of a recession to help lift the UK economy?

– How does uncertainty in the current economy affect the prioritization of projects?

– How can consultancies best support their government clients to ensure the best outcomes for both parties during times of recession?

– How can Central Government buyers work to improve any bottle-necks in the procurement process?

About our speakers:

Since leaving the Royal Marines in 2015 Paul has carved out a unique role for himself advising and consulting within Central Government. Initially working at the Home Office for Amber Rudd and then Sajid Javid as well as being instrumental in two major programmes of work for the Law enforcement and security communities. More recently Paul has advised the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on Afghan refugees arriving in the UK, A UN working group on the re-construction of Ukraine post conflict and an African Union programme on security issues relating to sustainable micro economies. Paul is currently engaged as a business development lead across Government, specialising in Defence and Law enforcement activities.

Jeremy is MD-Innovation for Fimatix. Through his 35 year career in the technology industry in technical, sales, strategy and consultancy roles he has been part of and led teams that have delivered digital transformations as diverse as the world’s first electronic banking system, waste recycling, the GDS transformation programme and reform of criminal justice.

Vicki is the Deputy Director for Change Implementation at the Department for International Trade. As a Senior Programme Manager, she draws upon extensive Business Transformation and Change Management experience to help design, deliver and manage change. She has worked on large scale transformation programmes for over twenty years in consulting and now as a UK senior civil servant spanning; corporate strategy and organisation design, cultural and behavioural change, business readiness and implementation. She’s currently focused on all things Hybrid Working, Efficiencies and Levelling Up and would love a chat about balanced scorecards, innovation and change delivery.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘GoveTech Leaders Virtual Meetup’ on-demand here:

iO Associates bring you our JavaScript Virtual Meetup! This meetup is a new community with the aim of bringing together JavaScript professionals nationwide through insightful and interesting talks.

Invited to the session are Derek Binkley, Engineering Lead at Localize, who present a talk on ‘Pardon the disruption: a user-first approach to software design’.

The technology industry celebrates disruptive technologies and brags about revolutionary new features and products. Lots of great technology has been created this way. Most of the time, our product’s users don’t want to be disrupted or revolutionised. They just want things to work.

In this talk, we learnt to think of your users first when designing your software or website. Thinking this way will allow your users to better understand changes and embrace new, great features instead of fearing them.

Derek Binkley is a Full Stack Engineer with Localize. While getting his start fixing the Y2K date problem in Cobol, Derek quickly moved on to spend over twenty years using JavaScript, PHP, JVM Languages, relational and NoSQL databases.

He enjoys teaching others through speaking, mentoring, and writing articles. Derek encourages developers to write clean, testable code. When not in front of a computer he spends time with family, travels, and makes sourdough crust pizza.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Pardon the disruption: a user-first approach to software design’ on-demand here:

.Net Edinburgh meetup is back face to face with ‘Minimal APIs’ with Kevin Smith, Microsoft MVP and Organiser of dotnetsheff and dotnet York, sponsored by iO Associates.

In this session, we’ll take a look at the “what”, “why” and “how” around the .NET Minimal APIs and how we can utilize these to make our API faster and more understandable. We’ll also cover the new .NET Minimal APIs coming in .NET 7!

Kevin Smith is a Microsoft MVP and Principal Software Engineer. He has been a technology enthusiast from a young age and enjoys working on a wide range of technologies. In his day-to-day work he is focused on, but not limited to, .NET and TypeScript, and using AWS and Azure Cloud Services. He is heavily involved in the community, running three community groups, 2 in the North of England, dotnet York and dotnetsheff, and one virtual hackathon group, MiniHack. He is passionate about helping and sharing knowledge with others, speaking at user groups and conferences, and contributing to the open-source community.

Join the .Net Edinburgh Meetup Group Here!

Discover more .NET talks here.

What is a big ball of mud?

Clean architecture is more needed than ever before. SOLID principles are the order of the day and with code bases of hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of lines – it’s never been more important to combat developer turnover and code entropy by building and focusing on good architecture principles. So, what’s the opposite of beautiful clean code architecture?

 “A Big Ball of Mud is a haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape-and-baling-wire, spaghetti-code jungle. These systems show unmistakable signs of unregulated growth, and repeated, expedient repair. Information is shared promiscuously among distant elements of the system, often to the point where nearly all the important information becomes global or duplicated.” – Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder.

How do you avoid accidentally stepping in a big ball of mud!? Well – All of your questions shall be answered by Matt Hunt.

Matt is both an AWS and Microsoft certified developer who has contracted at some of the biggest .NET contract houses in the country and in his spare time gives great talks on relevant topics occasionally offering surprising controversial takes (especially on SOLID principles)!

If you’re interested in attending, the talk will be held in person on the 9th of February 2023 at UCAS. Come along for some refreshments, food, a great talk in some great offices and great chance to dotNETwork.

Discover more .NET talks here.

We had three fantastic speakers lined up for an interesting talk surrounding: ‘Enriching your .NET Applications with AWS AI Services’.

Joining the session is Tom Harris, CTO at ClearBank, who will be delivering a lightening talk for our attendees, and Neil Syrett, Staff Engineer at ClearBank, who will be discussing ‘Wardley Mapping 101’. For the main talk, we welcome back Prasad Rao, Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, who is presenting a session on ‘Building AI-enriched applications with .NET on AWS.’

With AWS AI services, you can add capabilities like image and video analysis, natural language processing, personalized recommendations and translation, virtual assistants, and speech recognition. You can use each service standalone, or you can use them together to build a sophisticated AI-capable application. In this demo-heavy session, discover how to iteratively enrich your existing .NET applications with AI capabilities using AWS SDK for .NET

Prasad Rao is a Principal Partner Solutions Architect for AWS based out of 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.

If you’re interested in attending, the talk will be held in person on the 9th of February 2023 at Trainline HQ. Come along for some refreshments, food, a great talk in some great offices and great chance to dotNETwork.

Tom Harris is Chief Technology Officer at ClearBank and is responsible for driving ClearBank’s technology innovation and leading the continued build of its market leading core technology platform.

Tom joined ClearBank in 2018 and has been instrumental in building the Bank’s technology department, scaling the team to over 200 engineers.

Prior to joining ClearBank, Tom helped build Just Eat’s development organisation and was part of the team taking the business to IPO and then FTSE100. Tom is also the founder of BuildCircle, a successful software engineering consultancy that worked with Moonpig, BBC and other companies in the fintech industry.

Neil Syrett is a Staff Engineer and has been with ClearBank since 2020, previously having worked at ASOS, Regus and Symantec. He specialises in all aspects of software quality and testing, specifically test automation, TDD, CI/CD and performance testing. Neil is a proponent of DDD, Team Topologies and Wardley Mapping methodologies.

Neil’s session: Wardley Mapping is a powerful technique that is used by private businesses and public sector organisations to choose and evolve a strategy that allows them to remain ahead of the competition and avoid becoming irrelevant in an ever-changing world. Neil will be giving an overview of Wardley Mapping and how you might apply it to your organisation

About our partners. ClearBank was built on the belief that banking infrastructure would no longer slow down progress. Instead, it would be the catalyst that unlocks the potential to innovate. It would adapt to cater to different needs so a new era in financial services could begin.

Through their banking licence and innovative financial technology, they enable our clients to offer secure accounts, clear payments in real-time and enhance their banking propositions for their customers.

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 we encourage you to share this with your team and the wider community.

Join the iO .Net London Meetup Group!

Discover more .NET talks here.

‘A new hope for 2023 – what developers must learn next’.

This session will be hosted at Scott Logic, 1 Redcliff St, Redcliffe, Bristol BS1 6NP.

Over the last 10 years we’ve seen cybercrime accelerate beyond all comprehension. We’ve seen the growing and relentless impact it has on our society and our economies. It’s taken a long time for the world to act but finally we’re coming together to resist this uniquely 21st century evil.

At the heart of the resistance are developers. Whatever role you have, whatever programming language or software you use – the battle is at your door.

In this session we’ll brief you on the state of the situation and what you can do to be more prepared. We’ll look at the bad guys and how they operate, we’ll examine recent legal and government responses and, most importantly, how the software industry is working together to create the tools, frameworks and education needed to help us all become the developers we need to be.

Developer Advocate, Security Champion, DevOps practitioner (whatever that means) Long time Java developer, leader and evangelist. I’ve been working on Java SDKs and JVMs since Java was less than 1. JavaOne Rockstar, JSR leader and representation, Committer on open source projects including ones at Apache, Eclipse and OpenJDK. A seasoned speaker and regular presenter at international conferences on technical and software engineering topics.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Rob shares his insights and experience on how to effectively handle the challenges of maintaining high performance and scalability for a global website with a high volume of new daily content from a team of 100+ editors, while coping with millions of users on the front end.

We cover:

• How we handle continuously changing content while keeping optimum performance
• Performant A/B testing in a static site environment

Rob Humar is a seasoned web development professional with over 17 years of experience, currently serving as the head of web development at Dexerto, the largest eSports and gaming news publisher in the US.

Rob leads a team of highly skilled developers who specialise in building and maintaining multiple large scale React websites that receive an impressive 60 million users per month. The team under his leadership is dedicated to implementing the latest technologies and code testing coverage to ensure high performance and scalability for the websites.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘The Challenges of Dynamic Content in a Static World – Java Script’ on-demand here:

Clean architecture is more needed than ever before.

SOLID principles are the order of the day and with code bases of hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of lines – it’s never been more important to combat developer turnover and code entropy by building and focusing on good architecture principles. So, what’s the opposite of beautiful clean code architecture?

“A Big Ball of Mud is a haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape-and-baling-wire, spaghetti-code jungle. These systems show unmistakable signs of unregulated growth and repeated expedient repair. Information is shared promiscuously among distant elements of the system, often to the point where nearly all the important information becomes global or duplicated.” – Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder

How do you avoid accidentally stepping in a big ball of mud!?

Well – all of your questions shall be answered by Matt Hunt.

Matt is both an AWS and Microsoft certified developer who has contracted at some of the biggest .NET contract houses in the country and in his spare time gives great talks on relevant topics occasionally offering surprising controversial takes (especially on SOLID principles)!

His talk “Avoid Stepping in a Big Ball of Mud” has been well received already in several places and may just be what you need to stop your code from looking like a spaghetti junction.

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 encourage you to share this with your team and the wider community.

Join the .Net Cardiff Meetup Group!

Discover more .NET talks here.