iO Associates are excited to bring you our latest interviews as part of The Defence Series’ – A conversation with Nick Elliott CB MBE, Chair of Helsing UK, the £100,000,000 man

During our discussion, we covered:

Helsings £100,000,000 investment in to UK defence.

If Ukraine have anything to do with that decision?

How Nick plan’s to spend the £100,000,000?

Which technologies are having tangible results on the battlefield and in protecting our soldiers?

Which technologies are being over-hyped by the media?

How will the next generation of ‘TikTok’ enabled soldiers change the way the military uses digital technologies?

Recruitment, there’s a digital skills gap in the UK, with defence not often seen as a top pick for graduates, how do we attract that talent into UK defence?

How do Helsing go about their recruitment? What makes Helsing such an exciting prospect?

As part of The Defence Series, we are looking to bring together individuals from all walks of life – whether previous service history, working within the MoD, working for a prime or someone that’s just interested in finding out more.

Varun Mahajan and David Bayard share their insights into Amazon Aurora: Amazon Web Services’ fully managed relational database engine. They highlight Amazon Aurora’s strengths in high availability, durability, scalability, and extended disaster recovery capabilities. While introducing Aurora Serverless v2, showcasing its automatic scaling based on resource demand. Additionally, the session explores the integration of Aurora with Redshift, emphasizing the setup of Aurora Zero ETL integration with Redshift, manual table creation, and data entry in Aurora. Varun and David also discuss cost optimization strategies, performance insights, scaling, managed blue-green deployments, and the transformative feature of Zero ETL for real-time data transfer.

Varun Mahajan and David Bayard both have over 4 years experience as AWS Solutions Architects.

Watch ‘Amazon Aurora Innovations’ on-demand here:

iO Associates are excited to bring you the latest instalment of our C++ Series!

Our amazing guest speakers for the session included:

• Ofek Shilon, Senior C++ Developer at Toga Networks

• Conor Hoekstra, Research Scientist at NVIDIA

Ofek covered: ‘Everything I Wish They Told Me About Linkers’ and Conor provided a discussion around ‘New Algorithms in C++23’.

Ofek Shilon is a Senior C++ Developer at Toga Networks! Ofek will be covering: ‘Everything I Wish They Told Me About Linkers’ – it is an in-depth survey of shared libraries build and usage on Linux and Windows, with emphasis on implications for developers.

Ofek has 20 years in the industry, and 12 of those are as a leader – involved in the entire range from product strategy, technological roadmap, team management, hands on development, and down to optimization and debugging.

Our second speaker is Conor Hoekstra, Research Scientist at NVIDIA, who is providing a discussion around ‘New Algorithms in C++23’. C++23 has made a number of very important additions to the Ranges library that was introduced in C++20.

This talk will be an overview everything new in the C++23 Ranges library as well as a high level overview of all the different “types” of algorithms in C++ (from C++98 to C++23).

And lots more.

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.

We hope you enjoyed the session, please get in touch at meetups@ioassociates.co.uk with any questions or suggestions on future virtual meetups.

In addition, if there’s anything we can help you with in regards to sourcing candidates or finding a new role, please do also get in touch.

You can watch the full recording below:

We hosted our first iO Virtual Meetup – This new platform allows us to reach more of our community and get the most in-demand speakers on your choice of topics!

Our first Guest Speaker was Mark Rendle speaking on “From WCF to gRPC”.

gRPC is a high-performance messaging protocol that is ideal for communication between microservices and other clients on internal networks. It’s the ideal replacement for WCF or .NET Remoting, which are not supported on .NET Core.

In this talk, he explains the different models that gRPC enables, from Request/Response to full bi-directional streaming, and how they map to various WCF models. He’ll show how to create gRPC services and clients using the dotnet CLI, and share best practices for using them in the real world.

Connect & Follow

​Keep an eye on our LinkedIn page to see our upcoming Virtual Meetups and events and get in touch at meetups@ioassociates.com with any questions or suggestions on future virtual meetups.

Watch the Presentation

In the second of our iO Virtual Meetups our guest speaker Emily Jiang, Liberty Microservice Architect, Advocate and Java Champion, tackled the modern and open way to build cloud-native microservices and the programming models available.

You may have heard about Eclipse MicroProfile and are wanting to find out more. In this session you’ll learn:

• Everything you need to know about MicroProfile (including a demo), how to package the MicroProfile in to a Docker container and deploy it to a Kubernetes cluster, and how to use Istio to manage your microservice interaction.

Listen to this session to develop your in-depth knowledge about MicroProfile and how you can use it to build well-performed microservices. After this session, you will understand how to best develop Cloud Native Microservices by using MicroProfile and how to work well with Cloud infrastructure, such as Kubernetes and Istio.

About Emily Jiang:

Emily Jiang, is a Java Champion. She is Liberty Microservices Architect and Advocate, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) in IBM, based at Hursley Lab in the UK. Emily is a MicroProfile guru and has been working on MicroProfile since 2016, leading the specifications of MicroProfile Config, Fault Tolerance and Service Mesh. She is a CDI Expert Group member and passionate about MicroProfile and Jakarta EE. Emily regularly speaks at conferences, such as Code One, DevNexus, JAX London, Voxxed, Devoxx, EclipseCon, QCon, GeeCon, JFokus, etc. Follow her on Twitter @emilyfhjiang and/or connect with her on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-jia…)

​Keep an eye on our LinkedIn page to see our upcoming Virtual Meetups and events and get in touch at meetups@ioassociates.com with any questions or suggestions on future virtual meetups.

You can view the full Virtual Meetup below:​

iO are delighted to bring you the next installment of our Virtual Meetups. This .Net Meetup was a series of lightning talks hosted by iO Associates’ Michael Collins and Stella Webster.

Our first guest speaker was Robin Minto, the Head of Technical Architecture at ByBox, who kicked us off with ‘OWASP ZAP HUD WTF?’. During this talk, we saw how the features of ZAP can be used to find issues during development, therefore we can deploy a better-tested app when we navigate through a web application.

Stuart Lang from Coditorium followed up with his lightning talk on ‘C# 8 -Async Streams & Channels’. He discussed what’s new in .Net for asynchronous processing with hands on examples.

Our final speaker was Joe Woodward, a Senior Software Engineer at Just Eat. He took us through Microsoft’s new Feature Toggle library and showed us how we can utilize it to de-risk deployments of new features, and also use it to gradually role out new changes into production and promote continuous delivery.

It was really great to see so many familiar faces but also lots of fresh ones as well!

​You can view the full Virtual Meetup below:

In our latest iO Java Virtual Meetup hosted by iO Associates Bea Meyrick and Inness Law, Java Champion Matt Raible presents ‘Microservices for the Masses’.

Microservices are being deployed by many Java Hipsters. If you’re working with a large team that needs different release cycles for product components, microservices can be a blessing. If you’re working at your VW Restoration Shop and running its online store with your own software, having five services to manage and deploy can be a real pain.

This presentation shows you how to use JHipster to create Angular + Spring Boot apps with a unified front-end. You will leave with the know-how to create your own excellent apps!

About Matt Raible

Matt is a well-known figure in the Java community and has been building web applications for most of his adult life. For over 20 years, he has helped developers learn and adopt open source frameworks and use them effectively. He’s a web developer, Java Champion, and Developer Advocate at Okta. Matt is a frequent contributor to open source and a big fan of Java, IntelliJ, TypeScript, Angular, Spring Boot.

​Keep an eye on our LinkedIn page to see our upcoming Virtual Meetups and events and get in touch at meetups@ioassociates.com with any questions or suggestions on future virtual meetups.

You can view the full Virtual Meetup below:

​In the third installment of iO .Net Virtual Meetups, Microsoft MVP and Managing Consultant at Excella Alexander Slotte presents ‘Machine Learning; an introduction to ML.NET’.

it’s no exaggeration to say that Machine Learning (ML) is quickly changing the way we live. Things we are accustomed to today are things we could only dream of 10 years ago. As ML is becoming more and more mainstream, you may be asking yourself how to get started.

Historically, many of the tools and libraries used to train a model have been found in the Python and R communities (e.g. Scikit Learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow), but what if you’re a .NET Developer?

This session introduces ML.NET! ML.NET is an open-source, cross-platform machine learning library, specifically built to enable .NET developers to train their own custom machine learning models in C# or F#.

In this session we introduce some fundamental ML concepts and terms before transitioning into the world of ML.NET and building our first model from scratch.Beware, there is live coding!

​About Alexander Slotte:

Alexander is a Microsoft MVP, and a Managing Consultant and .NET Xpert at Excella, based out of Washington DC. He is an international speaker, and have spoken at conferences such as NDC London, ProgNET, Big Data Europe, .NET Jetbrains Global Online Day, Beer City Code, Music City Tech, Code PaLOUsa, Code On The Beach and Philly.NET. He’s the organizer of the .NET DC User Group and a member of the .NET Foundation. He is passionate about .NET and cloud architecture, and constantly attempts to push his knowledge on data science and machine learning. When not coding, you’ll find him out running or enjoying a good IPA!

Say hi on Twitter @alexslotte!

​Keep an eye on our LinkedIn page to see our upcoming Virtual Meetups and events and get in touch at meetups@ioassociates.com with any questions or suggestions on future virtual meetups.

You can view the full Virtual Meetup below:​

iO are pleased to bring you the full recording of our latest Virtual Meetup with Scott Hanselman. This .Net Meetup was our biggest meetup to date, hosted by iO Associates’ Michael Collins and Stella Webster.

Our guest speaker Scott is a Partner Program Manager at Microsoft. During his talk, Scott picked up on ‘Developing for Windows and Linux using Windows 10 and WSL’.

Scott used a variety of live demonstrations in this highly advanced session to take you through the state of the art of Linux on Windows, showing us if you can really use Windows to develop Linux apps. This session also exposed how real WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is, and how close it is to reality.

We were delighted to see so many familiar faces but also lots of new ones as well! This platform allows our meetups to reach more of our community and communicate with you directly. We get the most sought-after speakers on your choice of topics so please get in touch if you have any suggestions.

​About Scott Hanselman

Scott is a web developer who has been blogging at https://hanselman.com for over a decade. He works in Open Source on ASP.NET and the Azure Cloud for Microsoft out of his home office in Portland, Oregon. Scott has three podcasts, http://hanselminutes.com for tech talk, http://thisdeveloperslife.com on developers’ lives and loves, and http://ratchetandthegeek.com for pop culture and tech media. He’s written a number of books and spoken in person to almost a half million developers worldwide.

​Keep an eye on our LinkedIn page to see our upcoming Virtual Meetups and events and get in touch at meetups@ioassociates.com with any questions or suggestions on future virtual meetups.

You can view the full Virtual Meetup here:

.Net Virtual Meetup – TDD – Where did it all go wrong?

iO are delighted to bring you the next instalment of our .Net Virtual Meetups. This .Net Meetup was hosted by iO Consultants, Charlotte Herapath and Danny Watts, and featured special guest speaker Ian Cooper, a passionate exponent of OO, SOA, EDA, CQRS and Agile.

In this highly interactive session, Ian guided us through Kent’s original proposition from his book on Test Driven Deployment. We then discovered where key misunderstandings occurred and looked at a better approach to TDD that not only supports software development, but also stops hindering it.

It was another really good turnout to this meetup! This virtual platform means that we can reach more of our community and interact with you directly. iO Associates get the most in-demand speakers on your choice of topics so please get in touch if you have any suggestions.

You can view the full video here: