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Join us at Leeds Digital Festival 2021

18 August 2021

We're proud to be a sponsor of this year's Leeds Digital Festival (20 Sep–1 Oct) and excited to be running five events, including our first in-person event since the start of the pandemic.

We opened our Leeds office in March. With our history of high-quality delivery for global clients in financial services and the public sector, Leeds was the perfect choice for our next office location as Scott Logic continues to grow. We’re putting down strong roots in the city and getting fully involved in the local tech community, and our sponsorship and involvement in Leeds Digital Festival is an important part of that.

Through the webinars we're running, we're keen to share our expert insights with the tech community in Leeds. And through the in-person event—Open Source Leeds—we intend to grow a new meetup community in the city dedicated to promoting the use of open source in large enterprises. This group is part of a UK-wide network of meetups that we run in partnership with FINOS, with three other connected groups: Open Source Edinburgh, Open Source Bristol and Open Source London.

Find out more about the events below and follow the links to book your place.

Cultivating Empathy

Tamara Chehayeb Makarem

10:00–10:45, Tuesday 21 September

We live in a world that seems increasingly more divided and polarised. Platforms we use are designed to reinforce our views. Can cultivating empathy be a solution to that and how could we improve that skill? In this talk, Tamara Chehayeb Makarem (Lead UX Designer) will present empathy as a skill that can be cultivated and explore ways of doing that. Anyone interested in building their empathy skills or cultivating empathy within their team or workplace can join this session to learn about different types of empathy, the ways it can empower us and its practical application in our day-to-day jobs.

Book your place

An introduction to resiliency in the cloud

James Leftley

10:30–11:15, Wednesday 22 September

Although trying to prevent possible failures to a system is certainly worthwhile, we can also embrace failures and learn how to adapt. In this talk, James Leftley (Senior Developer) will explore some of the foundations and common approaches for designing resilient systems in cloud environments—and how experimenting with our systems, by deliberately introducing failures, can help us better understand their behaviour.

Book your place

Inclusive Design: How diversity is the key to building better technology

Alex Ternar

14:00–15:00, Thursday 23 September

When creating services, products or spaces, the decisions we make can directly enhance or inhibit the participation of people and communities. In this talk, Alex Ternar (User Experience Designer) will offer a taster of the vast world of Inclusive Design by exploring how understanding human diversity leads to the creation of better, more human products.

Book your place

The Computer Skills of Average Joe (Worse than you think)

Paul Graham

12:00–12:45, Friday 24 September

It should not be *that* surprising that our users find something difficult that we, as IT professionals, might consider easy. A survey of developed countries found that much of the population is unable to complete medium-complexity tasks, and that only a small percentage has high-level computer-related skills. This is something that we all need to consider when building software solutions, as Paul Graham (Lead Developer) will explore in this talk.

Book your place

Open Source Leeds

Sukhvinder Panesar, Colin Eberhardt and James Robertson

18:00–20:30, Wednesday 29 September

It’s the inaugural event of this new meetup group dedicated to promoting the use of open source in large enterprises, and we have three fantastic speakers lined up:

  • Sukhvinder Panesar, Chief Engineer, Lloyds Banking Group on Open Source Contribution in Banking
  • Colin Eberhardt, CTO, Scott Logic on Open Source Sustainability and our Corporate Social Responsibility
  • James Robertson, Software Engineer, Mixcloud on Building open source productivity tools

Book your place to attend in person

Register to watch the live stream

We look forward to welcoming you to our events! We're proud to be a sponsor of Leeds Digital Festival, and you can find out more about the two weeks of events on the festival website.