Check out your Company Bowl for anonymous work chats.
Tomorrow at 11:15am to round off Women’s History Month, we at Scott Logic will be watching a speech by software and equal rights pioneer Dame Stephanie Shirley, and you’re very welcome to join us! We’ve been given permission to share the speech in return for a donation to one of the charities she founded, Autistica. Although originally recorded for International Women's Day, the talk's focus on the history of the campaign for equal rights makes it a fitting way to round off Women's History Month. In her speech, Dame Stephanie tells her remarkable story: she escaped Nazi Germany and arrived in the UK as a Kindertransport refugee, and then educated herself through night school to achieve a job in the nascent software industry in the 1950s. Frustrated by hitting the glass ceiling time and again, she set up in 1962 one of Britain’s first high-tech companies—Freelance Programmers—which only employed women. Not only pioneers in software, the company also pioneered a whole range of working practices including flexible working and support for returners.
In the second of the four talks at Open Source Bristol tomorrow evening, Alex Birch (Lead Developer at Scott Logic) will give a talk on 'Reviving Google’s lost fluid engine'. We’ve all played a game with Box2D physics (e.g. Angry Birds). Google forked Box2D to add fluid simulation, but diverged irretrievably in the process. Can we salvage Google’s contributions, and bring both these C++ projects to the modern web using WebAssembly and TypeScript? Find out more about Open Source Bristol and book your place to attend in person or to watch the live stream: 🗓️ Wed 30 March 🕕 18:00–20:30 We organise Open Source Bristol in partnership with FINOS.
Next Weds, join us in person or online for our first Open Source Bristol meetup, with four fascinating talks from five fantastic speakers: • Eriol Fox, Product Manager & Designer at Simply Secure, on 'Design contributions to OSS: Learnings from the Open Design workshops project' • Tariq Rashid, Founding Director at Digital Dynamics, on 'How Open Source projects can attract more users and participants – Some thoughts' • StreamNative's Tim Spann (Developer Advocate) and John Kinson (Head of Sales, EMEA), on 'Building a Scalable Event Streaming and Messaging Platform using Apache Pulsar for Fintech' • Alex Birch, Lead Developer at Scott Logic, on 'Reviving Google’s lost fluid engine' Register to attend in person at our Bristol office: https://www.meetup.com/Open-Source-Bristol/events/284198269/ Register to watch the live stream or to watch the recording at a time that suits you: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/275647407817 We organise Open Source Bristol in partnership with FINOS.
At Scott Logic during Women’s History Month, we’re drawing inspiration from women pioneers in our industry who were born in Ukraine or were of Ukrainian heritage 🇺🇦. Today we celebrate Austrian-American actor and inventor Hedy Lamarr, daughter of a Ukrainian bank director. Inspired with an interest in machinery by her father and a love of the arts by her concert pianist mother, Lamarr studied acting under director and producer Max Reinhardt. Escaping a disastrous marriage to an Austrian munitions dealer, she fled to London in 1937, where she went on to meet MGM studio boss Louis B Mayer and her Hollywood career began. At the start of World War II, Lamarr learnt that the US Navy’s radio-controlled torpedoes could easily be jammed and set off course. She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed, and contacted her friend—composer and pianist George Antheil—to help her develop a device for doing that. The principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of Wi-Fi.
On Wed 6 April, get a mid-week boost from a couple of stimulating online talks! Martha King (Developer) will shed light on the history of encryption and how methods of encryption have changed over time. Simon Martin (Senior Developer) will talk about the creation of a UI that runs in browsers, which is powered by WebAssembly (compiled from Rust). These talks will give you a flavour of our learning culture at Scott Logic, where our consultants regularly share their insights through breakfast and lunchtime talks like these. We look forward to sharing them with you! 🗓️ Wed 6 April 🕥 10:30-11:15
At Scott Logic during Women’s History Month, we’re drawing inspiration from women pioneers in our industry who were born in Ukraine or were of Ukrainian heritage 🇺🇦. Today, we celebrate Ida Rhodes, born near Nemyriv in Ukraine in 1900. When she was a child, a local countess took a liking to her and educated her in the foundations of science. After she and her family moved to the USA in 1913, she went on to achieve Mathematics bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Cornell and completed her doctorate at Columbia. Rhodes was a pioneer in the analysis of systems of programming. In the early 1950s, she co-designed with Betty Holberton the C-10 programming language for the UNIVAC, the first commercial computer in the world. She also designed and programmed the original computer used by the US Social Security Administration. In 1949, the US Department of Commerce awarded Rhodes a Gold Medal for "significant pioneering leadership and outstanding contributions to the scientific progress of the Nation in the functional design and the application of electronic digital computing equipment".
In the fourth of the talks at Open Source Bristol on 30 March, Eriol Fox (Product Manager & Designer at Simply Secure) will cover the history of the Open Design workshops project and the problems it aimed to solve. They will also present the learnings and tools that engage designers not yet ‘on-board’ with OSS as an ethos or movement. Find out more and book your place to attend in person or to watch the live stream. 🗓️ Wed 30 March 🕕 18:00–20:30 We organise Open Source Bristol in partnership with FINOS.
Too often, open source software is developed primarily by enthusiasm for technology, rather than around the needs of users. In the third of the talks at Open Source Bristol on 30 March, Tariq Rashid (Founding Director at Digital Dynamics) will share his ideas for how open source projects can attract and keep more users by designing around user needs, and gain more contributors by encouraging skills other than coding to participate. Find out more and book your place to attend in person or to watch the live stream. 🗓️ Wed 30 March 🕕 18:00–20:30 We organise Open Source Bristol in partnership with FINOS.
In the first of the talks at Open Source Bristol on 30 March, Tim Spann and John Kinson will share insights into the modern data streaming landscape, how Apache Pulsar fits into it, and how it can be used for fintech. They will also talk about the origins of StreamNative as a commercial open source software company, and how that has shaped the go-to-market strategy. Find out more and book your place to attend in person or to watch the live stream. 🗓️ Wed 30 March 🕕 18:00–20:30 We organise Open Source Bristol in partnership with FINOS.
Happy International Women's Day! If you missed our Executive Panel discussion on the topic of 'Break the Bias' earlier today, you can now watch it in full on YouTube. Huge thanks to NatWest's Mei Clark, DWP's Jacqui Leggetter, Boohoo's Jo Graham and Scott Logic's Myra Cooke for so generously sharing their experiences, insights and advice on this important topic.
