On Wednesday the 29th of November Scott Logic invites you to join us for an evening of tech talks at our Newcastle HQ. Three of our technical speakers will share their thoughts on current technology trends, ranging from data engineering to web technology. It’ll also provide a good chance to meet some of our team over refreshments.

Talk 1: Small Data™

Big Data has been selling consulting gigs, conferences and books for years now. You don’t even know you have a Big Data problem, but let the consultants in, and they will lift the floorboards of your organisation, and will surely uncover rising damp from where your data lake is, ought to be or where the firehose ought to terminate.
In this talk we will examine the perils of Big Data, provide some alternative approaches and show how to embark on the journey towards sensible Big Data solutions.

Daniel Drozdzewski: Daniel started his passion for computation in the early 90’s with the purchase of Commodore 64. Technology took him on a journey with a stop over at Newcastle University finishing a great IT degree. Over a decade of career since has seen Daniel move through startups and big enterprises into diverse areas like rules engine and automated specs driven IT systems, mobile chat platform, online gaming and Big Data. Now happily consulting as a lead developer at Scott Logic.

Talk 2: WebAssembly and the future of JavaScript

For more than 20 years JavaScript has been the only 'native' language of the web. However, earlier this year that all changed with the release of the WebAssembly MVP. This talk gives a practical introduction to WebAssembly and asks what impact it will have on web development in the future.

Colin Eberhardt: Colin is Technology Director at Scott Logic and is a prolific technical author, blogger and speaker on a range of technologies. His blog includes posts on a wide range of topics, including HTML5 / JavaScript and data visualisation with D3 and d3fc. You'll also find a whole host of posts about previous technology interests including iOS, Swift, WPF and Silverlight. He's a member of Symphony Foundation, which is encouraging open source collaboration in the financial sector. Colin is also very active on GitHub, contributing to a number of different projects.

Talk 3: An Introduction to GraphQL

GraphQL provides a different approach to REST-based APIs, making your data queryable, explorable and interactive. We’ll take a beginner-friendly dive into the technology. Why was it built? How does it work? How can I start using it? And what are the challenges I’ll encounter along the way?

Sam Hogarth: Sam is a senior developer at Scott Logic, where he leads a team building an FX application for small businesses, with JavaScript and Java. He’s interested in new technologies, improving developer productivity and communicating new ideas to the developer community.