We hosted our first event of the year last Wednesday, with the launch of NiteTech North.

An enthusiastic crowd joined us at MadLab in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, and we were thrilled to see so many attending. It was the first in a new series of NiteTech events, held outside London for the first time.

We’re currently growing our UK presence outside the south east – especially in Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle – so if you’re an experienced developer based up north, get in touch!

What is NiteTech?

NiteTech is both a social and professional forum, allowing us to share our experiences and learnings in agile development. The events serve the growing network of Equal Experts Associates as well as members of the wider agile development community, and are always an excellent opportunity to meet informally over drinks and nibbles –  as well as network with like-minded agile software development practitioners.

A successful debut in Manchester

After some drinks and chat, our guest speakers took to the stage. Reda Hmeid – an Equal Experts Technical Architect and part of our team at HMRC – delivered an engaging talk about the HMRC API strategy. He spoke about the four rules the team has adopted to guide the design of the HMRC API platform, making APIs easy to consume and maintain. With the rise in popularity of APIs, the talk was relevant to many in the audience that had faced similar challenges.

After a brief refuel/refill, Jon Dickinson (one of Equal Experts’ Partners) led the second half of the evening. His talk and Q&A were focussed on a DevOps theme; he discussed the challenges we faced (and overcame) in creating an automated pipeline. This enabled application engineers and infrastructure engineers to validate their changes to infrastructure code, all within a heavily compliance-driven environment.

Jon explained how the pipeline allows product teams to check their infrastructure changes. Accompanied by a practical demonstration and followed up with a lively Q&A, it proved to be another useful, enjoyable talk.

Our thanks go to MadLab for hosting our first Manchester NiteTech  – the venue was excellent, as was their great taste in pizza!

Next up north…

If you missed the event in Manchester, join us in Leeds instead! We’re holding another NiteTech event in Leeds on Wednesday 24 February, and it’ll be another chance to hear from Reda and Jon.

As with all Equal Experts events, attendance is free and food and drink is provided. We’d love to see you there – if you’d like to join us, or want to be notified of future events, join our NiteTech North page on meetup. You can also follow us on Twitter for updates.