Future Rewired 2025 Roundup

The 2025 Future Rewired saw our line up of speakers covering a range of topics ranging from deep dives into technical aspects to marketing advice and concepts. We hosted 11 experts from a range of backgrounds including Digital Greenhouse members and external speakers all passionate about their individual fields. Attendees also got the chance to compete for the ever exciting, hand-made, Innovation trophy!

With talks across two floors, our Shed meeting space featured four deep dives into technical subjects where members of the local tech community got to learn from the expert speakers who joined together during the day’s final session for a panel hosted by our Interim Director Ben Wratten. Simultaneously the top floor of the Digital Greenhouse saw presentations around marketing and collaboration for founders with a focus of supporting the non-technical aspects of building a business.

Event sponsor Koadx’s founder - Dave Zak, stepped up to open the first session of the day where he spoke on the use of AI technology and where he feels it’s strengths but more importantly weaknesses are, especially when it comes to coding. Illustrating how coding backend architecture using AI generators can cause an accumulation of technical debt. It’s great to see businesses return to sponsor events having won 1st prize in the 2022 Guernsey Venture Challenge.

As we went into the lunch break Ben Wratten introduced us to the innovation challenge which was to come up with ideas for ‘How can tech help Guernsey get back into growing?’ – ideas could be blue sky, wildest dreams and points were awarded in three categories; Most innovative, funniest idea, and best drawing. The points won here would go towards winning the coveted Innovation trophy.

After lunch from Bean Jar guests split up between the in-depth and technology-driven sessions in the Shed event space, and the top floor sessions that ranged from data to creative.

The afternoon kicked off in the Shed with Damien Guard who took guests through how MongoDB can be used for Entity Framework in a less rigid way, using data collected from changing data structures rather than a traditional fixed table and column structure. Simultaneously Leo Sanders opened by covering how to be strategic in your marketing – how marketing the aspects you’re selling by identifying their functional benefit, then selling based on the emotional benefit it provides.

In our second talk from session two, Serena Moseley discussed branding with attendees and how branding is more than just your logo. As important as a solid logo is, it needs to work with your strategy, including aspects such as typography, and imagery. While many people rush to AI generators in the current climate Serena stressed that DIY branding like this isn’t bad, as long as you pair it with good strategy. While upstairs was deep in the creative and marketing aspects of entrepreneurship Dr Patrizia Kaye covered computing contexts in the Shed with our technical talks, taking the audience through computing concepts going from C to Python to mobile and web looking at how functions work across them.

Session three saw Tristan Knight take to the floor in the Shed - showing how to ditch the GUI and embrace the command line! Tristan's talk made a compelling case for terminal-based development, spotlighting tmux for terminal wrangling and Neovim as the editor for building your dream IDE. Forget pre-packaged menus, Neovim lets you craft a truly personalised coding environment with Lua, offering a supercharged, distraction-free workflow. It's all about your tools, your way – and who needs a mouse when you have a keyboard? Dave Wratten took the audience through how to ‘Build something that actually solves a problem’. In this talk he explored areas such as pretotyping and building minimum viable products that founders and developers can use to test markets before committing to fully building out solutions saving both time and money by avoiding to build products that audiences do not want.  

During this time the top floor hosted Kerry Guard from MKG Marketing, building upon the strategic and creative talks from the previous session. Her presentation illustrated how to get your site in front of your customers through the use of SEO, clarity, and performance. Providing value to your customer base with simple information and utilizing a high performance website can help put your site and brand in front of those you’re trying to reach. Followed up by Katie Inder who took us on a dive into data – proving that more data doesn’t always mean better data. How simplifying your data collection can help you find you actionable metrics, these can help you build better strategy, removing any distracting noise and hone in on the signal that drives insights.

When session four kicked off David Scott Turner offered an insight to how technical and non-technical founders could ‘Bridge the Gap’ between their skill sets. With each having their own strengths and weaknesses there can often be conflict between the two sides leading to breakdowns within the business. Following on with the final talk of the day we had Andrew Melton take to the podium, who spoke about the success he has found through the programmes offered at the Digital Greenhouse. Having taken part in our Startup Academy Andrew made the decision to pivot to a new product alongside his new cofounder, this then led to them winning the Guernsey Venture Challenge.

Back down in the Shed, we welcomed back some of the days technical speakers and our event sponsor for a panel hosted by Ben Wratten. The panel included Dave Zak, Damien Guard, Dr Patrizia Kaye and Dave Wratten, where the discussion centered around the effect of AI on the industry. They covered areas of how they saw AI tools being able to improve productivity as well as the security issues surrounding trends such as vibe coding.

We gathered attendees back on the top floor for a kahoot quiz on the talks of the day – and some general knowledge, points from the quiz and the innovation challenge run over lunch were combined to award the coveted (and handmade) Innovation Trophy! After this, everyone headed out to our rooftop decking, for drinks and to talk about the days presentations, ask our speakers questions.