Future Rewired brings local tech community together

In the simultaneous session, Jenny De La Mare ran a workshop focused on how to shout about the launch of a business or product. Attendees asked themselves the questions, 'what's the key message? what are the benefits? whats will the interview look like? what would get retweeted or shared?' as they developed what the cover story of their launch would look like with a hands-on scrapbook approach. At the end of the workshop, the canvases were shared and discussed and tips were shared amongst the group.

In our second session, we dived head first into a technical demo of the world of container orchestration with Adrian Massey. In this live demo, Adrian talked attendees through the steps of building and running a container with Docker, sharing tips along the way. In the second half of his talk, we took a look at some different systems and were shown a demo of a tool called Kind in Kubernetes Docker.

We heard about the history of Cortex from one of its founders Matt Thornton in an interesting retrospective full of insights, tips and tech-savvy memes. Amongst the lessons Matt shared from starting a tech business, the first and most important was 'It's your business.' 'When you start a business take a moment to think about what that means to you. What does success look like? What does it feel like to go to work?' These are all part of a less talked about subject in the start-up community, surviving the emotional rollercoaster that starting a business will take you on.

Sarah Hollingworth & Louis Pike's workshop on building customer personas focused on user experiences and making sure that people are at the heart of your business's innovation. 

This process is vital to startup businesses and established businesses alike, by keeping the customer at the heart of all your business decisions and communications will help it grow organically. We started by taking time to evaluate our business objectives and goals and use them to zero in on our ideal customers. Using user scenario worksheets, the workshop broke out into groups to discuss what our customer wants and needs are, why they feel that way and how as a business, we can be there for them at that moment. 

After a networking lunch break, we heard from Jack Fletcher as he returned to the Digital Greenhouse to expand on his talk about Zero Energy Buildings and what they can do for our island. We explored the technology behind the latest renewable energy options and the individual responsibility that needs to be taken to create a zero-energy community and move away from traditional fuels. 

In Marc Beavan's talk, we were walked through a set-up demo of using Docker for a sample .net development application, in the Blazor Web App, SqlServer database and background service.

In Nikita Botes session we explored a day in the life of a Digital Transformation team, starting with a brief history of Nikita's career and some lessons she learned along the way. 

Nikitas advice for when you've hit a wall with your project? K.I.S.S it - 'keep it simple stupid' - get to the heart of the problem and its simplest solution, and move forward with it! This among many other transformation methods is great for ideations and team-building exercises. Though at the heart of any digital transformation is digital, 

“Technology isn’t the heart of digital transformation, people are” Nikita declared, "building teams that feel safe and confident to bring innovative ideas forward will be the ones that break the legacy systems and create transformation!"

Our final talk of the day was from Damien Guard, about app data at scale. Damien's talk was full of useful advice and actionable tips on how to manage your data systems in the face of the constantly evolving cloud systems and customer demands. The way we design our systems and technology has taken more leaps forward in only a year and it's easy to feel your business fall behind. 

"You always need to be optimising for the fastest user experience - how long realistically will a customer wait for your system before leaving to find another one?" Damien asked as he discussed the most important aspect of a user's experience, speed. "Slow loading and running speeds are one of the main reasons a user will leave your site, and probably not return - Damien explains - and even if you become a success, they will just remember you as the system that was too slow. Thus re-evaluating and constantly working on your site's loading/uploading/downloading speeds is more relevant than trying to be at the forefront of innovation all the time." 

After running through the aspects of scaling with data, Damien took attendees through creating an example model to put his tips in perspective.

At the end of the day, everyone gathered to take part in the innovation challenge, run by Ben Wratten and supported by the DGH team. The problem statement this year was 'how can we use technology to improve entertainment for Guernsey islanders or tourists?' contestants had 15 minutes to come up with an exciting solution to win one of this year's prizes.

After voting, the most innovative prize went to Matt T for traffic drones, the funniest idea prize went to Marc B for a digital gladiator tournament with lasers and the best drawing prize went to Johnathan H for VR cinema entertainment.