Future Rewired packs a punch with an eclectic lineup in 2023

Future Rewired made a triumphant return for its fifth year with 50+ people attending for a day of learning and innovation. The Digital Greenhouse team ran a packed day of talks and workshops with a vast collection of local experts, bringing together Guernsey's tech community.

Having seen over 200 attendees since its creation in 2019, Future Rewired has always aimed to bring together Guernsey's leading voices in the creative and technology sector to inspire and educate the attending crowds. This year was no different, with the lineup growing exponentially in comparison to previous years, expanding to topics such as cyber security, caching, AI and marketing strategy. 

This year had sixteen speakers lined up to share their knowledge with the wider community, beginning with an insightful session on the discovery and visualisation solution for AWS workloads, its architecture and areas of scalability from Matthew Ball. Attendees were talked through the architecture and scalability of the tool he designed and developed that helps users visualise the relationships between AWS services that make up their cloud workloads.

In a simultaneous talk, Dave Wratten took attendees through the process of building solutions for your clients, and the tools that can make the task easier. Dave's advice, "avoid solutionism! Be a soundboard instead!" By gathering all the requirements and making a note of the business logic, data structures and workflows you'll make your process much easier.

Dave Zak demonstrated the technology behind NionNet Origin to onlooking attendees, showcasing the power of Origin for software development. Inspired to help save time for developers writing code, Dave designed the programme to give developers the source code of a fully featured web application, including a database, middleware and API depending on what requirements they submitted. 

Attendees were all brought together by the cyber security workshop run by Bruce McDougall, Joh Harvey and members of the Black Arrow Cyber team, covering key considerations for those building websites, and web applications. Joh shared his story of the data breach that occurred to his business, and how by using a free website developer with added plugins to take orders online meant that there were holes in his business's security. This was exploited and the credit card details of his customers were exposed. A true nightmare for any business owner, Joh expressed the need to take cyber crimes more seriously and wanted to make sure that sharing his story would help to remove the stigma of shame that entrepreneurs might feel when breaches happen. To follow up the Black Arrow Cyber team ran a hands-on workshop to give attendees practical actions and key considerations they could use when building their online business experience. Read more about 'Navigating cyber security in an open source world' here.

After a busy lunch of networking, Sarah Hollingsworth ran a practical session on networking with ease, exploring key principles, strategic networking and challenging attendees to ask themselves questions like, 'How do you add value to your contacts?' and 'What are you currently doing to build and sustain your network?'. Following a detailed look at a network Venn diagram of an optimal network, the crowd broke into focused groups to practice introductions with presence-boosting practices. Read more about 'Networking with ease, 4 tips to boost your presence and impact' here.

In a simultaneous talk, Damien Guard took listeners on a deep dive into designing and implementing REST web APIs, to help businesses avoid barriers to adoption. In the technical section of his talk, he expanded on cover versioning, security, rate limiting, error handling, caching and then documenting everything with OpenAPI.

In an effort to shine a light on the process of caching, Matt Champion took attendees through the concept of storing data in a cache, and how to implement it while avoiding common pitfalls.

Patrizia Kay took us through the foundations of artificial intelligence, the intelligence vs rationality argument and the types of search algorithms. Attendees also heard about the reasoning and biases of humans and the AI machines we create. Read more about 'Combining AAAAAAAAA and Intelligence' here.

Tim Wyatt led a deep dive into the developer tool, Camunda - sharing the process behind which developers can design, automate and orchestrate the microservices necessary to improve automated business processes.

Krista Osbourne and Chris Leaman ran a hands-on workshop for new businesses on how they can get their business message to the public via social and traditional media. Read more about 'How to market your product: 4 ways to get your message out there' here.

As the day came to a close, Digital Greenhouse team members Ben Wratten and Jenny De La Mare ran the popular Innovation Challenge. The crowd pondered, doodled and laughed while creating weird and whacky solutions to the problem statement "How can we use generative AI to make Guernsey a better place to live?". After an extensive post-it voting process, the winners of the most innovative, best drawing and funniest idea collected their trophies.