Another event means another blog post! This time around we were very kindly hosted By Thoughtworks, who are based in the same Federation building, but up on the 4th floor, which gave us great views over Manchester city centre before it went dark (Winter is coming!). Their offices are ultra modern, with fantastic presentation facilites and plenty of space for us to sit, eat and catch up with each other. They provided us with a quiet space and when we arrived our food was already there and set up for us to dive straight in! We were a bit more prepared this time with drinks - but it did involved lugging 6 kilos of ice across the city centre to keep them cool!
Speaking of diving straight in, Open Kitchen Mcr provided our dinner for the evening and once again, they did not disappoint. In fact, we were so busy tucking in to the amazing bao buns and carrot dahl we’ve had to pinch the picture below from the one person who remembered to snap one!
We would wholeheartedly recommend Open Kitchen for any event in Manchester, their sustainable ethos, which saves food from landfill as well as reinvesting profits to provide hot meals for the homeless fits really well with the kind of community spirit R-Ladies works so hard to promote. Not to mention it’s delicious - and a change from the usual networking pizza!
As usual, we did a bit of housekeeping before getting down to the fun stuff, giving a honorable mention to our sponsors Morson International and as always, plugging a couple of their roles that they think would be a great fit for our attendees. We totally forgot to take a group photo - if you have one please send it over - but our great host for the evening Gill did put her head round and snap a quick pic of most of us!
Our speaker for the evening was the brilliant Phrances Perez, who works at BookingGo as a Data Analyst. Her presentation is on our Github page.
Phrances spoke about her important learnings in R, and followed on from our August event by building on our Shiny know-how even more, talking about reactive functions. She also covered the important topic of version control and also some best practises - which I think we can all learn from!
To keep the momentum going, we went straight into the second talk. It was a quick introduction by our organiser Ellen to the Hacktoberfest event. We at R-Ladies have teamed up with a tonne of other great groups from Manchester to host an all day Hackathon event as part of the Hacktoberfest series of global events! It’s shaping up to be a really exciting day, with food, drink, live podcasting and of course, loads of coding! Join our waitlist for tickets to see for yourself!
There was plenty of food and drink left over to be eaten up, so we stopped to refill our plates before moving on to the discussion. Phrances’ talk sparked tonnes of interesting questions and we managed to stay on topic for the rest of the evening! We covered Stack Overflow, open source software in big commercial organisations and how academia should change to incorporate interactivity into publications; all hot topics that got everyone joining in!
If you like the sound of this, come and join us at our next event on December 3rd. We’ll be confirming a venue very soon and we’re planning lots of festive activities, so Christmas hats and jumpers are actively encouraged!
We’re always looking for sponsors to help us keep our events free to attend in the form of venue offers and provisions of catering - If you’re a Mancunian business passionate about diversity in tech and want to support us, use the email link below to get in touch!