In April we will be highlighting Women in Tech for International Women's Day celebrations! #IWD18 This event is primarily for ladies although everyone is welcome - the speakers will all be female talking about Google related technologies. 17:00 - Welcome Drinks and Snacks Talk 1: “What the hell is UX and Human Centred Design anyway?” A lot of industries are in a digital panic mode, everyone knows that digital is the way to go but how do we get there? How do we beat the rest and do it well and fast? This is when the terms 'Design Lead', 'User Experience' and 'Human Centered Design' start making an appearance. What makes this way of developing products so important? How do we as the Engineers, Designers and Product Owners deal with budgets, crazy deadlines, skepticism, delivering at scale and getting business to buy in? How do we create interfaces that make a user fall in love with our products and why are design guidelines like Google Material Design important in making a user feel at ease? This talk will be about unpacking the minefield that is product development and finding ways that we can make our mark, as a development and design team (we are in the same boat) so that we can have an impact and make magic. Speaker: Niki De Bruyn Niki is a Senior User Experience Designer at DVT. After getting her degree in Psychology and Criminology and unsuccessfully becoming a crime fighting phenomenon, she found her love for solving human problems through technology and design. There is nothing that she loves more than taking on a challenge and task that users don't really enjoy doing and turning it into something that makes things just a little bit easier to handle. Niki has worked on the Absa MegaU Kids Banking App, Absa Mobile Banking App, Vodacom E-Schools and My Top Dog Education platforms. She has also facilitated a number of Google Venture Design Sprints Talk 2: Enhancing your app with Firebase Speaker: Mbalenhle Ndaba (https://twitter.com/NdabaMbalenhle) Mbalenhle is a Mobile Developer at DVT. She enjoys learning new tech. She attended the 2017 Firebase Dev Summit through Google's Women Techmakers program which provides visibility, support and empowers women in the tech industry. Talk 3: Building an artificial John Lennon with Keras (45 min) Jade Abbott is a Senior Software Developer and Data Scientist at Retro Rabbit. Since 2013, she's built software for every field from social upliftment to banking, working on projects throughout Africa. She's worked at every end of software (with a particular preference for backend) and considers herself a polyglot. Since then, her focus has shifted to her lifelong passion - AI and data science. Her current project involves training deep learning models to perform a variety of NLP tasks for real-life systems. She has recently completed her MSc in Swarm Robotics and as a published researcher has presented her research locally and abroad. When she is not wrangling data, she plays bass for South African instrumental band Follow Me Follow You.
More information will be provided soon - but rough outline so far:
17:30 - Intro to GDG & Women in Tech event welcome!
18:05 - Talk 1 (15 min) -What the hell is UX and Human Centred Design anyway? (Niki De Bruyn)
18:25 - Talk 2 (15 min) - Enhancing your app with Firebase (Mbalenhle Ndaba)
19:00 - Talk 3 (45 min) - Building an artificial John Lennon with Keras (Jade Abbott)
19:45 - End Drinks and Prizes
Exploring the different features on Firebase and how they can be used in your app.
We live in a world where amazing APIs have made it easy to play in complex fields such as AI. Francois Chollet's Keras is one of those libraries that makes working with complex neural networks a breeze. The talk aims to give an intuitive understanding of machine learning (specifically for working with natural language), introduce you to Keras, and then demonstrate how to train an AI to write songs like The Beatles. Speaker: Jade Abbott (https://twitter.com/alienelf)
