Event date:

For our March event we are pleased to announce Lightning Talks! With pizzas provided by Laura Sharpe of Sharpe Recruitment and venue provided by Campus North.

The event will take place at the The Auditorum, Bunker Coffee, Carliol Square, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 6UF (location map at bottom of Ignite site).

The event is free and open to all, but please sign up online so that we have an idea of numbers for the venue, and how much Laura needs to cough up for the pizzas. Feedback, suggestions and ideas for future topics are welcome on our Google Group.

A brief overview of common anti-patterns and unit testing by Aidan Gustard

The subject of this talk is to clearly define the difference between functional testing and unit testing and to look at the most common anti-patterns that developers fall into that make unit testing a harder task than it should be. Aidan is an experienced PHP developer and Agile continuous delivery lifecycle consultant with a passion for high quality code, test-driven development, and Linux-based infrastructure.

SSL with Let’s Encrypt by Keith Pincombe

SSL has quickly become a required part of building a site these days but setup has always been a hassle and and a rip off. Times have changed and the EFF, Mozilla, Facebook, and a large number of other sponsors have helped build something amazing! Let’s Encrypt is a new, completely free service which makes generating SSL certificates super quick.

In his talk Keith will walk you through the painless process of installing Let’s Encrypt on your server so you can make it part of your next build process.

Super sentiments using the Google Prediction API by Nathan Dunn

During this lighting talk, Nathan Dunn will be taking us through how to use Google’s Prediction API for basic sentiment analysis and how it can be used in your applications.

Nathan has recently joined Opia, a sales promotion consultancy based in Gateshead, as a web developer.

Laravel Architecture by Jason Judge

This short talk aims to quickly pull together the concepts of some of the building blocks of a Laravel 5.1 application. They include features that have been in Laravel for some time, in various forms, but which some people may not be familiar.

The Laravel documentation goes into detail in how to use these features, but leaves out any wider descriptions on how to recognise when you need to use them.

The features include:

  • Commands
  • Jobs
  • Scheduled tasks
  • Events

The code samples leave out various sections for clarity, so use them in conjunction with the official Laravel 5.1 documentation.

Details of the fourth talk are to be confirmed.

After the event, many of us will be going to the Ware Rooms next door, for some liquid refreshments.