Logo

GIB DEVS

Next meetup: Jan 2023 

Get tickets

Past Meetups

Browse our past events and get presentation slides, YouTube links and other resources.

2022

November: Web 3.0 and WebXR

We started out with a primer on starting a Web3.0 project with Crypto veteran Chris Cousins, (CEO of Eve Exchange).

Following this, Matthew Broadhead shared some of his experience in developing projects for VR, some new metaverse products coming around, and the flexibility of the new WebXR platform.

Photos of the event are available on our Facebook page!

See Photos

October: Security and Stable Diffusion

We kicked off the night with some equally tragic and hilarious anecdotes from the world of cybersecurity, with Kieren (Head of IT Security / CERT at BetVictor), before diving into Joe's interactive demonstration of AI-generated artwork using the recently-released Stable Diffusion.

Yes, we kept copies of all your weird and wonderful creations XD and you can check those out on our Discord channel.

See Photos Watch Stable Diffusion Talk
2020

September: Intro to LitElement

This September, we welcomed Alin Inayeh to the virtual stage, to give us a crash course in the basics of the LitElement library.

Part of Google's Polymer Project, LitElement is a simple base class for creating fast, lightweight web components that work in any web page with any framework.

Alin is a frontend developer from Romania with 14 years of experience.

Coming soon: Watch again

August: Intro to Robots

Not only did our speaker, Ben Borastero, show us how to build a robot in less than an hour - but thanks to our lovely sponsors, Lottoland, we also gave away one kit containing everything needed to build one!

Ben is a station operative at GBC. In his spare time, however, he is a maker and tinkerer - specialising in concocting frankenstein devices from up-cycled electrical equipment.

He demonstrated the EZ Robot modular system, which can be used to customise homemade or 3d printed robots, or old toys. He also brought in a few of his projects, coded using multiple technologies, for a show and tell session!

See Photos

June: The Many Faces of Performance

June saw what was (hopefully) our last virtual, lockdown edition meetup, where we heard from Mihaela Ghidersa - Software Developer @ Centric.

Talking in generalities when it comes to performance is easy, but building a system that is able to grow around the right practices is a matter of great control and overview. Meanwhile, improving performance on an existing system can become a huge headache.

But none of the above is impossible if there is discipline, the right mindset and knowledge. This webinar evolved around the performance concept - more specifically around two ideas:

  • Model-Driven Development in the Client
  • Backend for Frontends
Watch again

May: Communication

Andrei Postolache: “Clear & Assertive Communication”

With over 18 years of experience in IT, starting out as a developer and moving to management and senior management. Andrei led May's meetup to give us a lesson in effective communication.

Andrei was the first developer hired at a company branch in Romania and ended up growing and managing what became a strong business unit with 300 employees.

Following his passions, he started his own company, Introspecials, that provides training, workshops and consultancy on various topics like Agile, survivial in teams and organisations, leadership, day-to-day communication, presentations and public speaking, motivation, etc. Check Introspecials.com for free resources!

Watch again

April: Machine Learning

Raluca Apostol: “Choosing the right machine learning technique to meet your product need”

Raluca, with her impressive background in machine learning, made the perfect host for this event. After a general overview, she told us about what ML algorithms are now available and how to choose the right algorithm to fit your purpose - as well what resources you will need in order to do this. After the theoretical part of the presentation, she walked us though a practical use case.

Raluca is Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at Nestor, a company backed by Y Combinator and Silicon Valley investors. She has a Ph.D in Machine Learning with research work referenced by Intel and LG.

Get the slides Watch again

March: Lockdown Edition

Ian Sproates, Senior Front End Developer @Lottoland: "Software Design - The Sproates Approach"

Ian joined us at our first virtual meetup to talk about software design - but also to lead us through an interactive, collaborative exercise to give us confidence that we are building the right things and are able to communicate our designs with others

Watch again

Izabella Jaworska, Analyst @Lottoland: "South Korea's COVID-19 story"

Izabella presented South Korea's COVID-19 story in data, using Python and Matplotlib library. South Korea is the perfect country to analyse, having collected a lot of data and making a lot of tests.

Watch again

February: Reactive Microservices & 3d Printing

Cheers to all who joined us for Reactive Microservices and Introduction to 3D Printing! Santiago Sanchez joined us all the way from his base in Malaga to tell us about reactive microservices architecture; covering asynchronous communication, event sourcing and CQRS.

Then our very own Helena Mercer showed us how easy it is to learn everything you need to know to make your first 3D printed object - giving away a 3D-printed, Gib Devs-branded debugging duck to one lucky attendee! Big thanks to Lottoland for sponsoring this event and making it possible

Get the slides See photos

January: UX/UI testing and design

We were so proud to welcome back over 50 Gib Devs at our first meetup of the year in the Lord Nelson!

This month's meetup was all about UX/UI. Miguel walked us through how important your UI - the visible part of your app - is to the end user and thus, how important it is to test thoroughly using Galen, a powerful tool with which we can build a suite of automation UI tests, increasing the quality of the application and speed of development.

Up next, Pedro led an interactive presentation on what it means to be a UX Architect, like him. We learned about some of the things that can get lost in translation between developers, designers and stakeholders, along with what can go right or wrong depending on the quality of our communication.

See photos
2019

November: Gib Devs 1st Birthday

Our one-year anniversary went down a treat with cake, cava, prizes and great company!

We quizzed you on what you remember from the last year, and gave cool tech prizes to the top 3 Gib Devs who proved they were paying attention. We also raffled a pair of Beats Studio headphones from Newston Store (thanks guys!)

Our talks were from Robin Whitting on "How to Avoid Death by PowerPoint" and how to create the classic "Tanks" game, by Dean Richards.

All of this followed by the obligatory after-party in Ocean Village and sore heads on Friday morning.

Get the slides See photos

October: Startup Grind

In partnership with Startup Grind Gibraltar, we hosted two tech talks at the World Trade Center, with food and drink sponsored by Heroku. First, Jan Ambrožič showed us how to make the beloved "Snake" game in under 30 minutes using an open source framework: Cocos Creator.

Next, Patrick Di Loreto, CTO at Addison Global, presented: "From 0 to your first million customers using serverless stateful architecture". He guided us through building a technology platform to support business growth. The event saw record-breaking numbers for us as almost 80 people attended.

See photos

August: Clean Code

Out of the darkness came this month's meetup... Yes, 30 minutes before the start of the meetup, Gibraltar suffered a nationwide power cut, showing no evidence that the power would come back on any time soon. Of course, we considered rescheduling...

But then, people started flooding in and we remembered an important fact: beer taps don't need electricity. Plus, our sound system has a big battery (thanks again Kindred!) and the Lord Nelson staff still managed to magically produced platters of hot pub snacks. We raffled prizes the retro way (with paper tickets), giving away 3 slim aluminium powerbanks from our generous sponsors, Kindred.

This month's theme: good clean code! Craig Saunders took us through the evolution of Software Engineering, explaining the crucial principles and best practices that differentiate a Developer from a Software Engineer, as well as Uncle Bob's software oath. Joining Craig in the war on bad code was our very own Vytautas, who ran through some concepts and prinicples that you can follow to make your code even more stable, testable, scalable, maintainable... you know, more *-able ;)

See photos

July: Body scans & Bug Bounty

Our speakers this month were on point! Peter Bassill, bug bounty hunter and CEO of Hedgehog Security here in Gibraltar, ran us through some entertaining IDOR and SSRF vulnerabilities, while Matthew Broadhead introduced us to his 3D body scanning work using Blender and Unity.

See clip

This was our first event at the Lord Nelson venue. They fed us and beered us very well indeed, thanks to our sponsors, Kindred - who also brought with them a bunch of free goodies :D

See photos

June: Terraform and your own Start-up

Jakub, motorcyle enthusiast and DevOps Engineer at BetVictor, brought us a demonstration of Terraform, a tool for managing cloud infrastructure. Next, Chris Cousins talked about how to take those development ideas and turn them into a revenue-generating business.

Thanks a lot to Lottoland who helped to make this possible by providing food and beers, to PizzaExpress for sponsoring the voucher giveaway, and to Bruno's for lending us the venue this time!

See photos

May: Visual Regression & Web Audio

Thanks to all who attended our super May meetup! Sergey Mangov with his talk about “Visual regression with BackstopJS and Cypress” covered software testing, a topic that hadn’t been covered before.

Next, an astonishing performance of Peter Mareš with “Web Audio, Trackers and making music”. He literally taught us how to make or own music using samples and applying some special effects in a web browser. Thanks a lot to our sponsor, Kindred, who help make this possible by keeping our bellies full of food and beer.

See photos

April: Reactive Architecture & Kimball

Juan Palomares sparked an enthusiastic Q&A session after showing us how data modelling using Kimball methodology can make your database more reliable and accessible to the end user. Next, Shelley Gill brought us into the world of Reactive Architecture by splitting us into teams for an interactive game.

Plus, one lucky attendee won a ticket to the www.buildstuff.es conference in Malaga - congrats! Thanks as always to our loyal sponsor, Lottoland, who help make this possible by keeping our bellies full of food and beer.

See photos

March Meetup

Thanks to everyone involved: two great speakers, Manuel and Pedro; our loyal sponsor Lottoland; and most of all, you guys for showing up, engaging in Q&A, networking between speakers, and helping us to form a supportive and friendly dev community here in Gib.

During this meetup we also got you guys to decide what our new logo will be, by way of a vote. That big reveal is coming soon...

See photos

February: JS Type-checking, Java 9 & REPL

We were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and sheer number of attendees at our third ever Gib Devs meetup! Other than the usual free beer and hot snacks, for which we give thanks to our event sponsor Lottoland, we were also treated to two coding presentations by local devs working here in Gibraltar.

Alin Inayeh kicked off the event with a talk on JavaScript type-checking and why/how you should be using it, and Java trainer Maciej Sławiński continued the night with a live demo of Java9 and REPL. Finally, as always, we rounded off the night by networking over even more beers!

See photos

January: Flutter

We had such a great evening thanks to our great speaker João Soares and all the wonderful people that came!

João showed us how easy it was to code a beautiful to-do list app using Flutter.

See photos
2018

November 2018: Inauguration

The first ever Gib Devs meetup was hosted at Supernatural.

See photos

Thinking of joining the team, or contributing in some other way?

Check out how you can get involved here.