Join us on Tuesday 12 March for our 12th OpenUK London community meetup! Last year saw the rise of Generative AI. So many of those projects are based on open source software and open data. What have you been building? What open source tools have been helping you be more productive?

6:30 pm: Arrive, grab a bev, a slice and a chat. Scope out our swag table (bring giveaways to contribute or trade!)

7:00 pm: It's demo time! Show us what you've built or contributed to or just open source projects related to AI that you just love! We'd love to get people signed up ahead if you'd like to message Jen. So far, we expect:

• Robert Castelo demoing some new AI features for Drupal
• Bettina Moltrecht, PhD, demoing Harmony NLP for Mental Health Data
• Someone demoing AI features developed by the Green Software Foundation
• Kyle Luster and Fábio Santos sharing how to apply a Large Language Models API to Issue Classification Problem (remote presenter)
• Zixuan (Steve) Feng will share a new OSS community retention management system that integrates AI and statistical models (remote presenter)
• Jacob Penney and Fábio Santos will talk about the prototype GiveMeLabeledIssues

More to come including... maybe YOU?

8:15-8:30 pm: Cleanup and see-ya-next-time.

Please remember to bring your I.D. if you are attending in person, as it is required to access the venue. Note the venue does not permit e-scooters or bicycles within the building.

Thank you to our sponsors Avanade for providing this great space and pizza! By attending this or any OpenUK event, you are adhering to our Code of Respect and OpenUK's Competition Policy. Please read ahead.

If you would like to hear more about OpenUK's other events, you can join our Newsletter. After the event, look out for a Meetup message with an invite to our burgeoning Slack community as a way to keep in touch and support each other between activities.

Details

PBIMCR Feb 2024 session

When: Thursday 29th February 2024 Time: arrive for 5:45pm with talks starting from 6pm start prompt Location: Number 1 Spinningfields, 1 Hardman Street, Manchester, M3 3EB Session will not be streamed over MS Teams Complimentary drinks & pizza provided by our hosts & sponsors Robert Walters February's PBIMCR will feature Matt Lakin and Andy Cutler.

Session 1 - Matt Lakin: Get a Load of this - Realistic Load Testing for Power BI, explained! Are you a Power BI developer or admin?

Do you have Power BI reports that work great during development and UAT, but performance drops once released to production with multiple users?

Or perhaps you're a decision maker, and want to know how much Premium capacity to buy? Or whether you need to invest in Fabric?

You need automated Power BI Load Testing!

In this session we will discuss Power BI production report performance woes by answering:

- Why do Power BI performance issues arise unexpectantly in production? - Why do we need load testing? - How can we carry out load testing with Power BI reports? - How can we use load testing to understand what the right level of Premium capacity is for our tenant? - How can we use Load Testing to quantify the benefits of DirectLake mode in Fabric?

We will go through a live demo of the Realistic Load Tool, which uses a PowerShell script to replicate a specified amount of users opening a report simultaneously. We will discuss what to keep in mind when using the tool, what are its restrictions, and how to use it most effectively for your own reports.

Speaker Details - Matt Lakin With a background in both Data Engineering and Visualisation, Matt is an expert in modelling and visualising data, and is enthusiastic about using this to enable insightful storytelling and informed decision making, specifically in Power BI.

Matt is currently Visualisation Manager at Barratt Developments, and Co-organizer of the Newcastle Power BI User Group in the UK. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattlakin/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/datalakin

Session 2 - Andy Cutler: Synapse Data Warehousing in Fabric: It's all just SQL...Or is it? Fabric is Microsoft's new platform on the block, covering the world of lakehouses, warehouses, real-time streaming, data engineering, and Power BI data modelling and reporting. In this session we'll be looking at the Microsoft Fabric Warehouse service and how it differs from the SQL services we all know and love from Microsoft. We'll look at how and why it's different, and dive into the differences we need to be aware of when developing data solutions.

It's all just SQL...or is it?

Speaker Details - Andy Cutler Andy is an Azure Data Platform professional working predominantly with Azure Synapse Analytics (SQL Pools), Data Factory, SQL Server and Power BI. He holds an MSc in Business Intelligence and Data Mining and is a current Microsoft Data Platform MVP. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andycutler/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/MrAndyCutler

Robert Dietz, Chief Economist of the National Association of Home Builders, joins Mark Zandi, Marisa DiNatale, and Cristian deRitis to discuss the outlook for mortgage rates, home sales, and construction activity.  The team delves into the immigration and demographic trends affecting housing demand along with the 5 L's (Laws, Labor, Land, Lending, and Lumber) limiting homebuilding today.  Rob's quoting of Tolstoy catches everyone off guard while the wide-ranging discussion made it difficult for the team to come up with a clever podcast title so we took a cue from Friends.   Follow Mark Zandi @MarkZandi, Cris deRitis @MiddleWayEcon, and Marisa DiNatale on LinkedIn for additional insight.

Questions or Comments, please email us at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you.    To stay informed and follow the insights of Moody's Analytics economists, visit Economic View.

The London Excel Meetup group is coming to Munich, Germany.

There will be fun, drinks, learning, and networking in a very social atmosphere. I cannot wait to meet you all.

Our venue is very close to Central station so for those who can commute to Munich (or live in Munich), this is a great opportunity to attend an in-person event.

Please, please RSVP on this page if you plan to attend as we need to know numbers.

The plan for the evening.

• 18:30 - doors open. network, chat, settle in.
• 19:00 - Presentations
• 21:00 - questions, chat, networking
• 21:30 - leave venue for further drinks and social chat

This event will have multiple speakers delivering short presentations of 10-15 minutes each.

You will hear from:

• Alan Murray - "Small productivity hacks"
• Robert Mundigl - “Table Slicers for Dashboards”
• Martin Weiss - "AGGREGATE function in Excel"
• Anders Ebro - Excel VBA for the professional Developer - Enabling Intellisense for custom named ranges - Enabling Intellisense for custom ribbon objects
• Giles Male - Guidance for the average modeller
• Sue Bayes - "From phone to Excel to Power BI to phone"
• Cristian Angyal - "Low Code - High Impact Power Query Tips & Tricks"
• Traci Williams - "My Love / Hate relationship with Macros"
• David Benaim - A short comedy set on the topic of Excel
• Enrico de Crescenzo - "Rules of the conditional formatting"

Alan Murray

• Founder of Computergaga blog and YouTube channel
• Author of 'Advanced Excel Formulas' and 'Advanced Excel Success'
• Microsoft MVP
• Excel and Power BI trainer
• Organiser of the 'London Excel Meetup' group

Martin Weiss

• Excel trainer, developer and consultant

• Owner of the Excel blog “Tabellenexperte” (www.tabellenexperte.de)

• Author (“Excel Pivot-Tabellen für Dummies“)

• Microsoft Certified Excel Expert

Robert Mundigl

• Consultant for Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Financial Modelling, Simulation and Optimization

• based in Aschheim (near Munich, Germany)

• Founder and owner of Clear & Simple Analytics GmbH

• Blog: ClearlyandSimply.com since 2009

• Microsoft Excel user since 1990

Sue Bayes

I'm a Microsoft Certified Data Analyst Associate in Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Power BI specialising in Microsoft Power BI, Excel and Paginated Reporting. I develop reports and models using Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Excel, R and Python and work closely with businesses to enable them to use these tools to provice strategic insight and answer those questions that give value.

Giles Male

Giles is a CIMA qualified modeller, and co-founder of Full Stack Modeller – a training company and global community for finance professionals. Giles is keen runner, with Comrades Ultra in South Africa on the calendar for 2024.

Anders Ebro

Anders Ebro is a software engineer and system designer from Exacto , working out of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Anders has been developing and delivering optimized business applications built with Excel and SQL server for more than a decade. Everything from complex manufacturing forecasting to requirements management tools, or HR bonus payout, Anders has built it.

An Microsoft MVP in Office since 2014, he has gladly shared, presented and helped hundreds of people learning the finer nuances of Office, VBA and SQL.

Cristian Angyal

• Project Management Professional turned Data Specialist bridging Business and IT
• Data-driven problem solver with a passion for insights with 20+ years across industries
• Holds several Microsoft Certifications (MCSE, MCSA, MOS, MCT, etc.)
• Romania Power BI and Modern Excel User Group organizer
• Microsoft MVP

Traci Williams

Traci is a trainer and consultant operating her own company Excel Ace. She loves Excel and in her training helps businesses get the most out of their spreadsheets.

Enrico de Crescenzo

Enrico has been a senior finance manager in several companies in Zürich Switzerland for the last decade. He's a lazy runner and an Excel (and Power BI) enthusiast. When he's not busy improving cash flow forecasting systems or implementing KPIs to monitor financial performance, he's probably teaching how to optimize and automate spreadsheets through examples of the fictitious and delicious Pizza BI.

David Benaim

"Excel MVP and amateur comic David Benaim merges cells with exhil-arating laughs. If you like to spreadsheet, come and get sum, or #nah, if it's out of your range."

This is an in-person only event.

Bis bald

Join us for a workshop on Service Weaver by Robert Grandl.

Service Weaver (https://serviceweaver.dev) is a programming framework that makes it easy to write, deploy, and manage distributed applications written in Go. With Service Weaver, you write your application as a modular monolith and compile it into a single binary.

The Service Weaver runtime then splits the binary and deploys it as a set of distributed services. This programming model enables you to focus on what your code does without worrying so much about where it runs.

You can deploy your application across multiple execution environments, locally on your laptop, across a pool of machines via SSH, or in the cloud! Additionally, the Service Weaver runtime can reduce infrastructure costs and improve application latency by several orders of magnitude compared to the status quo. 

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the workshop, you should be able to:

Develop a Service Weaver application;

Add instrumentation (e.g., logs, metrics, traces) to your application;

Debug, monitor, and test your application;

Understand how to deploy your application to the cloud.

Workshop Structure

• Part 1: Service Weaver Presentation

What is Service Weaver?

Service Weaver concepts.

How to develop, deploy, debug, and monitor a Service Weaver application.

• Part 2: Hands-on Activity

We will develop, instrument, test, and debug a Service Weaver application.

Requirements

Please bring a Linux or MacOS laptop with Go version 1.20 or later installed.

Please prepare your development environment to write Go programs.

Agenda

6:00 PM: Doors open, registration, light dinner

6:30 PM: Service Weaver presentation + workshop (with a break)

9:00 PM: Drinks & networking

Hosted By

Amanda Cavallaro, GDG Organizer

I'm an Aikidoka, Developer Advocate, Software Developer, Google Developers Expert, Linkedin Learning Author and a Full Stack Web Development Specialist.

Saverio Terracciano, GDG Organizer

Stefano Le Pera, GDG Organizer

Lorenzo Turrino, GDG Organizer

Alessandro Puccetti, GDG Organizer

My name is Alessandro Puccetti, I am Italian 🇮🇹 but I am in fact a citizen of the world 🌎. I love travelling and meeting new people from different cultures, and I enjoy having a particular focus on their food 😉.

Kubra Harmankaya, GDG Organizer

Natalie Godec, GDG Organizer

Bruno Ripa, GDG Organizer

I am an italian software architect, in the industry since 2006. I have been in entrepreneurship in Italy, for 6 years, and then continued my career in United Kingdom, in London (2012), a city (or, better, the City) which I consider as my second home. I have worked in several industries (gaming, fintech, digital asset management) and in many companies, with a 3 years parenthesis in Spain (2017-2020), precisely in Barcelona, where I have worked as a contractor for a few USA startups and an european company working in IoT. In March 2020 I made my way back in London, working for Erlang Solutions. Actually I am a contractor and Consultant at BBC

Arianna Capizzi, GDG Organizer

Jen Kwon, GDG Organizer

Complete your event RSVP here: https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-cloud-london-presents-workshop-on-service-weaver-by-robert-grandl-google-london/.

Hibernate Search in Action is a practical, example-oriented guide for Java developers with some background in Hibernate Core. As the first book to cover Hibernate Search, it guides you through every step to set up full text search functionality in your Java applications. The book also introduces core search techniques and reviews the relevant parts of Lucene, in particular the query capabilities. Hibernate Search in Action also provides a pragmatic, how-to exploration of more advanced topics such as Search clustering. For anyone using Hibernate or JBoss Seam, this book is the definitive guide on how to add or enhance search features in their applications. About the Technology Good search capability is one of the primary demands of a business application. Engines like Lucene provide a great starting point, but with complex applications it can be tricky to implement. It's tough to keep the index up to date, deal with the mismatch between the index structure and the domain model, handle querying conflicts, and so on. Hibernate Search is an enterprise search tool based on Hibernate Core and Apache Lucene. It provides full text search capabilities for Hibernate-based applications without the infrastructural code required by other search engines. With this free, open-source technology, you can quickly add high-powered search features in an intelligent, maintainable way. About the Book What's Inside About the Reader About the Author Emmanuel Bernard: After graduating from Supelec (French "Grande Ecole"), Emmanuel has spent a few years in the retail industry where he started to be involved in the ORM space and in full text technology. He joined the Hibernate team in 2003 and is now a lead developer at JBoss, a division of Red Hat. Emmanuel is the lead developer of Hibernate Annotations and Hibernate EntityManager, two key projects on top of Hibernate core implementing the Java Persistence(tm) specification. He has also lead the Hibernate Search project from its inception, reconsiling the two fields Emmanuel has been involved in: ORM and Full Text search. He is a regular speaker at various conferences and JUGs, including JavaOne, JBoss World and Javapolis (Javoxx). He is also involved in the Java Community Process as a specification lead for JSR 303 (Bean Validation) and as a expert group member for JSR 317 (Java Persistence 2.0). John Griffin has been in the software and computer industry in one form or another since 1969. He remembers writing his first FORTRAN IV program on his way back from Woodstock. Currently, he is the software engineer/architect for SOS Staffing Services, Inc. He was formerly the lead e-commerce architect for Iomega Corporation, lead SOA architect for Realm Systems and an independent consultant for the Dept of the Interior among many other callings. John has even spent time as an adjunct university professor. He enjoys being a committer to projects because he believes it's time to get involved and give back to the community. John is the author of XML and SQL Server 2000 published by New Riders Press. He is a member of the ACM. Currently, he resides in Layton, Utah with wife, Judy and Australian Shepherds, Clancy and Molly. Quotes A great resource for true database independent full text search. - Aaron Walker, base2Services It has completely changed the way I do complex search. Awesome! - Ayenda Rahien, Author of Building Domain Specific Languages in Boo Love its vast coverage--the definitive source. - Patrick Dennis, Management Dynamics Incs. Covers it all...the only source I need. - Robert Hanson, Author of GWT in Action A superb discussion of a complex topic. - Spencer Stejskal, SOS Staffing Services