Fusion is a meetup for the Tech-passionate, with a focus on engaging, thought provoking talks in an informal and sociable space. We hold them in the well-connected city centre of Birmingham and since 2015 our events have proudly showcased local talent alongside industry specialists from further afield, all sharing knowledge and innovation with our Fusion family.

Our focus is to bring the local Tech community together over insightful talks, good food, and conversation; a networking event 

About Fusion Meetup

Shout out to Rudy's pizza for stepping in last minute to serve the flavour at Fusion with their delicious pizzas!

Sadly we couldn't make things work for Pietanic at the venue, but no doubt they'll back at Fusion next year.

Since the move to Birmingham last year, Goldman Sachs have worked hard to study the Birmingham Tech community and have identified some key groups to associate their brand with.

We have had some great talks so far from the GS team and we're delighted to have them with us at every event. They are a lovely bunch, so feel free to grab them for a chat on the 29th!

Goldman Sachs

The Vonage team have been long standing supporters of Fusion Meetup. We have established a great relationship with the team, and look forward to working with them year on year.

They have a super exciting 12 months ahead of them, and we can't wait to hear all about it! Vonage have made a huge impact on the growth of Fusion, and their passion for community growth and collaboration mirrors Fusions core values.

Vonage

Almost all teams have a PR approval process: the gold standard, the way science does it. But there’s a catch, the process feels horrible. You’re left twiddling your thumbs and waiting for judgement hour to come. Only then to repeat once again, or maybe even twice.

Worse yet, science says it doesn’t really help for tech at all. What if there was another way? Where you can ship to prod every hour, leave work with a spring in your step, and both love and trust your team’s work.

I’d like to tell a story, starting with the hashtag trunk based dev brigade, moving through team drama, to throwing out the rule book. Taking only the bits that suit your team with a sprinkling of new tech to get the job done.

L﻿uke Browne

Friends don’t let friends use approval rules

In the good old days, your users would log into a web app with a username and password. But now people expect an alphabet soup of SSO, 2FA, OAuth, OIDC, SAML, FIDO2, OTP... What do they all mean - and why do they matter? Why is central authentication useful? What does two-factor authentication really protect us from, and what's still wide open?

Learn how to keep your users safe as we discuss the good, the bad and the ugly of modern authentication mechanisms for the Web.

This talk is aimed at anyone passingly familiar with web development, with an interest in security, or who simply wants to know what’s really going on when you ‘sign in with Google’.

I love making cool and / or weird things, talking about them, and hearing other people talking about the cool and / or weird things they’re making. In particular, I’m passionate about making the tech industry accessible and inclusive, and my favourite thing about tech is that it connects me to other people.

E﻿li Holderness

You Shall Not Password: Modern Authentication for Web Apps

Turning source code into runnable programs is still tricky, even after years of build systems and new tools - we'll dive into what makes it so difficult, and talk about some of the best work out there to deal with the complexity.

Maintainer of open source software at Docker

Justin Chadwell

Autotools was actually (kinda) right

Rewriting entire systems is a lot of work, wouldn't it be better if we could avoid this in the first place? This talk will provide some pointers on how.

Ben Paddock

Rewriting our approach to rewriting software

Head of Developer Relations at Infobip & Half of @DevRelAvocados

Julia Biro

Building 2FA

It's the last Fusion of the year and we're mixing things up a bit! We'll be bringing all the usual Fusion goodness but this time with lightening talks!

For in person tickets, the event will start at 6pm, for online tickets the stream will start at 7pm. We will have a short break in between talks and will hold Q&A after the main talks only. There will be a chance to talk with the other speakers during the interval and after the event.

We're delighted to announce that All Greek street food are bringing the flavour on Thursday! Expect the tastiest gyros in town!

It’s 2022 and we’re all on the edge of our serverless seats. But what is The Edge? What are Edge Functions? And what impact does this new technology have on the Jamstack, the web, and ultimately — people and our planet?

Salma Alam-Naylor

We're all living on it. But what exactly is The Edge?

Going through the purpose, vision and strategy for Oakbrook's new(ish) cross-functional platform team. How we've learned to balance risk and prioritise keeping our system reliable while accelerating the delivery of product teams.

Connell Watkins

Oakbrook's Cross-functional Platform Team

Modern applications all have one thing in common: They need secure data access to provide users.

Purists will turn to some native Cloud infrastructure, spend days reading about how to spin up a server and add all the extras required to run an app. Another technique is to use ready-made DB as a service tool with out-of-the-box integration for data access.

Both approaches are very valid, but we often make sacrifices and let go of specific features with each choice. What if we want to add hosting, how do we automate webhooks, can we migrate to a different infrastructure at a moment's notice?

We must go far away to an entirely different Realm to achieve this. This is where we discuss the Mongo Atlas services with the Realm-Web SDK. Think of a ready-made suite with all you need. Authentication, GraphQL, Cloud Functions, and many more are just among the features we will be demonstrating live.

Sani Yusuf

Protector of the Realm

We are bringing you the well-known Fusion vibes at Studio venues, as well as having the option to watch from the comfort of your own home.

For in person tickets, the event will start at 6pm, for online tickets the stream will start at 7pm.

Due to sponsor requirements, we aren't accepting ticket requests from recruiters/sales people.

It wouldn't be Fusion Meet-up without showcasing one of the amazing street food vendors we have in our wonderful city.

We will have a relatively quick turnaround on food, so our pals at The Indian Brewery will be boxing us up some of their delicious fat naans so we can make sure everyone is fed before we kick off our evening with Jake and our other speakers. The Fat Naan options are chicken, paneer and chana masala! (YUM!)

Please be sure to let us know if you require a vegetarian option. This can be done by emailing the Fusion Team directly or dropping us a message through Meetup.com or Twitter @thefusion_hub

We proud to announce Fusion’s new headline sponsors as Goldman Sachs. Since the move to Birmingham last year, Goldman Sachs has worked hard to study the Birmingham Tech community and have identified some key groups to associate their brand with.

Goldman Sachs have confirmed headline sponsorship with Fusion for all events in 2022 and we are looking forward to seeing what the exciting partnership will bring to our event and attendees.

The Vonage team have been long standing supporters of Fusion Meetup. We have established a great relationship with the team, and we are super excited to introduce Lucinda Bone as their new Community Manager.

Vonage have made a huge impact on the growth of Fusion, and their passion for community growth and collaboration mirrors Fusions core values.

We are absolutely over the moon to have the one and only 

 joining us for the evening! We will be hearing one of Jakes new talks and this will be followed by an open Q&A session where you can bring any question to the table for Jake. We will be taking questions from both our in house attendees and folks watching the live stream at home.

Jake Archibald

The Page Transitions API

Monzo's success relies on us rapidly shipping new features to customers. This tight feedback loop helps us quickly validate our ideas. We can double down on the ideas that are working, and fail fast if we need to.

As companies grow there is a growing temptation to reduce risk by adding more red tape - particularly in the regulated banking industry. As well as lengthening the product feedback loop, this red tape often increases risk: engineers are incentivised to batch up changes into risky "bing bang" releases.

At Monzo we've worked hard to resist this temptation. In this talk I'll show you how we’ve optimised our engineering culture, tooling, and architecture to make the path from idea to production as frictionless as possible, all without sacrificing safety.

Will Sewell

How Monzo deploy to production over 100 times a day

James will be talking about Legend – a platform created by GS and open sourced that is used to model data and connect and integrate systems https://legend.finos.org

James Mason-Drust

Goldman Sachs’ open source Legend platform

We are bringing you the well-known Fusion environment at Studio venues, as well as having the option to watch from the comfort of your own home. For in person tickets, the event will start at 6pm, for online tickets the stream will start at 7pm.

Building web apps is a complicated mess. You need to know Python, JS, HTML, CSS, SQL, Flask, Bootstrap, SQLAlchemy, Webpack... the list goes on. What if you could do it all in Python?

That's Anvil -- an open-source framework with Python in the browser, Python on the server - even a Python UI toolkit. And then, we built an online IDE, drag'n'drop designer and hosting platform for it.

In this talk, I'm going to introduce Anvil, then take a deep dive into how it works. How do you run Python in the browser? How do you build an autocompleter that knows about everything from your UI layout to your database schema? And what does it mean for a programming tool to be "accessible"?

Eli Holderness

Building web apps with Anvil

Run through of current Motion Capture project and maybe a demo!

Dr Tom Goodman

Motion Capture Project

Artificial Intelligence is at the forefront of discussion in every industry, with SEO certainly no exception. As with any emerging technology, there are huge promises and a potential for the hype to overtake reality. In this technical talk, Aaron counters some of the sensationalism around AI, highlighting the dangers of over-reliance on AI and sharing how the technology can be tricked.

Aaron Tello-Wharton

Hackers Guide to Resisting the AI Apocalypse

Once upon a time, relational databases, or RDMS (think SQL), were the only data store in town. But now there’s a competitor, Document Databases aka NoSQL. In this talk, you will learn about the basic differences between them, what MongoDB is, why document databases are so powerful, how MongoDB can be used with .NET, and some really cool uses cases that show databases can be cool

Luce Carter

Zero to Document Hero - Intro to MongoDB and .NET

Pretty good, much more relaxed than I was middle of October time! We’ve survived 2020 and here we are!

It was an experience, which I think is the diplomatic way of putting it. The last five/six years of my life have been spent around running events, chatting to people, and making connections, and then all of that got turned on its head. I have never spent so much time in my house that’s for sure!

So what has got you through the last year?

I set up an office in the living room rather than in my bedroom. It meant I had a separation between working and relaxing. Keeping a routine was so important as its really easy to fall into the trap of not going to bed early and waking up late. Also having the kitchen next door meant I wasn’t taking breaks, so I started actually having breakfast and lunch away from my screen and not taking breaks at my desk.

Lots of lights too!! I’ve brought a light therapy lamp actually which has been great!

We saw you and the HTM team take on the challenge of running the hackathon virtually!! First of all congratulations, it was a huge success. The collaboration between teams was amazing, the submissions were so strong and so well thought out. How did you find it all?

Absolutely knackering!! The week before was the hardest because we were working 14/15 hours days, to get set up, make sure the stream was running. The last day was also really intense as we had to do all the judging and film the closing ceremony and stitch the sponsor videos together – all things you don’t need to think about when you are doing it person.

Rightly so, we don’t trust tech, so it was easier to have recordings rather than live streaming. With there being so many people involved there was lots of different elements to juggle doing it virtually.

What was the biggest challenge running HTM5?

Trying to transition the skills we have as a team to running in person events, which is a completely different beast to running it online. The second challenge was maintaining the same community feel. Something that’s key to HTM is this welcoming community that makes people feel like they are a part of something during the event, because it wouldn’t be hack the midlands without that. Trying the keep that community feel existing within the online context was definitely one of the biggest challenges.

We started planning HTM5 in October 2019 and by the following March we had to switch things up due to lockdown and had to start thinking about ways we can make it delightful for everyone, and make everyone feel like they are a part of it all. How do we maintain the community feel? How can we go above and beyond to make sure people have a good time and feel included? It’s really hard to emulate the in person events, where you have a really cohesive community.

There is such a huge emphasis on community at HTM, as well as collaboration, skills transfer, learning from peers etc. What sort of solutions did you come up with to keep that going?

We kept all engagement within the Discord server rather than having separate chats on MS teams, Zoom etc. Charlie and the team built a great bot, where you can create channels so can interact with your team in the server. That obviously came with its own challenges!! We accidently made 100 channels and spammed the discord with them!!

We also took an idea from Hack Quarantine where we created check points so people could chat about what they’ve done each day. Another thing I encouraged people to do was to drop into chats to see what everyone is doing and offer help. I think having that extra communication really helps, and it encourages people to talk in Discord community channels.

Discord was great shout Tom, it worked so well!

Its such a flexible platform, being able to write a bot allows you to get creative. Having the mix of text and voice chat too was great, and the ability to have multiple meetings going on at once.

Are you getting paid by Discord for Advertising?

I would shill for Discord purely based on how useful it’s been…I say wearing a discord t-shirt!

Something you want to tell us Tom? Are you starting work with them next year?

I wish! Discord if you’re reading this interview, feel free to chuck us some money or some nice clothes! Is this how product placement works?

Over the HTM years, what would be your favourite submission of all time?

That is one of the hardest questions you could have asked, there has been so many amazing submissions. There was one called Dance Auth – where you danced the password. You would train it a dance move and by the user completing the dance move correctly would gain authorisation.

We could have a lot of fun with something like that!!

So any Tom Goodman plans or HTM plans for 2021?

Well, we’re coming towards the end of my PHD which is terrifying!

HTM wise it’s not clear whether by October will we be able to run in person events, but we might start planning to run one online again. By the time that we know that we can run events in person, will we have enough time to work that out. Its hard to judge. The main thing for us was protecting our attendees, our community, and the wider society. It can be really easy to think online is easier as you don’t have physical logistics, but then actually when we got into the meat of it there was a lot more work putting HTM on line that any of us had anticipated. However, now we have that knowledge, we not only have the infrastructure to do it again, but we also know what we can improve on.

Ages! We tend to start planning the next HTM straight after the one we’d just done, which is not exactly healthy, but it gives us the most time. We had everything sorted for last years to physically go ahead by March, and then we had to start all over again. So, we started online planning in March, it was bit slow as we had a lot of deep discussions about how we can preserve the feeling of HTM online. It took a lot of discussion, lots of brain storming, we had to work out how can we carry on the same way, how will out reach work? How will we get sponsors? We got a lot done last year considering – new website, the Discord server, a high number of attendees etc.

Whilst its not the same as running an in person event, and once we get the chance to go back in person, of course we will, given the curveball we were thrown in March it went really well.

There’s an element of HTM that we really love, which is encouraging people who don’t have experience to come along and get involved

What’s the best tip you have for a tech newbie, for someone who wants to get involved in tech?

That’s exactly the position that was in in 2015. I was in the very fortunate position that I had gone to University and there was a really great society president Jack Weardon who took me under his wing and took us to hackathons. The biggest thing for me was chatting to people, and the more people you get to know the more part of the community you feel.

The best advice would be to go to events like HTM, or check out SoC, Hackference (note to self, bully Mike Elsmore to run this again). Chat to people and ask for help or direction. You do not need to have prior experience, it’s not about building the most polished incredible project and winning, but you can equally win by coming and showing that you learnt lots of great stuff. The most important thing is learning, and now everything is online, sign up to events and there’s lots of free ones too! Have confidence in the fact that people do not expect and huge amount from you when you are new and if they do, they are dicks.

My advice to people who are already in the community and have experience – be patient, be the person that is encouraging those people to be in tech, take them under your wing, point them to events! They are at the start of their journey, help them along because you were once in their position. If we are not those people, then people won’t want to get involved, especially people from underrepresented groups and disadvantaged backgrounds who currently don’t have as bigger place in tech, and that is a real shame.

That’s great advice to finish on Tom, and some really key points there that people of all ability levels can take on board.

Once again congratulations on the success of HTM5 and thank you for all the work you put into the Birmingham Tech community.

We’re looking forward to hopefully seeing you this year for a coffee, IN PERSON!!

Fusion chats with HackTheMidland’s Tom Goodman

Happy Mind Monday to all! How are we all feeling this week?

This is our fourth Mind Monday blog, so we hope you are enjoying the content and getting some useful stuff from it.

We’ve got busy couple of weeks ahead of us with two workshops and Fusion meetup, so we are trying to make sure we are giving ourselves some down time amongst the madness.

Let us know if you’ve been reading the blogs, and please share any tips you have with us on Twitter @thefusion_hub using the hashtag #MindMonday

When everything feels a little more magnified than it usually does, it’s sometimes hard to mange negative feelings, and we become more reactive to things.

The 3 minute breathing space is easy to follow and an excellent tool to use when we need to take a break from a situation. It’s quick and effective, and will help disperse negative thought patterns and return you to a calm mindful state.

Here is a useful page to walk you through the 

Exercise is not for everyone, and sometimes it can feel like a struggle to fit exercise into your daily routine, however, we all know the positive impact that physical exercise can have on our mental health.

The Pacer app setup a group walking challenge to ‘walk Everest’ within a 14 day period. The challenge is an exciting way to walk the world’s greatest treks and be a part of team all working together to hit the end goal. We thought this was great idea, and something anyone can do! You can run, walk or hike 70km within the 14 day period, and this got us thinking, should we set up a Fusion walking challenge? Who’s in?

Who is guilty of not taking lunch breaks whilst they’re working from home?

It’s easy to see why people think they are being more productive ploughing through their sandwich and coffee whilst still sat at their desk, less time away from your computer right? Wrong! Taking just 20 minutes to step away from your desk at home can give your mind a little rest and refresh it needs to have a super productive afternoon.

So on your next working day, allocate just 20 minutes to shut your laptop, mute slack notifications, and grab a coffee and a sandwich without being surround by the noise of work. Listen to some relaxing music, read a book, chat to a friend, or go for a walk – you’ll feel better for it!

Inspired by real life events, ‘Brothers’ a short film, backed by CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) Charity, is about friendship and the fragility of mental health. The film, written and directed by Huse Monfaradi tells the story of Michael and his older who is struggling with mental health issues.

It highlights the importance of communication and reaching out to a friend or family member when we are struggling or find ourselves dealing with low mood or negative thoughts. People with more support during times like these are 30% less likely to have a lifetime suicide event (CALM website).

Matt Haig’s ‘The Midnight Library’ is a wonderful read. At a time when it’s easy to be all consumed in what’s happening around us, this book offers a wonderful escape and opens our eyes to the fact that we are surrounded by so much opportunity. The book follows Nora Steed who’s life has been full of misery and regret. She finds herself between life and death, and here begins a story of hope, opportunity, forgiveness, and gratitude.

Bryony Gordan’s ‘Mad World’. We love this podcast, Bryony has frank open conversations with a whole host of people, from well known celebrities, sports personalities, healthcare professionals and Prince Harry! We’ve gone right the way back to her chat with former NHS Mental Health Director, Mandy Stevens in 2017. Mandy talks about her own experience of mental health and how she was in fact suffering from depression. She talks about how she used the 

 which is a list of 21 questions that allow you to self-assess depression and what level you are at. We thought we’d drop it in this weeks Mind Monday for reference. Remember, being aware of your mental health and when it’s needs attention is the first step forward.

That’s it from us for this Monday! Have a great week all!

P.S If you know someone who would find any part of this blog helpful, please do share it with them. You never know how much a quick text or call could brighten up someone’s day; never be shy to check in with your friends and colleagues.

Fusion Mind Monday – November 16th

How is everyone doing? Hope you are all well and keeping safe.

You may have seen that this month’s Fusion meetup will go ahead on 26th November. We have some great speakers joining us, one of which is mentioned in our Mind Monday this week.

We’ve been focusing on a little bit of self-care over the weekend, which was much needed! Doing all of your favourite things can lift your mood during times like these. Hot chocolates and board games were the theme of the weekend, and no doubt that will continue well into this week!

At the last Fusion Meetup there were some great tips shared in the live chat to support better mental health. We spoke about great accounts to follow on social media, and one of our favourites is The Kaleidoscope Group (@Kaleidoscope_PG). They share some useful tips on little things we can do to help ourselves when we are struggling. They recently posted some great tips on how the deal with low mood and bad feelings. Check out the post 

Anyone else feel more sluggish working from home? We are trying to do our daily walks to get some fresh air and a little bit of exercise, but the great British weather doesn’t always make that possible. We found this great 

, which is made up of easy body stretches that will give you a nice little boost to start your day. We’ll be giving this a try this week!

Keeping in touch with colleagues in a social capacity can really have it’s benefits. We know it’s hard to pop out for coffee or head to the pub after work at the moment, however, its super important to keep conversation going with colleagues whilst we’re in lockdown. Some teams have arranged a weekly/fortnightly Zoom social on a Friday afternoon where everyone talks about their week over a cuppa or a cold beer. It’s a nice way to end the week, and you never know, someone may have had a tough week and this could be the little pick me up they need!

‘Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb’ (Netflix) – not particularly relevant for mental health, but this documentary offers a nice little escape from the world around us right now. You will follow Egyptian archaeologists on their journey of unearthing a tomb that has been untouched for over 4000 years. The story is fascinating, and you will be gripped as the story of the tomb unfolds. Enjoy!

‘The Mindset Triangle’ (by Henriette Lang and Stuart Baker) is a great book that offers a simple framework to follow to help support better mental health. This book is full of healthy easy recipes, easy workouts and tips for sleeping better. It also helps to set goals and includes positive quotes and interviews from people who have experience in mental illness.

Stuart Baker is a true inspiration, and regularly sets up fundraising initiatives to support mental health charities, with one of them being ‘Pedal the Premiership’ which you can read about 

. He will be joining us for this months Fusion Meetup!

Henriette Lang works for This can happen events – an online conference empowering companies with their mental health strategy. She also has her own podcast and is a soon to be Samaritan listener.

You can get a signed copy of The Mindset Triangle by dropping them a message on the 

There are some great relaxing playlists available on Spotify. We’ve been listening to the ‘Reading Soundtracks’ which are great to bring a little bit of calm and focus when working from home. As much as we all love a kick-ass sound track to get us going for work, we sometimes need a little bit of calm to help us zone out and improve our flow with things.

That’s it from us for this Monday, have a good week folks!

Last Event

December 2022

Friends don’t let friends use approval rules

You Shall Not Password: Modern Authentication for Web Apps

Autotools was actually (kinda) right

Rewriting our approach to rewriting software

Building 2FA

About Fusion Meetup

Fusion Blog

Fusion chats with HackTheMidland’s Tom Goodman

Fusion Mind Monday – November 16th

Fusion Mind Monday – November 9th

Past Events

December 2022

September 2022

June 2022

March 2022