Software Engineering Events in Sheffield

NEW TIME AND PLACE

Join us for a relaxed monthly creative coding meetup

This is a meetup for people interested in creative coding and adjacent things: generative art, live coding, robotics/hardware, simulations, AI, 3D, interactive tools, weird experiments, and more.

You do not need to present anything to come along. You can just watch, chat, meet people, and see what others are up to. Beginners, hobbyists, professionals, and curious newcomers are all welcome.

If you do want to share something, bring it along: polished projects, rough experiments, works in progress, even half-formed ideas. We have access to a TV if you want to share your laptop screen (via HDMI or USB-C). We will be in the upstairs room of the Fat Cat and have the room to ourselves. Feel free to reach out with any questions.

Rough format:

• arrive, chat, and settle in
• 3-5 show-and-tell demos/informal presentations
• hang around and chat afterwards

Presentations will be limited to a max of 20 minutes if there is a lot of demand to present. Shorter presentations are more than welcome.

Past sessions have included demos of:

• a live-coded jungle set in TidalCycles
• breathing life into an ancient plotter
• generating 3D terrain of the UK from open data
• exploring the maths of infectious diseases through a card game
• turning photographs into a 3D Gaussian splat scene
• projection-mapping experiments
• deterministic game character generation
• cellular automata experiments!
• an introduction to VJing with TouchDesigner
• ... and more!

Latecomers are welcome; it’s fine to drop in or leave early.

Looking forward to seeing you!

We're back at SHU in Room 12.4.12 at the Charles Street Building, Sheffield Hallam University, 120 Charles St, Sheffield, S1 2NE

Look for the FES signs up into the lift and the 4th floor, and please sign-in when you arrive.

This month: Thomas Baker & David Warrington

Our event is free and inclusive; we welcome people of all backgrounds and experience levels to join. We will be checking in people at the door so be sure to sign up online.

Before you attend, please read our code of conduct: http://bit.ly/fes-coc

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This month we'll be welcoming:

Tom Baker - Intro to SassyCSS - Everyone’s Favourite Preprocessor

I’ll explain what SassyCSS is, the difference between Sass and SCSS (even though the names are often used interchangeably), the key features and why you should drop vanilla CSS!

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David Warrington from Shopify - TBD

TBD… but likely something Shopify / ecommerce-orientated!

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Post-meetup social
After the talks we'll head to socialise at the nearby Triple Point Brewery + Bar. They serve a range of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, plus food from Twisted Burger Co. See https://triplepointbrewing.co.uk/ for more details. One of our volunteers will show you the way.

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Running order
6:15pm - Doors open (please tick yourself off on our sign-in sheet as you enter the room)
6:30pm - Welcome
6:40pm - Talks begin
7:30pm – Open mic
7:35pm – Social

This event will be a two talks, Encryption in a Post Quantum World with Mark Thompson, and .NET + Alpine Ajax with Andrew Gunn

⚠️ This will be an in-person event, the venue is TBA.

Agenda:

• 🍕 Pizza/Drinks (18:15 - 18:30)
• 🗣 Introduction (18:30)
• 👉 Encryption in a Post Quantum World
• 👉 npm uninstall everything: Alpine AJAX and .NET
• 🍻 Social @ Pub (after the talk)

👉 Encryption in a Post Quantum World
Quantum computing is here, it is time to protect our code. Todays standards have served the world for decades. Not any more. It’s time to discuss Post Quantum Encryption and how we as developers can use it, without panic, hype, or heavy maths.

This talk is a friendly, practical introduction to quantum-proof encryption, aimed at C# and .NET developers. We’ll focus on how encryption is used in real applications, not the maths behind it, and everything is explained in terms of practical use.

We’ll start by looking at why encryption needs to evolve, including how Shor’s Algorithm fundamentally breaks widely used asymmetric encryption standards like RSA and ECC, rendering them unsafe in a quantum world. We’ll then revisit symmetric and asymmetric encryption, clarifying what remains safe and what needs to change.

From there, we’ll get hands-on and build simple, real C# examples to encrypt data, sign it, and verify it code you can take away and use straight away.

This is a relaxed, code-first session designed to make modern encryption feel approachable, useful, and achievable. You don’t need to be a mathematician or a Crypto expert. There will be no slides of equations.

👉 npm uninstall everything: Alpine AJAX and .NET
We've spent years building SPAs that serialize data to JSON, ship it to a framework, and reconstruct the same HTML the server could have just sent in the first place. It's time to ask: what if we stopped doing that?

Alpine AJAX lets you make requests from the browser, receive plain HTML from your server, and swap it straight into the page. No virtual DOM. No state management library. No existential crisis in node_modules. It doesn't care what your backend is, it just wants HTML. That makes it a perfect fit for Razor Pages, which already do exactly that, with a few Alpine.js attributes sprinkled on top to handle the interactivity.

I'll walk through how it works, then take a standard Razor Pages app and convert it to use Alpine AJAX, so you can see how little it takes to get that SPA feel without actually building one.