Code First: Girls Northern Conference 2018
​#CFGNCONF18
2nd March 2018

​Who, When, Where, What??

Who: This event is open to all to apply. The sessions are targeted at those who identify as women/non-binary, aged 18+ interested in technology and entrepreneurship
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When: Friday 2nd March 2018
Time: 10.00-17.30
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Where: PwC Office, Manchester

What: We're planning a day packed full of insightful panel discussions, illuminating tech talks as well as networking and a chance to hear from tech companies about what they are looking for in candidates. ​

​Whether you are looking to become a developer, want to work in start ups, a big tech company or just want to see whether it could be for you, the conference will give you an insight into the amazing developments happening in technology, as well as inform you on how you can break your way in. 

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Aims of the conference

​1) Inspire and empower you to start a career in technology and entrepreneurship
2) Demystify the tech industry and give you an understanding of what it takes to succeed

What is the conference like?

This is the second time we're running a CF:G Northern Conference. If you'd like to see how exciting last year's conference was, check out #CFGNConf17 and read more about this on our webpage here. Last year, around 30 women from the CF:G community came together at PwC in Edinburgh to hear from some incredible speakers in the industry. You can also see some pics and tweets below.

Want to go but are worried about travel costs? 

We want as many women from our community across the UK to be able to join, so CF:G will be offering a limited number of travel bursaries of £40 for those whose travel costs on public transport will exceed £35. Please note we cannot guarantee that everyone who applies will get one.

​More information about this will be made clear to those who have been offered a place at the conference

2018 NORTHERN Conference Agenda - CLICK HERE
​#CFGNConf18

​10.00 - 10.30 / Arrival and coffee

10.30 - 10.45 / Welcome talk
Introduction by Siobhan Baker from Code First: Girls and Cathy Wilks from ​PwC 

10.45- 11.45 / Tech Industry Opening Keynote Panel: Machine Learning
Moderator: Tania Allard, University of Sheffield @ixek //  Jana Novohradska, Bank of America Merrill Lynch @JanaNovohradska//  Riza Batista-Navarro, University of Manchester @rtbbatista // Liz Hardwick, DigiEnable @Tech_Geek_Girl // Grace O'Halloran, PwC @graceaohalloran //

11.45 - 12.00 // Break

12.00 - 12.45 / Technical Talk - Introduction to JavaScript
Harriet Ryder, Northcoders @northcoders

12.45 - 13.15 / Company Speed Pitch
Hear from an exciting array companies sharing information and opportunities from their companies.
Speakers include: 
Elena Prilutskaya, Godel Tech @GodelTech ‏// Katherine Bond, PwC @Kat_Bond_PwC ‏ //
Gaia Caruso, Sparta Global @SpartaGlobal ‏// Laura Jacobs, Degree53 @Degree53 ‏// Luciano Visentin, Sainsbury's @LucianoVisentin //

13.15 - 14.15 // Lunch

14.15 - 15.15 / Workshop: 
Learn about the creation of the PayPal donation journey for the BBC Children in Need campaign.
Helen Stevenson, Reason Digital @ReasonDigital
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15.15 - 16.15 / Personal Development Panel
Moderator: Kirsty Styles, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism @kirstystyles1 // Pauline Narvas, University of Sheffield @paulienuh // Dijonn Taylor, SavvyGuest @SavvyGuest //
Sophie Chadwick, STEM Women @STEMWomenUK // Laura Jacobs, Degree53 @Degree53 ‏//

16.15 - 16.30 / CF:G Wrap Up
Final remarks from Siobhan Baker - Code First: Girls 
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16.30 - 17.30 // Networking

17.30 / End

Our Speakers

Dijonn Taylor founded Savvy Guest in 2012 after noticing the lack of good advice for individuals seeking relevant career tips, industry insights and realistic expectations of job roles. Instinctively she knew her business model had to be accessible to all demographics locally with the potential for growth across UK. She was convinced the answer lay in creating a digital platform with capabilities of bringing together; companies and individuals for pre- career chats whilst incorporating Corporate Social Responsibility and capturing valuable data. With little knowledge of the technology sector she spent the next year planning the mechanics of how the digital platform would operate. Launching in July 2013, companies from different industries have joined Savvy Guest offering Pre-career meet ups with individuals, allowing them to have a more informed choice of whether they are suited to a career or job role. Savvy Guest currently boasts a range of participating companies which include: Virgin Money, Laing O’Rourke, Brother UK, MACC, Wythenshawe Housing, Creative Adventures, The Hair Sanctuary, EON Reality and many more. In 2013, Dijonn welcomed business partner Val Dickinson who joined the company. The business has gone on to receive recognition and have won awards in; Innovation, Digital, Creative and Technology categories.

Having worked at Godel for nearly a decade, Elena Prilutskaya is a highly experienced technical expert across many areas of software development. After graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in IT from the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics, she became a quality assurance engineer and began her career at Godel. Elena moved from Belarus to Manchester and entered the role of Technical Presales Consultant, facilitating high-level conversations with clients. Now, Elena is using her talents in tech as Business Analyst for a Godel client, interpreting requirements for its complex software development projects.

I have a background in Research and Employment Law from The London School of Economics, where I supported academic research on Equality and Diversity and trained across HR frameworks with a focus on the tech sector. Having developed an interest in tech and a desire to work in the ever-transforming digital sphere, I decided to join Sparta Global in 2017 as part of their Talent Acquisition function. I currently lead the University Partnerships strategy at Sparta Global as well as being activity involved in every stage of our graduate recruitment process. Managing relationships with our STEM & Non-STEM programme managers, partners and business advisors, my role is focused around driving practices and actions that bridge the digital skill set gap and inspire inclusion and diversity in our graduate tech workforce. I also support our internal women in tech agenda by facilitating initiatives and corporate relationships that help increase gender diversity in industry and foster equal opportunities.

I studied for my MMath at Sheffield University and graduated in summer 2017. Throughout my time at university I learnt how code, most of which was self-taught. I enjoyed doing a lot of mathematical modelling, especially in Python. Between my third and fourth year I did an internship in Data and Analytics at PwC and went back there as a graduate in September 2017. During my time there I have developed a huge interest in machine learning and AI, and other emerging technologies such as blockchain. An exciting project I am currently working on is building a machine learning chatbot.

After a background in humanities and several years working in schools and libraries, I decided to make my hobby of coding a career. I attended the Northcoders coding bootcamp in early 2016 and stayed on to work there afterwards. I have been lucky to meet so many talented and passionate people at the beginning of their careers, and have particularly loved introducing people to code for the first time at taster sessions and introductory workshops. I am now excited to start working as a full-stack software engineer at the form analytics startup, Formisimo.

Originally from Belfast, Helen made Manchester her home following university. She has a background in professional services, having worked at PwC as a management consultant. Helen has recently made the move into the Tech for Good sector and is working at award winning agency Reason Digital. She has worked on digital transformations with Local Authorities, Housing Associations and most recently an International Development Charity. She is passionate about gender equality and digital inclusion.

In banking in London, I started as an admin temp on fixed income trading floor at Merrill Lynch back in 2005. I moved to research admin, from where I resigned to complete my second MSc Financial Computing at UCL. During my studies, I gave birth to my son in July 2008, and 12 months afterwards to my daughter in July 2009. I resumed my career at Barclays in December 2009 working in equities trading systems production support role. I moved to Citi to focus on derivatives pricing and risk systems, and from there on, after a year career break in Aug 2013/Aug 2014, I moved to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Currently, I lead GMOT Robotics Process Automation project globally, focusing on leveraging new emerging technologies to achieve operational efficiency and reduction of operational risk via automation. The role is dynamic and collaborative. Delivering bots across the whole range of businesses within global markets and banking. I also lead reference data client migration engagement liaison which is an extension of my previous role, in which I lead a reference data support team, delivering trading reference data to our equities high frequency and algorithmic trading platform.

Katherine Bond is the Student Recruitment Manager at PwC, a global professional services firm and the Number One graduate employer in the UK. Katherine is heavily involved in the attraction, selection and development of students and graduates for a wide range of roles, particularly those in the technology division of the business, such as Cyber Security, Data & Analytics and Technology Consulting.

Until 2016, Kirsty worked as a technology journalist, editor, podcaster and campaigner in East London. Having specialised in the political, social and economic issues related to technology, she recently headed back home to head up the talent and skills programme for DCMS- backed Tech North. It's her job to help us establish what our 'digital skills crisis' looks like in the North and work with others to do something about it, and she's just been recognised in the Northern Power Women Future List for 2017. So far, her work has included taking northern cities to a London-based jobs fair to attract 'boomerangs' back, creating the Northern Voices speaker training programme to make women in the northern tech industry more visible, and completing the Upskill accelerator programme to help digital skills providers train more people, more quickly. Before Tech North, she was B2B tech editor at the New Statesman, and was previously a reporter at The Next Web and editor at Tech City News. She's also the creator and was the founding presenter of the New Economics Foundation's Weekly Economics Podcast. The podcast won third place for ‘Best Current Affairs’ show at the British Podcast Awards, alongside The Economist and the BBC.

Although being relatively new to the coding world, Laura is no stranger to the tech industry. With over 9 years' experience in computer Visual Effects, working on projects like Harry Potter, Everest, Avatar and Terminator for various international studios, she made the change to coding last year and now has 6 months' experience under her belt as a junior front-end developer at Degree 53. Never one to let being the only 'techie' girl stop her in what is usually regarded as a boys world, Laura has also gone on to climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for charity, as well as working with search and rescue teams in the jungles of Central America where she completed survival training. (again, being the only woman on her team).

Liz Hardwick is Co-Founder of award-winning Digital Training and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) company, DigiEnable. She designs and delivers tech-based and online marketing workshops, and is a professional speaker at conferences and events across the UK and beyond, recently being listed in the Techworld's 111 UK Tech Women Speakers and Business Cloud's 101 Female Founders in Tech. Liz’s career started in broadcasting working for some of the big names as well as spending a number of years creating media for charities, before starting her own business. She is also a published author on Digital Storytelling, sits on a number of non-profit boards, chairs a National Womens Equality Committee and is listed on the UK's Digital Leaders 100. She's a self-confessed productivity and SEO geek, loves tweeting as @Tech_Geek_Girl and supporting other women in(to) Tech.

Riza Batista-Navarro is a Lecturer in the School of Computer Science of the University of Manchester. She obtained her PhD degree in Computer Science with specialisation in Text Mining in 2014. Her research focus is on extracting information from text using natural language processing (NLP). Since 2010, she has gained experience in interdisciplinary work developing machine learning-based information extraction methods and applying them to biomedical use cases, e.g., cancer biology. Her work figured prominently in the BioCreative community-wide evaluation challenges in 2013 and 2015, having obtained top-ranked results. More recently, Riza is developing novel text mining methods with applications to socio-economic contexts. In 2017, she completed the UK Digital Economy Crucible leadership programme developed by the CHERISH-Digital Economy Centre at Swansea University. She is currently the Principal Investigator of a research project on NLP-based social media analytics funded by the University of Manchester Research Institute (UMRI). As part of this effort, she is collaborating with research partners from various institutes in the University (i.e., School of Social Sciences, Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research, Alliance Manchester Business School, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Global Development Institute) in defining and implementing various use cases for social media analytics.

Pauline is a final year Biomedical Sciences student at the University of Sheffield but wears a lot of other hats. She is a self-taught developer, teaching herself how to code when she was 8 years old. Now shares her knowledge and teaches other ladies how to build websites with Code First: Girls and is a part-time remote developer at Kroto Research Institute (TUoS) Building communities is something that Pauline is passionate about and in addition to growing the #shefcodefirst community in Sheffield, she also helps organise events such as women in tech events, inspireWIT and hackathons like the interdisciplinary hackathon, HackMed with the aim of bringing people together. She has blogged about everything since 2008 and loves everything health, well-being and self-development related.

Siobhan is Community Programmes Manager at Code First: Girls, where she oversees the delivery of their community activities, including courses and events which take place throughout the UK and Republic of Ireland. Siobhan joins from early years education, having worked as a Data Officer across four government-led Children’s Centres, which were located in areas of high social need. Siobhan is passionate about supporting underrepresented communities in achieving their potential and in providing accessible learning opportunities.

STEM Women introduce inspirational employers to our female STEM communities. Our communities exist at student, graduate, professional and employer (hiring) levels and content is tailored to each level. As a community member you can benefit from career support, networking opportunities, event invites, job alerts, monthly newsletters and market updates. Find out more at https://www.stemwomen.co.uk/

Tania works as a Research Software Engineer at the University of Sheffield. She is involved in a number of projects spanning in machine learning, linguistics, and computational engineering, among others. She also consults research groups and SMEs on how to make the most of their data and to build robust data analysis pipelines. Her main focus is complex analysis workflows, scalable data science, and reproducibility and replicability in scientific computation. She is passionate about mentoring, open source, and its community and is involved in a number of initiatives aimed to build more diverse and inclusive communities.

Having worked at Sainsbury’s for over two decades in various roles and locations across the country, Luciano now leads a small team of Software Engineers in the Manchester Store Support Centre. The team, young and growing is founded on core engineering principles building applications using open source technologies.

You can see tweets from 2018's Northern Conference below!

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How we do this?

Code First: Girls' Northern Conference is brought to you with the support of our AMAZING sponsor. Without their support, we wouldn't be able to offer all of this for all these amazing young women for free!

This year's sponsor...

Headline ​Sponsor

www.pwc.co.uk/careers
@PwC_UK_Careers