Organised in partnership by Scott Logic and FINOS, the Edinburgh Open Source Fintech Meetup aims to expand contributions to and consumption of open source technologies, while growing a healthy engineering community in the financial services industry.
We held our first event on 4 December, with three great speakers:
- Colin Eberhardt, Technology Director, Scott Logic
- Calum Miller, Director/Owner, Millersoft Ltd
- Reg Wilkinson, Software Engineering Lead – Debit Card Systems, Lloyds Banking Group
Couldn’t make it to the meetup? No problem at all – we filmed the talks and you can watch them here!
Colin Eberhardt // ‘Why I 🖤Open Source’
At work, Colin spends a lot of time talking about the commercial benefits of open source software, and more broadly about the business benefit of engaging with the open source community. In this talk, he shared a more personal viewpoint and the seven reasons why he spends so much of his time working on open source.
He covers a rich range of memories along the way, including: what his BBC Micro and Commodore Amiga computers taught him; his youthful correspondence with Beebug magazine; his high scores on Hedgehog and Missile Command; and the global reach of IJDb (the Internet Juggling Database) which, thanks to voluntary community translations of the site, could be enjoyed as the Internet Jonglier Datenbank in Germany, and across the world in ten other languages.
Colin explains that the thread that ran through all of these early experiences of programming was the sharing of creations, underpinned by collaboration and the sharing of knowledge – all of which remain incredibly important to him and are at the heart of open source community.
Calum Miller // Lightning Talk
Calum explained how, for him, open source is a key which unlocks opportunities for market access, co-operation and learning from peers, facilitates long conversations, and enables creative integration. To illustrate this, Calum gave a demo of a technology stack including Linux, Pentaho Kettle, Apache Druid, Apache Kafka and Allegro Turnilo – showing how Millersoft has used these open source tools to create an end-to-end system for the real-time analysis of payments.
We’re grateful to Calum for getting in touch with us and offering to give this lightning talk at our first event. If you would like to give a lightning talk at a future event, please contact organisers Claire Cocks and James McLeod via Meetup.com.
Reg Wilkinson // ‘Pipeline acceleration using Open Source at Lloyds’
Reg gave the final talk of the evening, providing fantastic insight into the transformation journey that Lloyds has been on, enabling the group to seize the opportunities created by changing customer behaviour and expectations.
Reg described the changes required in organisational culture and team shapes, moving from a project-led approach to a product-led approach, and evolving from project teams to component teams to feature teams. Lloyds has managed an Agile and DevOps transformation, powered by open source technologies, all in the context of a highly regulated environment and a legacy estate that still uses mainframes.
To demonstrate the business agility that this has cultivated within Lloyds, Reg and his team concluded the talk with a coding challenge to show how, using Lloyds’ React-based component library, Constellation, and a REST API exposed from the mainframe, rapid changes can be made and deployed to live.
Huge thanks to all of our speakers! It was great to hear stories and see evidence of the collaboration and innovation that open source is fostering in the financial services community.
Our next events
The next event of the Edinburgh Open Source Fintech Meetup will be on Wednesday 18 March 2020, when we’ll welcome three more amazing speakers:
- Ian Skelly, Head of Engineering, Tesco Bank
- Jonathan Haggarty, Head of Open Banking Technology, RBS
- Louise Smith, Fintech Envoy, HM Treasury
You can join the group and book your place here.
And if you’re London-based, we are running the inaugural event of the London Open Source Fintech Meetup on Thursday 30 January 2020. Join the group and book your place here.
