whoami - SoCraTesUK/socrates-uk GitHub Wiki
Tell us who you are :)
Amélie Cornélis
- Tech person living in Scotland 🏴
- Going round the various crafters unconfs (regular at SocratesUK and CodeFreeze, and making my way around the others - next on my list: still Crete 🤞🏻)
- Currently working adjacent to tech (in a care home)
- Mostly interested in backend/integration (especially how things fail). And all the ops!
- Keen to find those incremental steps to improve all the time (code, test approaches, deployment, processes, collaboration, ...)
- Favourite new food recently: honeyberries
Ted M. Young
- Also known as "JitterTed" on some of the social media (medii? medias? socials-media?)
- Technical coach/trainer, live coder, speaker, and board game creator living in San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA
- Current favorite solution for all problems: Event Sourcing
- Over 40 years doing coding and software development, 31 years of doing Java, 25+ years doing XP practices, and Domain-Driven Design for 20+ years
- Created JitterTed's TDD Game that I will have with me to play and explore TDD tactics and team collaboration
- Currently working on a "Refactoring" expansion and a separate new game on Event Sourcing
- Spent 3+ weeks at various conferences, meetups, open spaces, and user groups in Europe so far in 2026, and will be spending many more!
- So much so that I had to create a custom app named JitterTravel to track my travel logistics.
- p.s. I am an AI-Resister (mainly LLMs and Diffusion-models). I recognize its significance, and use it on occasion to understand its capabilities and how others might use it, but I do not promote it (this is obviously my personal stance, I have no judgment for others using it!).
Oscar Duignan
- Developer living in Bristol
- Work in the public sector
- Interested in platform engineering, collaborative modelling, DDD, event sourcing, design systems, and languages like Scala and Elixir
Dmitry Kandalov
- Living in East London hipsterlands.
- I have been writing software since DOS times using various programming languages and technologies. I spent the last 20 years or so in Java lands, most “recently” working with server-side Kotlin/Dart/C++ using XP practices.
Michel Grootjans
- Living in Belgium, just north of Brussels.
- I have been writing software since the eighties. I focus on helping people with XP practices and focusing on flow.
Jon Jagger
- Live in Somerset, England
- Love being a grandad
- Love fishing
- Working for a startup Kosli, which is trying to automate compliance, which is actually a lot more fun and interesting than it sounds!
Clare Sudbery (🦣 https://mastodon.social/@claresudbery)
- I'm a Principal Developer at Autotrader in Manchester
- I'm partially responsible for helping build the back end of the website
- ...and partially responsible for teaching / training our apprentices and T-level students
- I'm a member of the Samman technical coaching society
- SoCraTes UK is my favourite event (this is my fourth time here)
- This year, as I'm no longer a freelance public speaker, I've said no to most events. But this one I couldn't miss!
- I've been mostly responsible for organising this year's training day
- ...where I will also be delivering a short session on AI and TDD
- I like to sing / play jazz and blues and rock and pop
- I'll hopefully be joining some kind of jam session at some point
- ...although sadly this year I was unable to bring my portable piano
- I was briefly featured on ep 5 of season 2 of The Piano in 2024!
- I was diagnosed both autistic and ADHD in 2024
- ...which makes me what people are now calling "AuDHD"
- I was once briefly a high school maths teacher, but I didn't last long
- I've had millions (approx) of different jobs, but software engineering has cropped up more frequently than anything else
- I'm a word geek
- I'm a published novelist, but I also love Scrabble, Wordle, cryptic crosswords etc
- In January this year I started writing my fourth novel. Typically it takes me four years to write one, so don't hold your breath
- I once spent weeks trying to design the perfect Scrabble game, and designed a game where the combined score of both players was 3674
James Bell
- Currently an Engineering Manager at FreeAgent in sunny 🏴
- 12 years of time there as a developer and manager so my previous keen interested in maintainable, mendable software has been strongly honed 😅
- plenty of teaching and training of new folks (a great joy)
- An organiser of both a conference (Haggis Ruby) and a user group (the Scottish Ruby User Group).
- My first SoCraTes event! Woohoo!
- Scotland is full of hills, and I love walking in them
- Also: table top role playing games and board games. I might bring some? I might bring some.
Giorgio Sironi
- From Italy, now Cambridge (UK)
- XP heritage from Milan
- Web development and dynamic languages
- Now working at Kraken, extracted from Octopus Energy
Doga Sezgin
- Developer from Istanbul for 8 years.
- Master's in AI in Canterbury last year.
- Currently in London, working remotely.
- Developed a HFT trading system in C++.
- I like reading, board games, tennis.