April Event at Duke & Grace

Dear members,
For our April event we have something special in store for you. We're teaming up with women.code(be) to bring you a joint-event so our user groups can get to know each other a little better. We'll be visiting the offices of Duke & Grace for the occasion. Duke & Grace will kindly provide food for the occasion but we ask you to provide any allergy info when signing up for the event.
Our first two speaker we have for you is Dennie Declercq with his talk "The Power of Inclusion" and Sanne Vermeiren with her talk "Ownership of the benefits of development".
This event has a hard limit of 35 attendees. Please only sign up for one of the events and not both so enough people have a chance to attend. RSVP'ing yes for this event = attending so please do show up if you do so and don't change your RSVP last minute. Thanks!
We hope to see you soon,
Dries & Rias
PS: Please remember to change your RSVP if you cannot attend.
EVENTY
We're also happy to announce Eventy, a new platform for managing your events. Eventy is currently under construction but as soon as it's ready we'll be moving with the user group to our new home. Visit https://eventy.io to subscribe to the newsletter and follow the twitter account at https://twitter.com/eventyio to be the first to know when it launches.
SCHEDULE
18:00 Doors Open
20:00 Start Talks

TALKS
The Power of Inclusion by Dennie Declercq
A session about accessible software for people with a disability. As developer you can develop apps, to help people with a disability. It’s a sector that is not often covered by developers. But with a little set of developer skills you can make lives better. First of all we start with the description of the field of people with a disability, which disabilities are there? What are the problems? After this I describe how people with disabilities are threaten in the past and today. Then I describe how software can help inclusion. I talk you about inclusive design and develop patterns. I end with slides how people in normal work situations can benefit of the power of persons with different kind of disabilities.
Speaker: Dennie is Microsoft MVP Developer Technologies and has experience in accessibility in with Microsoft technologies. In daily life Dennie is president and developer at DDSoft, a nonprofit in function of People With Disabilities. Dennie invented technical solutions and systems to help people with disabilities to participate in their daily life. Thanks to his autism he’s the right man at the right spot to contribute as a volunteer in function of people with disabilities.
Length: 45min
Ownership of the benefits of development by Sanne Vermeiren
The gap between business and developers is not new, it's been there as long as IT exists. Yet, we seem to have a hard time closing this gap. Customers often know what they want and, as developers, we tend to dive right into the solution immediately. We are problem solvers and we have the latest, coolest technologies to build a solution for everything. Because of all this enthusiasm, we sometimes forget to stop and think about the problem. Why does the customer asks for a certain project, feature ,…? Do we really need to build a whole new application to solve their problem?
Customers should be the "owner of the benefit", which requires them to be heavily involved. But how do we make sure that they are part of the development team? And how can we make sure that we both work towards a common goal?
In this talk, I will share my lessons learned about bridging the gap, learning how to listen and to speak a common language.
Speaker: I'm Sanne Vermeiren, scrum master for the Flemish child allowance project "Groeipakket". I've discovered my passion for technology right after I had received my applied economics degree. After three months of intensive coding training, I started working on my current project. In 2019, I became Young ICT Lady which gives me the opportunity to share my passion for technology with young girls and kick stereotypes ass. Currently I'm trying to learn more about Docker, microservices and domain driven design. My ultimate goal is to be able to explain these technologies and concepts in a way that a non-technical customer can understand what the developers are talking about.
Length: 15min