New voices

Gail Ollis

⏱ 90 minute session

beginner

intermediate

advanced

16:00-17:30, Wednesday, 2nd April 2025

A short track of new speakers at the start of their careers.

Hear fresh perspectives from people newly embarking on their professional programming careers. Each has 15 minutes to share a relevant and interesting topic.

Talks will be announced before the conference. They are selected from submissions by placement and final year students, and junior developers engaged in their employer's graduate scheme. While none of the speakers has presented at a conference before, all have received skilled support with preparing their talk.

🏷 new speakers

Gail Ollis

After two decades as a software developer, Gail eventually became so obsessed with human aspects of the job that she began talking about them at tech conferences. She left the day job for a psychology degree, followed by PhD research in the psychology of software development.

Sharing knowledge became the new day job in an accidental second career as an academic. Gail has taught programming and cyberpsychology, and researched cyber security for software developers. Until retiring from academia last year she was teaching problem solving and software engineering to final year students at the University of Portsmouth. A rocking chair by the fire is still some way off; Gail is now finding ways to help young developers on a voluntary basis.