Part of the culture we have built at JUXT is a tradition of technical collaboration and discussion, from Slack channels and our fortnightly Safari meetinds, to internal and external conferences that we organise.
We started planning an internal event of this May (2024), but then decided to expand it to be a bigger conference and invite our community. We’ve called this conference XT24 (previous quadrennial events being XT20 and XT16).
Much of the reason we wanted to hold it in our futuristic home city of Milton Keynes is the new Unity Place venue that has just been built right next to Milton Keynes Central station, which itself is just a 33 minutes train journey from London Euston.
For this conference we want to focus on the fintech sector. It’s a challenging domain: scale meets money. With money, you’ve got to get your sums right (hence the regulation). These challenges are ever present, and certinaly not a solved problem. But as new approaches are found in this industry, they often cross to other industries that have similar needs for both scale and precision.
Speakers
Regular readers of our JUXT blog will recall that last January we looked at the Horizon scandal (UK Post Office). Neale Swinnerton draw our attention to an article “Unregulated AI could cause the next Horizon scandal”, written by one of our former clients, Francine Bennett. I loved the article and was delighted when Fran, who now works for the Ada Lovelace Institute, accepted our invitation to speak.
Another early adopter of Clojure was Allen Rohner, who cofounded CircleCI, a popular continuous integration service which we use at JUXT. Allen later went on to create Griffin Bank with David Jarvis, where he works as the CTO. Griffin is an API-first bank, offering its services to partners via an API. As such, it needs to make sure its services are reliable and trustworthy. Recently, Allen’s been working on a novel approach to testing services, that he’s called Contract-Based Testing, which he’ll explain in his talk.
We met Kim Johannessen quite recently and he gave us a fantastic overview of how to build an IBOR (an Investment Book of Record), a key system of many buy-side firms. Kim has extensive knowledge of this sector and we’re excited to hear what he has to say.
Wrapping up the morning session will be Sebastian Ferraccù and Manpreet Babbra, representing Artis Works, talking about their technology in the commodities market. We’ve been working with Artis Works for a number of years and it’s very satisfying seeing what an impressive product they have today.
After lunch, Jeremy Taylor and I will be giving a quick update on JUXT’s own database technology, XTDB, and the use-cases that are possible now we’ve delivered the full ‘cross time’ experience we’ve been promising for years.
Another long-time JUXT staffer, Oliver Hine, will follow us with some insights distilled from his years working with JSON and JSON Schema in banks.
We’ll then have a break, and a few more sessions including an interview with Vlad Yatsenko (founder of Revolut), plus a panel with experts including Francine Bennett, Jay Modha and Mark Burgess.
Our final speaker, Zohar Melamed will wrap up the conference with a talk about how he and his team built a successful risk system.
Networking
At the conference there’ll be plenty of opportunity to join in the informal group conversations, make new friends and contacts, and have those impromptu conversations that make face-to-face conferences so interesting, enjoyable and valuable. We’ll have regular breaks, lunch and we’re hiring out the Sky Bar at the top of the venue from 4pm for drinks.
If you haven’t already received an invite, why not visit https://juxt.pro/xt24 and ask for one. And if you come, please make sure you stop me to say hello and chat.
