Katie Fenn and Amy Benson, organisers of Front End North, discuss their involvement in the Sheffield tech community and the upcoming Front End North conference. Scheduled for 10th July 2025 at Sheffield Hallam University, the event will feature eight talks covering a range of topics including design, software development, and accessibility.
They emphasise the importance of an accessible, low-cost event to include a diverse range of attendees and speakers. The selection process for talks involved an anonymised system to ensure fairness. They also highlight their motivations for organising the event and why they want to put Sheffield on the map for this type of event.
Amy is part-time Senior Software Engineer at Hive IT, and full-time Social Research student.
Katie is Senior Developer at the Financial Times. She’s a member of The Green Party, LGBTIQA+ Greens, and Greens for HS2. She loves cycling, fiddling with bikes, and also has a collection of synthesisers! She gave a talk at State of the Browser in 2024 about making the music of Daft Punk using a browser and a MIDI controller!
Subscribe to the podcast
If you’d like to have new episodes of the show appear right in your podcast player, you can subscribe via our page on Apple Podcasts and follow the show on Spotify, or search for us in your podcast app of choice!
Links
Front End Sheffield Meetup website
Front End Sheffield on LinkedIn
Front End Sheffield on Bluesky
References
Other Front End North Conference organisers
Ian Parr
Lee Moody
Tom Heaton
Did we miss something you’re looking for? Just get in touch and let us know.
Contact Front End North
info@frontendnorth.com
Join the conversation
We’re really keen to get your feedback on the podcast. You can share your thoughts with us on the channel in the Sheffield Digital Slack community or email info@sheffield.digital.
Thank you for the music
Thanks to Alex Mclean – aka Yaxu – for the show’s intro music, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.