Volunteer-led organisation codebar runs regular, free coding workshops that aim to diversify the tech industry. Local developers volunteer as coaches, and women, minority ethnic groups and members of the LGBT+ community come along to learn whatever takes their tech fancy. Workshops run monthly in Oxford, and on 26th September, Oxford Computer Consultants hosted one at our new St Aldates offices. Attendees mingled over food, then the event kicked off with a welcome presentation, followed by a lightning talk from Reynold,[...]

On Friday the 24th, we sponsored the #upfront workshop in Oxford, which was widely attended by OCC staff. This was a public, evening workshop for helping people build up their confidence and work on their public speaking skills, through a variety of fun and engaging exercises. #upfront run a series of confidence workshops, with the aim of encouraging and elevating new voices on and off public stages. #upfront’s vision is to make the stages around the world more diverse and[...]

We exhibited at the Low Carbon Network Innovation conference (LCNI) again this year. LCNI brings together distribution network operators, National Grid and energy industry suppliers to network and present the innovative ways they are responding to current challenges in the energy industry. As the industry reduces its reliance on carbon-based energy sources – which are concentrated, predictable and controllable – in favour of more distributed and variable green alternatives, the challenge is to maintain electricity and gas supplies and respond[...]

Last Wednesday, Reynold, our projects director, and I gave a talk at ACCU Oxford. We shared practical UX techniques to embed UX in development cycles and talked about the importance of a good user experience in tech. Abstract Good user experience is essential to the success of your product, it creates a competitive advantage and saves you money by reducing wasted development time. But how do you know that what you develop are the features that users will care about?[...]

Last month OCC took part in LocalGovCamp 2015 and the Local Democracy Maker Day fringe event in Leeds. LocalGovCamp is an annual “unconference” where the attendees set the agenda by pitching sessions, building a schedule, and taking part in the sessions that appeal the most to them. To people used to formal conferences, it might sound a little chaotic, but it works incredibly well and results in a highly topical and engaging event. Sessions ranged in topic from Open Data,[...]

Tom Litt & I will be attending The Lead Developer conference in September – it’s a new conference with a great line up of speakers covering new and disruptive technologies (of course), tools, methodologies, and, because it is aimed at Leads, also managing teams, motivation and leadership. To warm up I’ve written an article for the conference blog: How to write a 5 year plan (and why it doesn’t matter if no one follows it).

National Grid will be showcasing three of their OCC-partnered projects at the Low Carbon Networks & Innovation Conference (LCNI) in Aberdeen, 20-22 October 2014. The conference is a platform for gas and electricity network operators to showcase projects sponsored under their NIA and NIC innovation schemes. The OCC-partnered projects are: Ramp Rate Study System: an interface to a numerical modelling tool that allows engineers to study the effects of a sudden change in gas pressure (“ramping”) on the network. Standards[...]

David Hannaford and Mark Stone attended Digital Health Oxford’s Hackday, held at the Oxford Launchpad in Said Business School, Oxford, over the weekend of 12th and 13th July. David’s team came 2nd for the data visualization tool they built to enable a doctor to show a patient their survival rate if they are at risk from cardiac issues. The app calculates the survival rate of an individual by looking at data on risk factors, such as age, weight, blood pressure,[...]

Reynold Greenlaw and Andy Muddiman attended the Oxford Startups demo night at Oxford Launchpad in the Said Business School, on 15th May where they demoed the GaitAssist smartphone app that has been developed for the Cupid project. They demoed it pretty much continuously at our very busy table to the many interested attendees and our communications manager Janine Smith joined in to lend a hand. The app continuously compares the gait of a user with Parkinson’s disease during walking with[...]

A personal blog post from our Director of Consultancy Projects As well as delivering products, OCC has a team that specialises in custom software development; they are behind the wide variety of case studies on our website. This combination of teams working on custom software and product development & support is, I think, unique. Once a year I take the custom development team out for a day to discuss how we might write even better software. This time we crossed[...]

For our 2013 Christmas do we decided we would visit our colleagues in Poland rather than go for the usual Christmas outing. As Poland tends to be rather chilly in December we opted to hold out until May and hope for some summery weather. So, over a long weekend, we (along with friends and partners) enjoyed the delights of a boat trip, a visit to underground cellars where vodka is made and aged, a walk round a picturesque lake, two[...]

We believe there are many organisations implementing systems that conform to the following pattern: A patient is being supported at home. They wear sensors and/or use a smartphone. Sometimes there is a home unit that wirelessly connects to the sensors/smartphone. The data is securely transferred to a server. There is a browser based application by which a clinician accesses the data. Sometimes the clinician can send data back to the patient via the home unit or smartphone. There may be[...]

Reynold Greenlaw, Director of Consultancy at OCC, recently presented at eHealth and the Brain – ICT for Neuropsychiatric Health held in Brussels on the 5th November 2013. His presentation on Telemedicine and eHealth for Neurology, focused on the OCC’s involvement in the CuPiD Project. CuPiD is a three year EU project powered by an eight member consortium led by the University of Bologna. The CuPiD project is developing and field-testing home rehabilitation services for the major motor disabilities caused by Parkinson’s[...]

OCC has been extremely busy during the conference season promoting our contract management and financial assessment management product, ContrOCC. Nick Warner and Damian Payne were at the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) Information Management Conference held at the Hotel Russell, Bloomsbury, in October. Later the same month, Damian Payne, Chris Smith and Keith Musson represented OCC at the National Association of Financial Assessment Officers (NAFAO) meeting at the Macdonald Burlington Hotel, Birmingham, where Damian demonstrated the new[...]