Front End North Conference 2025 - Interview with Organisers Katie Fenn and Amy Benson

Sheffield Digital Podcast

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!

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Links

Front End North website

Front End Sheffield Meetup website

Front End North on LinkedIn

Front End Sheffield on LinkedIn

Front End North on Bluesky

Front End Sheffield on Bluesky

Front End North on Mastodon

Katie Fenn on LinkedIn

Amy Benson on LinkedIn

References

Hive IT

All Day Hey!

ffconf

State of the Browser

Pixel Pioneers

Make Do

Dave Letorey

Other Front End North Conference organisers

Ian Parr

Lee Moody

Tom Heaton

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Contact Front End North

[email protected]

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Thank you for the music

Thanks to Alex Mclean – aka Yaxu – for the show’s intro music, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.