Panel: Socially Conscious Software

Sareh Heidari is a Londoner and is currently a Senior Software Engineer at Accurx, a health tech startup, working with the NHS ensuring everyone involved in a patient's care can communicate with each other. Prior to this, she worked at BBC News on the home page and articles pages. She cares about accessibility, web performance and ensuring user needs are centred when designing and building websites. She's worked on sites with a global reach of millions of visitors a week and enjoys learning about the ways that technology can be used to empower those most marginalised.

In her spare time, she enjoys reading speculative fiction and going on day-long walks.

Andy Walker has spent over 30 years working in tech companies from the early days of the World Wide Web with Netscape through to Google. During that time he’s built teams and products all over the world. These days he confines himself to writing about his experiences for the next generation techies and doing the odd bit of coaching.

Germán is the founder of CodeYourFuture, a community-led organisation changing people’s lives by offering accessible training for people of refugee and low-income backgrounds, helping them start thriving software development careers. In the past, Germán worked in open innovation roles and has led artistic productions and fundraising campaigns. He holds degrees in Engineering and Literature.

Aleena is a Senior Software Engineer at Suvera, a health-tech startup based in London.

She is currently studying on the inaugural MSt in AI, Ethics and Society at the University of Cambridge, where she is exploring an anti-capitalist and anti-hype approach to tech. With a background in startups, Aleena has spent the last several years working at the intersection of tech and healthcare, including delivering a covid vaccine booking solution that has been used to book over 30 million vaccines across the UK. Her engineering work centres on the technical aspects of building products for differently-abled users, and she also volunteers at various outreach projects that work on getting more underrepresented minorities into the tech industry.

Find her on Twitter/Instagram/YouTube at @aleenacodes