About

Established as far back as 1979 (to the best of our knowledge), the Computing Society is one of the biggest and busiest at Warwick! Our exec team helps to organise a whole host of cool activities throughout the year. This page should help to give you an idea of what we do. We are the official British Computing Society student chapter for the University of Warwick, and have close ties to the Department of Computer Science.

Info on our current exec and their contact details can be found here.

Academic

Industry and Student Talks

From industry speakers, current members, and our wide alumni network. We have a lot of industry connections, with past speakers including both graduates and guests from QRT, Qube, Reply, Oracle, Google, IBM and many more!

Throughout the academic year, we host many 15-minute Lightning Talks on a whole range of CS topics. This is a cool opportunity to talk about a topic you're passionate about, if you're interested, just get in touch with the Academic Coordinators on our Discord, or via academic@uwcs.co.uk! Check some of them out on our YouTube channel!

Courses and Workshops

Gain real-world skills that aren't taught in a degree, including one-off workshops on Git, Docker, and more! We're offering a cross-society Python Course for beginners; a hands-on Rust Course if you feel more confident (was not run 23/24 and 24/25, but may make a return soon!); and new for 2025 a React Course.

Programming Competitions

We participate in yearly events like Google Hash Code (RIP) and Advent of Code, and hold our own internal programming challenges every term! Previous questions can be found on our ProgComp portal or our archive.

Revision Sessions

Got an upcoming exam or coursework deadline? We're here for you! We run revision sessions for many of the trickier modules, but these can also be organised on demand, so let us know if you're finding something tough - get in touch with the Academic Coordinators on our Discord, or via academic@uwcs.co.uk. Channels such as the computing-help channel are good places to ask questions!

Gaming

Friday Night Gaming

Our weekly takeover of the Department of Computer Science, to give you a break from your studies. We've got a wide range of games and consoles (from retro to modern), our very own Valve Index VR setup, and we've re-purposed the Linux PCs into gaming machines running Steam and a selection of DRM-Free games. A good place to have fun after a stressful week, and get to know people on your course! The event usually runs from 7pm until late, with a selection of snacks, and occasionally pizza!

If Friday isn't your thing, feel free to hop on our Discord and organise some online games too.

LAN - Like gaming, but bigger

The answer to the question: what if Gaming was bigger and had a bunch more events and also ran continuously for a whole weekend? We run these once most terms, and collaborate with other societies to make sure you have a good time. We pull out all the stops, bringing along all our consoles and board games, and super fast internet! For more information, see this page.

WASD - Warwick's Awesome Speedruns & Demos

Warwick's Awesome Speedruns & Demos is the largest student-run charity speedrunning event in the UK, and organised by us! WASD started in 2015, and as of 2025, the event has raised more than £9,000 for SpecialEffect - a wonderful UK charity which aims to put fun and inclusion back into the lives of disabled people across the world

You can find out more about SpecialEffect here.

We are always looking for runners, commentators and organisers, so get in touch, either at contact@warwickspeed.run, or via the WASD Discord!

Social

Weekly Pub Meal

Consider joining us for our weekly pub meal! A casual event where we meet up, chill and chat while enjoying some good food at a range of nearby pubs every Monday. For our end of term meal, we might go to some more exotic locations...

Big End of Year Trip

Every year, we hold a trip to a big and cool destination, either towards the end of Term 2, or the end of Term 3! This varies each year, with locations such as Alton Towers, Bletchley Park & The National Museum of Computing and more having great success in previous years, so don't miss out!

Collaborations

Other societies can be pretty cool. Whether out of respect, tradition, or secret hatred, we hold events jointly with other societies. For example, our ongoing war with Tabletop at Laser Quest, a big Pub Crawl with MineSoc, and our collabortion with Mafia Society to bring social deduction games to Friday Night Gaming and driving one of our exec slightly insane from hosting a DND session!

One-off Events

Anything from paintballing, to go-karting, to invading The Wave in Coventry. Anything goes!

Tech

For a full list of our services, servers, and projects, see our wiki.

Hosting Services

We provide a variety of services to both members and other socieies, and have a dedicated Tech Team. Here's some of the things we do:

• Website & database hosting - from static sites to large web apps - for students and other societies
• Shell accounts - connect to our servers for your day-to-day Linux use
• Container hosting - use Docker and Portainer to easily deploy a containerised application
• Virtual machines - dedicated general-purpose compute resources
• Game server hosting - we can run a Minecraft server for you

Talk to us on Discord in the tech-team channel or via email (tech@uwcs.co.uk) if you need any assistance with accessing our services, or want to host something that falls outside of the typical use cases we support (we are always happy to do something cool even sometimes at the cost of insanity).

Open-Source Projects

Many of the society's events are supported by our tech projects! All our projects can be found on our GitHub or wiki. We are always looking for contributors to our projects, and are always happy to support you. If you are interested in getting involved, contact Tech Team as above to get started.

Our projects also need a place to run. We own and administer all our own server hardware and network, running in DCS itself. More information on this infrastructure can be found on the Tech Team wiki.

Inclusivity

We have always taken inclusivity seriously, but in the past few years we've introduced our Gender Inclusivity Officers. They're responsible for organising events aimed at under-represented genders in the department, and the field of Computer Science as a whole - this includes everything from Wildcards Gaming Nights to Cat Café trips, alongside promoting various talks by academics and other campaigns. Join our Discord where you can access the Wildcards channel for women and non-binary members only!

Technical or not, if you’re interested in what we do, we’d love to see you at our events who knows, maybe you'll get some free snacks out of it at least!.

Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank our sponsors for the current academic year.

Democracy

Each year, elections are held for every exec role, along with the chance to present motions that shape how the society moves forwards. We also elect fresher representatives for various roles during Term 1, so that new students feel more represented.

You can see the known history of elected exec here, our democracy repo with history of recent motions and results here and our current constitution here.