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.

Full info on our current exec and positions 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 Google, LSEG, TPP, and IBM.

We host bi-termly sets of 15-minute lightning talks on a whole range of CS topics. If this sounds like something you'd want to try doing, we'd be happy to have you. Check some of them out on our YouTube channel!

Courses and Workshops

Gain real-world skills that aren't taught in a degree. One-off workshops on Git, Docker, and more. We're offering a cross-society Python Course for beginners, and a hands-on Rust course if you feel more confident (not running 23/24).

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.

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 get to know people on your course! The event usually runs from 8pm until late.

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 continously for a whole weekend? We run these once every term, 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! Started in 2015, to date 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. We are always looking for runners and organizers, so get in touch!

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...

Bletchley Park & The National Museum of Computing Trip

Every year, we hold a trip to everyone's favourite enigma-cracking destination, usually towards the end of Term 2. 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, or a big Pub Crawl with MineSoc.

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 (#tech-team) 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).

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 Inclusivity Officers. They're responsible for organising events aimed at those under-represented in the department, and the field of Computer Science as a whole. Contact our Inclusivity officers to be added to the Wildcards group chat for women and non-binary members.

Technical or not, if you’re interested in what we do, we’d love to see you at our events.

Our Sponsors

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

Our current constitution can be found here.