Welcome to {dev.talk}

{dev.talk} (pronounced "dev dot talk") is a community-driven monthly meetup bringing together software engineers and tech professionals in the Bournemouth and Dorset area.

Free to attend and run by community volunteers, we create an inclusive space where developers of all experience levels can learn, share knowledge, and connect.

Each meetup features sessions from community members (mostly of a technical nature), with time for networking and discussions between talks. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting out, you'll find a welcoming environment to explore new ideas and "geek out" with fellow tech enthusiasts.

To extend our reach beyond the in-person events, all sessions (with speaker permission) are recorded and shared on our YouTube Channel, creating an accessible resource for the wider developer community.

Our mission is simple: build a thriving, supportive tech community in Dorset where everyone can grow professionally while making meaningful connections.

Upcoming sessions

• Built Fast, Hard to Live With (10 mins) - Menahil Tanveer

  Session description

  Early in my career I thought my job was simple: ship fast, ship features people use, make it look good. Then I built a table where every row quietly rendered its own modal. It looked perfect and worked perfectly, right up until it didn't. Years later I found 39 identical API calls firing on a single page load, a classic N+1 problem written by someone else, and recognised my own old mistake staring back at me. This is a short, honest story about the costs that stay invisible until scale arrives, why the durable version is often no slower to build, and the one question I now ask before shipping anything: in six months, at twice the scale, will this still be safe to change? For developers at any level. Juniors will recognise themselves in the first half; seniors will recognise the code they've inherited in the second.

• What broke when we put our product in people’s hands (20 mins) - Oksana Logvynenko & Vitalii Mytenko

  Session description

  The easy bit was building our AI prototype. It’s another matter getting real people to actually start using it which is why for over a year now I have been working on and testing my AI tools with some pretty unusual users, by traditional product-testing standards at least. People whose level of English, digital skillsets, culture and understanding of AI all differ dramatically from one another. In today’s session, I’m going to tell you what happened when our prototypes weren’t just prototypes anymore, but instead sat in front of actual users. There were some surprises where everything went great… And there were lots more where nothing went great. Prompts that were obvious to us were confusing to everyone else. Technically correct AI answers that couldn’t help anyone in real life. Translation didn’t magically solve every language problem. And some folks had way too much faith in AI, others had zero. Come to this session if you want to hear some real-world experiences of how we developed our tools and programmes Newcomer Navigator, EduHub and our AI-supported employability work in Somerset. But this is NOT going to be about how to create the smartest AI model. It will focus on what comes next once your techy thing actually works technically. How did things break down as real users started using our product. What needed to change and which of my, and others’, assumptions were incorrect? Could I have fixed more earlier on by involving real users earlier? In this talk, I'll discuss all these questions about our journey from what failed, to what was changed, to what surprised us – so that anyone building an AI product for real users can take something useful away from it.

• Mapping True North with User Needs (30 mins) - Rich Allen

  Session description

  Many organizations pursue better outcomes, yet struggle with misalignment, slow delivery, and growing coordination overhead. Strategy exists, teams work hard, but the connection between the two often feels unclear. In this talk, Rich explores why user needs are the missing anchor between strategy and teams. When user needs remain implicit, outcomes become fuzzy and alignment becomes effortful. When made visible, they can guide clearer priorities, safer autonomy, and more effective team interactions. Using real examples and a practical case study, Rich introduces User Needs Mapping, a collaborative visual technique for uncovering dependencies, reducing cognitive load, and designing for better flow. Attendees will leave with a fresh perspective on alignment, outcomes, and how to organise around what truly matters. Key takeaways: Understand why outcomes often feel disconnected from day-to-day work: Learn why many organisations jump from strategy to initiatives without a clear translation layer rooted in real user needs. Reframe alignment as a structural challenge, not just a communication problem: See how unclear ownership, tight coupling, and coordination overhead create friction even in capable teams. Learn how user needs can act as a north star for decision-making: Understand how explicit user needs create clearer priorities, safer autonomy, and stronger local decision-making. Discover a practical visual technique for improving flow: See how User Needs Mapping helps leaders and teams reveal dependencies, assess cognitive load, and explore more coherent team boundaries. Leave with a new question for your own organisation: What would change if user needs truly shaped how we organise, fund, prioritise, and measure work?

• Knit 1, Perl 1 (30 mins) - Katy Ereira

  Session description

  Knitting and programming; a creative hobby with sticks and string, and writing complex logic in computer languages - could they be any more different? Actually, they’re not so dissimilar. Let me show you where knitting and programming intertwine!

• Building an Agentic Mobile OS, Part Two: Keeping AI Local Is the Easy Part (30 mins) - Kevin Ocansey

  Session description

  In March I talked about how we planned to build JarvisOS, how we'd use Cactus, and how our small but growing knowledge of Android system programming would help us put an offline AI model on a phone. A few months on, I'm back to share what actually happened. I'll walk through the timeline: trying to build on my own PC, Gemma 4 arriving, a hackathon where we built Mama AI and played with sound, and the months we stalled while figuring out how to turn Jarvis from a gimmick into something that could genuinely help people. I'll also cover what helped along the way, from building with AI to working as a team when everyone has their own thing going on and balancing their actual with this "startup". I will finish with where we are now and next steps forward.

• State Boundaries in Flutter: A Live Refactor from setState to Maintainable Architecture (40 mins) - Ibim Braide & Oyegbile Oluwabukunmi

  Session description

  State management often becomes difficult as a Flutter application grows. More screens need access to the same data, business logic begins to appear inside widgets, and setState starts spreading into places where it becomes difficult to follow. The problem is not always the state management tool. Sometimes, the real problem is where the state has been placed. In this practical session, I will refactor a small Flutter shopping application and explore three important types of state: local widget state, shared feature state, and application-wide state. We will begin with a version that relies heavily on setState. We will then introduce clearer state boundaries using ChangeNotifier and Provider. Along the way, I will show how Consumer and Selector can be used to control rebuilds, and how separating the user interface from state and application logic can make a Flutter project easier to understand, test, and maintain. This is not a talk about choosing the most popular state management package. It is about understanding the problem first and choosing an approach that fits the size and needs of the application. By the end of the session, attendees will be able to: * Identify whether state should remain inside a widget or be shared elsewhere * Separate user interface code from state and application logic * Reduce unnecessary widget rebuilds * Recognise when setState is enough and when a structured approach is needed * Choose a state management approach without overengineering the application Although the examples will use Flutter, the architectural ideas will also be useful to Android and other cross-platform developers working with state-driven user interfaces.

• Archetypes - your secret superpower (45 mins) - Mike Wojtyna

  Session description

  Imagine jumping into a new project. In a very short time you start asking meaningful questions, understand the business, and model it correctly. Somehow you just feel what's right. You manage to solve some of the problems the team was facing for months. You suggest improvements that can benefit your clients tremendously. All within the first few weeks. Some team members may admire you, while others might make accusations that you are cheating or faking your abilities, or that you possess some special superpowers. Sounds like a fairy tale? During this presentation I'm going to show you how you can utilize archetypes to immediately recognize the business patterns, make right modeling decisions and astonish your fellow team members.

• Building AI Agents That Actually Ship: Lessons from Production LLM Systems (30 mins) - Ahmed Khan

  Session description

  Everyone is building AI agent demos right now. Far fewer are shipping them to real users and keeping them running. In this talk I share what changed when a multi agent LLM system moved from prototype to production, and what actually mattered once real traffic, real failures, and real users entered the picture. I will walk through the practical side of building with LangGraph, structuring agents so they stay debuggable instead of turning into a tangle of prompt chains, and the unglamorous but critical work of handling failure gracefully when a model call times out, hallucinates, or simply gets it wrong. I will also touch on real time constraints, like what happens when your agent needs to respond fast enough to feel natural rather than just eventually correct. This is not a talk about prompt engineering tricks. It is about the engineering decisions that separate a cool demo from a system your users can actually depend on, and the lessons I wish someone had told me before I started.

• I Threw People for a Living. Then I Opened My First Terminal. (45 mins) - Osama Okunbo

  Session description

  In judo you always know how good you are. Someone throws you or they don't. There's a scoreboard. There are belts, you can see what you've earned and what's next. You lose in public constantly, in front of everyone, and nobody thinks less of you for it; that's just training. And the first thing they teach you isn't how to throw someone. It's ukemi how to fall without getting hurt. You spend months learning to be thrown before you're allowed to attack. I did that for years, professionally. Then I moved into tech, sports science, then game development, then cloud security and every one of those things was gone. Here's what took me years to work out, and it's the whole talk: impostor syndrome isn't a personal defect. It's what happens when you take a person out of a system with feedback and drop them into one without any. Tech has no scoreboard nobody tells you if you're good. It has no belts progression is invisible and the titles don't mean the same thing at two companies. Failing in public isn't training here, it's a performance review. And nobody teaches you ukemi. You're expected to attack from day one, and when you get thrown you have no idea whether that's normal or whether you're finished. Four things judo had. Tech has none of them. That's the diagnosis, and I'll go through them one at a time. I wrote a book about this, which means people wrote back engineers, career-changers, people ten years in. The thing that comes up over and over: everyone assumes they're the only one, and they're all assuming it about each other. Then the fix, which isn't confidence. Confidence advice fails because this isn't a confidence problem you simply have no data on yourself, so you fill the gap with the worst available assumption. So build the missing structures yourself. Make your own scoreboard: an actual file of what you shipped and what you fixed, because your memory won't do it for you. Learn ukemi deliberately practise failing where it's cheap, so you know how it feels before you fail where it's expensive. Find your randori: somewhere you can be thrown regularly without it counting against you. I got thrown more times than I can count and never once thought I didn't belong on the mat. Falling was the training, not the verdict. Tech taught me to read the same event as proof I was a fraud. That's the mistake, and it's worth naming out loud.

• 3D Asset Creation, Integration & Publishing for Games (30 mins) - Rhys Green

  Session description

  The session will explore the fundamentals of how to create 3D models and assets for games development in mind. We will be exploring creating assets based on your game engine of choice, in this session will be for Unity or Unreal Engine. The modelling examples and tips will be using Autodesk's Maya 3D modelling software, where we will be diving through the fundamentals of workflow, UV's and exporting. Will then be taking a quick look when it comes to texturing models in mainstream software such as Adobe's Substance Painter and how to export your textures correctly here. And then will be deep diving into integrating game assets and textures into your game engine of choice, creating materials, and some of the engine technologies such as Unreal Engine's 'Nanite' to help with asset optimisation and performance. Once asset integration has finished, will be talking about my experience publishing assets together into asset packs, and how to handle the corporate side of things with companies involved.

• Why opinionated frameworks win at small / medium scale (30 mins) - George Buckingham

  Session description

  Laravel is a highly opinionated PHP framework. We'll explore why it allows developers to be so productive, especially for small / medium sized applications.

• Livewire: Building interactive interfaces without JavaScript (30 mins) - George Buckingham

  Session description

  Say hello to Livewire - a PHP library for building interactive user interfaces. We'll explore how back-end developers can deliver a dynamic interface without writing a line of Javascript. It's very marmite - not one for the purists!

• Gender Identity & Me: Life as an autistic software engineer (30 mins) - Rose T

  Session description

  I'm a 22 year old Trans woman and have had an unusual life story - I want to use my skills and platform to educate about Autism & neurodiversity, trans rights and broadly sharing love and respect for each other especially when it comes to mental health. I attended a specialist Maths School for my A-levels where I achieved A*s in Maths, Further Maths and Computer Science before starting a degree apprenticeship at a large American bank which I have just finished achieving a 1st class degree in Digital & Technology Solutions from the University of Exeter. Throughout the last 6 years, I have gone from being on a plane for the first time to having travelled to the USA for 2 weeks solo, to Japan for 2 weeks with friends. I've come out as Rose, struggled with my mental health and learnt a lot

• Building my blog: A journey of discovery (45 mins) - Mark Oliver

  Session description

  In this session, I will explain the journey of discovery of building my fully interactive Blog website and the engine behind it, using free cloud technologies such as Azure Static Web Apps, Github Actions and Blazor WebAssembly.

• Why is there a shark in my Wire - An introduction to Wireshark (25 mins) - Mark Oliver

  Session description

  A short introduction to the network protocol analyser tool Wireshark, and why it can be helpful for software engineers. I will show the basics of running the tool, the benefits of knowing this tool for all software developers, and then cover some real life examples of where it has been used to aid development of production systems.

Upcoming events

View the full events calendar

• October 21st 2026: {dev.talk} - The One Where We Ask, "Could This Be Any More Useful?"

  Join us for an evening about building technology that works for real people and stays safe to change. Explore how making user needs visible can improve alignment, team design, and flow, then hear candid lessons from putting AI products in front of diverse users. Finish with a short, honest talk on hidden technical debt, N+1 API calls, and designing software that remains easy to change as it scales.

• November 25th 2026: {dev.talk} - The One With Jarvis, Knitting and the Tests That Don't Lie

  This event explores what happens when ambitious ideas meet the realities of building software. Hear how JarvisOS evolved from an offline AI concept into a more purposeful project, as a team of three speakers shares lessons from experimentation, teamwork and setbacks. Katy Ereira then shares her experience as a software engineer and speaker, including the surprising connections between knitting, programming and the craft of writing reliable software.

• December 16th 2026: {dev.talk} - The One With the Secret Superpowers and the State Boundaries

  This event explores how developers can recognise patterns and make better decisions when designing software. Discover how archetypes can reveal business models and make complex problems feel surprisingly clear, then see how thoughtful state boundaries can transform a growing Flutter application. Come for practical ideas on modelling, architecture and avoiding overengineering, whether you work in mobile development or beyond.

• January 27th 2027: {dev.talk} - The one in January

  This event is currently being planned, with 2 speakers. Details forthcoming.

• February 24th 2027: {dev.talk} - The One With the Belts, the Bugs and the Boss Fights

  This event brings together two practical and very different perspectives: Osama Okunbo explores impostor syndrome in tech through the lens of professional judo, offering strategies for building confidence and learning from failure, while Rhys Green covers the complete game-asset workflow, from 3D modelling and texturing to engine integration and publishing. Come for honest career insight, practical creative and technical knowledge, and ideas you can apply immediately.

• March 24th 2027 🎤 Speaker wanted: submit a talk idea or get in touch.
• April 28th 2027 🎤 Speaker wanted: submit a talk idea or get in touch.
• May 26th 2027 🎤 Speaker wanted: submit a talk idea or get in touch.
• June 2027 ☀️ We pause events in summer to give everyone a chance to touch grass.
• July 2027 ☀️ We pause events in summer to give everyone a chance to touch grass.
• August 2027 ☀️ We pause events in summer to give everyone a chance to touch grass.
• September 29th 2027 🎤 Speaker wanted: submit a talk idea or get in touch.
• October 27th 2027 🎤 Speaker wanted: submit a talk idea or get in touch.
• November 24th 2027 🎤 Speaker wanted: submit a talk idea or get in touch.
• December 29th 2027 🎤 Speaker wanted: submit a talk idea or get in touch.