Next Event Information

Previous events

The following is a list of our past {dev.talk} meetups. Click the links for details, recordings or photos where available.

2026

  • February 25th 2026: {dev.talk} - The One With The Gaming Collab

    Overview

    This event is packed with practical game development advice, from the key decisions that help you finish game jams faster to smart ways to build an audience and work with marketing while you ship.

    Highlights

    Sessions and speakers

  • January 28th 2026: {dev.talk} - The One Where We Don't Break the Platform (or Believe the Hype)

    Overview

    In this event, attendees will hear how to cut through AI hype with a practical automation framework, plus how to make websites easier to evolve using feature isolation without a full rebuild.

    Highlights

    Sessions and speakers

    • The AI Integration Framework: When to Automate, When to Wait (30 mins) - Dr Rushan Arshad

      Do you have broken processes that needs fixing? Have you hired expensive consultants who have told you that AI is a magical wand that will fix everything for you? You are not alone in this scam. In this session, you'll gain a practical decision framework to cut through the AI hype and make strategic automation choices for your business. Rather than focusing on what AI can do, we'll explore when it should be used versus traditional automation tools.

    • Why websites become hard to change - and how to stop it. (30 mins) - Herve Tribouilly

      Many teams struggle to evolve their platforms without increasing cost, complexity, or upgrade risk. Monolithic systems can become hard to change, while micro-services are often too heavy for most organisations. This session introduces the Feature Isolation Pattern — a practical way to keep a stable core platform (such as Magento or WordPress) while building customer-facing features that can be developed, tested, and deployed independently. Using real examples, the talk shows how this approach improves flexibility, performance, and long-term maintainability without rebuilding the platform or adopting full micro-services.

2025

  • December 17th 2025: {dev.talk} - The one with something different

    Overview

    A fun and social end-of-year session where everyone can take part in a general knowledge quiz and celebrate together.

    Highlights

    Sessions and speakers

  • November 26th 2025: {dev.talk} - The one with our Birthday

    Overview

    This event blends humour and hard lessons, exploring the human side of software engineering through a sitcom lens and reflecting on bugs from the Post Office Horizon system and what teams can learn from them.

    Highlights

    Sessions and speakers

    • Sitcom lovers guide to Software Engineering (30 mins) - Adam Scholey

      Brief: Series 1, Episode 1: Laughter. It's the best form of medicine. And a valuable solace for those of us assigned yet another Jira ticket with ambiguous Acceptance Criteria... As AI continues to dominate society, our humanity is becoming ever more crucial to the products we create and the value we deliver. Behind every user story is an actual human who relies on our abilities to empathise, reflect and adapt to their needs. In this talk, we'll explore the softer, "fuzzier" side of software engineering - why knowing who your F.R.I.E.N.D.S are is crucial to shipping high-quality features; how to retain perspective when you're in The Thick Of It [battling a 3am production fire], and why a little business acumen can supercharge your technical skills in 2025 (Del Boy anyone?) Whether you're a fellow software engineer, or simply have to put up with us in your day-to-day, we'll Peep (Show) behind the curtain of what makes us far more Kryten than Marvin the Paranoid Android!

    • The Post Office Horizon System's bugs (30 mins) - Frank Milsom

      Defects in the Post Office Horizon System caused accounting errors that led to many Subpostmasters being unjustly prosecuted. Most of these faults were complex. Adjustments to the software development process might have increased the chances of catching these bugs before release.

  • October 22nd 2025: {dev.talk} - The One Where PMs Ask, Designers Imagine, and Devs Improvise

    Overview

    Attendees will hear short, practical talks on improving developer environments with Nix, using domain-specific languages to simplify complex problems, and building better collaboration between product managers and developers.

    Highlights

    Sessions and speakers

  • September 24th 2025: {dev.talk} - The one where we learn to Level Up Our DevEx

    Overview

    A deep dive into developer experience, covering how to test complex end-to-end flows effectively and how .NET Aspire and OpenTelemetry can make integration testing and local development smoother.

    Highlights

    Sessions and speakers

    • Level Up Your DevEx: Unit Test Complex E2E Flows + Integration Testing with Aspire & OTEL (60 mins) - Andrew Poole

      This session is in two parts: 1) How to get the maximum mileage from a minimal number of tests - end-to-end component tests 2) Using .Net Aspire for next level devex and easy integration tests asserting against OTEL trace data. Part 1 Introduces, explains and demonstrates an approach to automated testing which covers as much of the surface area of your codebase as possible. Imagine a unit test where the 'unit' is actually multiple executables! A single test can cover the whole happy path flow of a complex piece of orchestration, from API handlers, service bus handlers, database calls etc all in-memory, fast and with a nice fluent developer experience! Because everything including the Program.cs and startup code are covered we can spot configuration and IoC issues which are hard to test with more traditional methods. I include a method of mocking and asserting against Azure Service Bus Part 2 discusses the usual issues with integration tests and how they expose the issues with running an app locally. It then presents .Net Aspire as the answer to lots of these issues, It covers the process of adding .Net Aspire to a solution and showcases its features, adding additional OTEL telemetry to track interesting events, including persisting and rehydrating telemetry across any 'process airgaps' and the creation of integration tests covering end-to-end flows using Open Telemetry trace data for assertions. The aim of both parts of this talk is to have a repo which when pulled down onto a fresh machine, builds first time, component tests pass first time, then having run the script and the app, the the integration tests pass first time, after which you can push F5 and have it all run with almost no time or effort!

  • July 23rd 2025: {dev.talk} - The one with the conference come down

    Overview

    This event focuses on managing change and growth, with insights on helping people adopt new tools and a real-world case study on evolving service boundaries and architecture over time.

    Highlights

    Sessions and speakers

    • Human side of change (30 mins) - Maria Gaganova

      As developers, you are building new tools and disrupting the way others operate. Having a tool is great, but then adopting users to change their behaviors requires separate focus, time and resources. Sometimes, we need to let users "destroy" the tool first, only to learn how to make them "love" it later. I'll give some examples on how I went about this challenge in the teams I worked with and how important is the work between developers, users, stakeholders, project leads, change managers and so on.

    • The Hidden Evolution of Services (30 mins) - Stuart Caborn

      How do you know when a service needs to evolve? While we often focus on REST APIs and runtime behavior, the true scope of a service could extend beyond these interfaces. Through the journey of a critical booking service at loveholidays, Stuart will explore how 12 years of rapid organisational growth created unexpected challenges in both our runtime and data architectures. Gain practical insights about recognising when your service boundaries no longer serve your teams, how 'hidden' APIs like data dependencies can impact your ability to evolve, and how loveholidays approached restructuring for future scalability while keeping their systems running smoothly. This real-world case study demonstrates how to systematically untangle and evolve critical services as your organisation grows.

  • June 25th 2025: {dev.talk} - The one where we connect before re:connect

    Overview

    A collaborative and relaxed community night featuring a fun general knowledge quiz with the Re:connect conference.

    Highlights

    Sessions and speakers

    • Re:connect collab & Quiz (120 mins) - Kerry Oliver (JustPickOneUK)

      We had a fun general knowledge quiz which was a collaboration with the Re:connect conference, and hosted by JustPickOneUK.

  • May 21st 2025: {dev.talk} - The one where Open Source AI tries to break into Tech

    Overview

    Attendees will explore the current open-source AI landscape and hear real stories and advice on pathways into the tech industry.

    Highlights

    Sessions and speakers

    • The Current Landscape of Open Source AI (30 mins) - Richard Brough

      The talk will cover the benefits of open source AI, a selection of major milestones in recent years and the current landscape of open source large language models, image generation and more. It will give an overview of how you can run these yourself either on your own hardware, or in the cloud.

    • Breaking into Tech (30 mins) - Shalom Vic-Jumbo

      A discussion forum about popular pathways to 'breaking into the tech industry' from another industry. Listening to people's story and feedback to inspire new graduates and people transitioning.

  • April 23rd 2025: {dev.talk} - The one where we will see you at BU

    Overview

    This event highlights practical engineering approaches, from applying Clean Architecture in Salesforce to using OpenTelemetry to make application observability easier.

    Highlights

    Sessions and speakers

  • March 26th 2025: {dev.talk} - The one with Creatives & Coders at Cottonwood

    Overview

    A varied event covering modern PHP, the real ups and downs of building a YouTube channel, and practical strategies for landing a tech role without a computer science degree.

    Highlights

    Sessions and speakers

  • February 26th 2025: {dev.talk} - The one where we forged friendships at the FOUNDRY

    Overview

    In this event, attendees will hear how agentic AI is shaping the future of automation and get practical guidance on navigating today’s changing tech hiring market.

    Highlights

    Sessions and speakers

  • January 30th 2025: {dev.talk} - The one where we deployed our first PATCH

    Overview

    This event shares lessons from building a city-based maze game with open tools, alongside a candid look at scaling teams and systems through a domain-driven design transformation.

    Highlights

    Sessions and speakers

2024

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