Software Engineering Events in Amsterdam

Hey folks,
Join us on May 6 for a React meetup where we’ll explore how modern web engineering is evolving — starting with a fresh look at how we deploy Next.js applications beyond traditional setups, and what new tooling makes possible today.

🗣 Call for Proposals
Have an idea or story to share? Submit your talk proposal through our CFP form and take the stage at one of our upcoming meetups!

🤝 Organized by
This event made possible thanks to the support from React Summit, JSNation and TechLead Conf organizers – GitNation.

🤝 Sponsored by
Huge thanks to our friends Sentry!
Sentry is the only app monitoring platform built for developers that gets to the root cause for every issue. For software teams, Sentry is essential for monitoring application code quality. From Error tracking to Performance monitoring, developers can see clearer & solve quicker — from frontend to backend.

🤝 Want to support our community?
We’re looking for venue partners and sponsors for future meetups. Let’s discuss collaboration — contact us!

🕑 Event Schedule
18:30 - Doors open - snacks, beer, socialization
19:00 - Intro and announcements
19:10 - Vinext: Deploy Next.js Without Next.js - Jan Peer
19.35 - Modernizing a Codebase While Delivering Features - Bora Semiz
20:00 - Break with drinks
20:15 - Don't .gitignore Mental Health - Frédéric Harper
20:40 - Networking, Open Mic Lightning Talks
Mingle until 21:30pm

🗣️ Talks

➡️ Vinext: Deploy Next.js Without Next.js - Jan Peer
Next.js is a great framework - until you want to deploy it somewhere that isn't Vercel. vinext is a Vite plugin from Cloudflare that reimplements the Next.js API surface from scratch, so your existing app runs everywhere with a single command. In this talk, we'll look at why this exists, how Cloudflare built it in a week using AI, and how close to "drop-in replacement" it actually gets.

➡️ Modernizing a Codebase While Delivering Features - Bora Semiz
An opinion and methodologies on how to modernize an outdated and unmaintained codebase while at the same time delivering features. We will also explore how AI can support modernizing a legacy codebase.

➡️ Don't .gitignore Mental Health - Frédéric Harper
⚠️ Content Warning ⚠️
Depression, dark thoughts, anxiety – These are some of the words that most of us would like to add to our ignore file. Discussing mental health is still taboo in our society, and it’s even more so in the developer ecosystem, where we pride ourselves on working long hours and our lack of sleep.
More than ever, we need to talk about mental health! This is why I want to share my experience with depression, general anxiety, ADHD, and experience volunteering at a suicide prevention hotline. Along with my thoughts on how we can improve the situation, I’ll be sharing some tips to help people be more open about these topics and issues – more importantly, I want to touch on how those struggling can ask for help and assistance when needed.
—
👍 Code of Conduct
By registering for this event you agree to comply with our CoC
📩 Contact
events@gitnation.org
https://twitter.com/ReactSummit
https://bsky.app/profile/reactsummit.gitnation.org
http://youtube.com/ReactConferences

Every 2 months, we'll visit a company or institute that will host the event and provide talks.

This time, we’re visiting Blender. Blender is a public project hosted on blender.org with the mission to get the world’s best 3D CG technology in the hands of artists as free/open source software. Blender is licensed as GNU GPL, owned by its contributors.

Countless communities and thriving businesses are built around Blender, from entertainment to medical research. Together, content creators, add-on developers, researchers and global marketplaces form an ever-expanding ecosystem.

If you want to learn more, check out:

• Website https://www.blender.org/
• Blog https://code.blender.org/
• Recordings of presentations from past Blender conferences, such as BCON25 https://video.blender.org/w/p/ofNr3T19QdraJNTVTB7FvG Also available on YouTube.

The schedule is as follows:

• 16:30 Walk-in, drinks, office tours
• 17:00 Seating
• 17:05 Welcome talk from the host: Blender
• 17:10 - 17:40 Talk #1: from Jeroen Bakker - "From main loop to pixels on the screen"
• 17:45 - 18:10 Networking and drinks, office tours
• 18:10 - 18:40 Talk #2: from Sybren Stuvel - "Introduction to Blender's render farm Flamenco”
• 18:40 - 19:30 Networking, drinks, and food

For those who visited the previous meetups, you already know what to expect: deep dives into technical subjects, snacks and drinks, and enough time to socialize.

You don’t need to register in advance for the office tours, they will be organised on the spot in small groups.

Due to the small size of the office the registrations are limited to 35 people only, so please register in advance to secure your spot.
And a friendly request - please no more than 5 people from the same company. Thank you!

See you there!

Join us for drinks and chats at Café de Muurbloem.

We have a Slack for the Hackers & Founders community. If you want to join the Hackers & Founders conversations in Slack (#jobs etc) please DM on Twitter (https://twitter.com/feargal) and I will send you a sign up link and follow on Twitter for irregular updates on the meetup.

During Waag Open, you’ll map out other people’s routes around Nieuwmarkt through drawing. The workshop is led by visual artist Esther Polak.

After a very successful first edition in Berlin in 2023, the babashka-conf come to the Netherlands for the second episode. As usual, we will explore the babashka ecosystem, use cases and techniques while making sure our community gets the chance to shake hands and exchange ideas.

More info on the website: https://babashka.org/conf/

NOTE: while the event is completely free of charge, seating is limited so reserve your ticket while you can! In case there are no seats left or in case of other questions: send an e-mail to babashka.conf@gmail.com and we will see what we can do.

On the 9th of May, we're joining forces with the Creative Coding Amsterdam for a full afternoon and evening at A Lab.

One big room. Two communities.

Games, art, code, and the people who make them.
We’ll be filling the space with exhibition and play-test booths. Indie games in the making you can play, creative projects to interact with, and the makers right there to talk to.
It's going to be informal and a bit chaotic in the best possible way.
Come for the work, stay for the people.

Towards the evening we'll gather for a round of short talks and showcases from both communities before we wind things down.

We've got a great mix of people signed up already!
Want to join them and show your work?
There's still space! → forms.cca.codes/may

All are welcome.
Free to attend.

Hope to see you there! 💜

→ more on https://cca.codes/assembly

We’ve been getting a lot of requests to explore two big questions. First, what coding skills will matter in an AI-driven world? This topic has only become more pressing as some have made bold claims that traditional coding is "dead." And second, what will the product stack of the future even look like in an AI-driven world? So we'll be covering both in the May AI on the Amstel meetup!

Here is the panel for the May meetup:

• Adrian McPhee, CTO of the startup Eccasion. Adrian is also the former CTO of Bol.com and the former CTO of Amsterdam fintech champion Backbase.
• Clare Jones, CEO of Polarsteps. Amsterdam-based Polarsteps is a popular travel app with over 20 million users.
• Michael Aronzon, CTO of Miro. Miro's visual workspace has over 100 million users across 250,000 organizations.

May meetup will be held at the large atrium in Miro's Amsterdam office. Doors open at 17:00. The event starts with a networking period, and we usually start the panel sometime between 17:45-18:00. There will be time for Q&A with the audience. After the panel concludes, there will be another networking session. It's fine if you arrive a little late - we know work can be busy!

For those that are new to this meetup, the AI on the Amstel meetup is a monthly technical meetup that features knowledgeable speakers discussing "in the weeds" AI topics and challenges. This meetup caters to engineers, product managers, and founders in AI.

The AI on the Amstel meetup is the largest monthly AI event in Amsterdam. We get 250-400+ people a month depending on the size of the venue that month. For example, here are the pictures of the crowds at our three most recent meetups: a meetup at Amsterdam's flagship public library, a meetup at the AMS Institute graduate school, and a meetup at Booking's headquarters. I hope to see you at the May event!

Our hosts for this month (Miro) also have legal terms for an event in their space. Anyone attending acknowledges that they have read and agree to Miro’s Conduct and Content Standards, Miro Meetups Terms, and Miro’s Nondisclosure Agreement and agree that Miro may use their personal data to send them communications, including marketing emails in accordance with Miro's Privacy Policy.

Hello, Kotlin enthusiasts!

Our next MeetUp will take place at the Xebia office in Amsterdam on 13 May.

📍 Location: Xebia Netherlands - Amsterdam - Wibautstraat

Join us on an evening filled with tasty food, refreshing drinks, and insightful Kotlin discussions.
Make sure to press the RSVP button!

---

🕒 Timeline:
• 17:45 - Doors open, food and drinks 🍕
• 18:30 - Opening 💻
• 18:40 - Making @Transactional Play Nice with Kotlin Rich Errors and Either - Tjalling Ran
• 19:30 - Quick break 🚽
• 19:40 - How to supercharge your knowledge base with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) - Jamie Craane 💻
• 20:25 - Closing 💻
• 20:30 - Chats & Drinks 👥

---

Title: Making @Transactional Play Nice with Kotlin Rich Errors and Either

@Transactional rolls back on exceptions — but what if your error is a value? Functional error handling patterns like Arrow’s Either.Left or Kotlin’s upcoming Rich Errors let you model errors as return values instead of throwing exceptions, making failure explicit and strongly typed in your function signatures. The downside: your @Transactional would commit even on an error. This talk shows how to solve that with Spring AOP, so you can adopt functional error handling in an existing Spring Boot codebase without breaking your @Transactional behavior.

Bio:
Tjalling Ran is a back-end developer at Maqqie, where he works on public APIs, backoffice tooling, and CLA compliance, bridging technical implementation and technical and non-technical stakeholders alike. He has a passion for writing expressive and unambiguous code by leveraging the type system and naming things well. His day-to-day stack is Kotlin with Spring, OpenAPI, and JPA. Earlier in his career he worked on code generators with Xtend, a language that felt refreshingly modern compared to Java at the time, which made Kotlin a natural fit.

Title: How to supercharge your knowledge base with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

Abstract
Your notes, documents, and images contain a wealth of knowledge — but finding the right piece at the right moment can be surprisingly hard. What if you could search your personal knowledge base the same way you talk to an AI assistant?

In this talk, we’ll explore how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can supercharge your personal knowledge base. You’ll learn how vector embeddings are created, how they are stored, and how they power an end-to-end RAG retrieval workflow. Along the way, we’ll demystify what embeddings actually are and why they work so well for semantic search.

But we won’t stop at text. We’ll also integrate image embeddings into the workflow, enabling you to query your own photos and screenshots using natural language.

Finally, we’ll tackle an often overlooked challenge: protecting sensitive information. You’ll see practical techniques for preventing confidential data from being sent to external embedding providers.

By the end of the session, you’ll understand how to build a powerful, privacy-aware RAG system that turns your personal data into an AI-searchable knowledge engine.

Bio:
With over 20 years of IT experience, Jamie Craane designs and develops software for a wide range of organizations, from large enterprises to startups and SaaS services. Working for Moxie-IT, Jamie focuses on the entire value chain: from architecture and technology to software development, deployment and management, and improving the performance of development teams. Adding value and providing insight for everyone involved are central to his approach.

Fast, secure, and automated delivery are essential to his approach. Jamie combines innovation with proven technologies and closely follows developments in Artificial Intelligence. He doesn’t shy away from challenges and enjoys sharing his knowledge with teams and the community.

---

RSVP Now!
Don't forget to RSVP to secure your seat—spots are limited! We can't wait to see you there and discuss the future of Kotlin and software architecture.

Maptime — End of Spring Edition
📅 Wednesday, May 13, 2026 | 📍 TomTom Building

18:15 — Doors Open | Walk-in
Grab a drink, get settled, and catch up with familiar faces.
18:30 — Welcome & Intro
A quick hello, what's new in the Maptime world, and a shout-out to everyone who asked for this edition to happen. You made it happen!

18:35 — Community Project Showcase
Maptime regulars share what they've been working on — any mapping project, case study, or line of work is welcome. Short, informal, no slides required.

19:45 — Humanitarian & Development Mapping
A couple of focused mapping sessions for humanitarian and development projects. Laptops open, maps on screen, contributions welcome from everyone.

19:45 — Optional: Field Survey Walk (weather permitting)
A quick walk around the building to do some real-world surveying. Good vibes, fresh air, and maybe a few new data entries on the map.

21:00 — Wrap-up
Keep mapping, keep chatting — wind down at your own pace.

Hi✋

At Data Tribes we organise Meetups because we truly care about sharing knowledge both inside and outside the organisation. We believe that it is beneficial to us and to the market as a whole to connect, create, learn and grow together!

The agenda

// Doors open 6.00pm
// Drinks and Pizza’s 6.30pm
// Start presentations 7.00pm
// Marcel van der Kuil & Henk van der Valk
// Cloud & Climate Pub Quiz
// Start networking 9.00pm
// End Meetup 9.30pm

Greetings,
Data Tribes Inc.

Join us for the fifth event at our new location: The Social Hub Amsterdam City!

Tech Drinks + Pitching by Tech Makers, powered by Qonto is our regular meet-up for the tech and entrepreneurial community in the Netherlands, hosted in Amsterdam.

Each month we bring together tech start-ups and individuals to have drink, pitch ideas, swap stories, share failed experiments, and plot a bit of world domination.

If you're interested in pitching during the event, please apply via this form.

Follow Tech Makers here for upcoming events, interesting people, and a little mischief

Looking for a cofounder? Try the matching platform we created, https://findyourcofounder.nl

Register for free and let's boost entrepreneurship in the Netherlands !!

By registering and attending this event, you acknowledge and consent that photos, videos and other media may be captured by the organizers and partners.
These materials may be used for documentation, promotional, and community purposes in connection with Tech Makers activities.

Join us at Waag on Thursday 4 June and experiment with radio technology around the Nieuwmarkt neighbourhood!

Join us on Saturday 6 June for Hyperlink at Waag Futurelab and discover how we can make technology work for our democracy again by participating in various workshops, exhibitions and talks. Create your own AI model, discover mesh technology and more.