Software Engineering Events in Leeds

Location
1st Floor Meeting Room,
Platform,
New Station St
Leeds
LS1 4JB
https://w3w.co/fortunate.brings.lasts

Codurance has expanded to an office in Leeds and we are enjoying getting to know and support the community. Software Crafters Leeds offers a safe, fun space for the Leeds Development community to meet.

What's the format?
After a short intro, we'll get into groups/pairs or work solo - whatever people feel most comfortable with - and start building. We usually work through a kata (sometimes from this website), but we're open to suggestions, if there's something specific you'd like to cover, please let us know.

You choose how you want to work and what language you want to code in - this could be a language you are familiar with or new to. So far we have seen Python, Javascript, C#, Java, VB, Rust and Elixir. This session is about collaborating with others, becoming a better developer and building your network, in a fun, relaxed environment.

Throughout we will be sharing ideas, discussing best practices and using this as an opportunity to learn from our fellow coders. There's no need to be a professional developer - if you're interested, come along.

Food and drinks will be provided, with vegetarian and vegan options available. All you need to do is bring a machine if you'd like to code along.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me.

P.S. If anyone is interested in doing a short 10-15 min talk on a relevant topic at a future meetup, please let us know.

Welcome to our May 2026 meetup hosted by Parallax @ The Elbow Rooms. Please see the directions provided on this page.

We are pleased to welcome John Carney from PDFTA and PyDataMCR, and Obinna Iheanachor from Rotork and Wisabi Analytics.

If you would like to volunteer as a speaker for our 2026 programme please reach out to us at lds@jumpingrivers.com.

Schedule

18:00--18:45h: Refreshments (Food served on first come first served basis)

18:45--18:50: Welcome

18:50--19:25: Speaker 1: John Carney (PDFTA)
Building valuable Deterministic products in a Probabilistic world

It's very rare in software to build probabilistic systems. Almost everything that we've built has historically been deterministic. With the advent of LLMs, much more of what we build is either a probabilistic product or is being built probabilistically. This means we have to think about how we build things a bit differently.

John will share some techniques and principles to do this successfully

19:25--20:00: Speaker 2: Obinna Iheanachor (Rotork)
From £8,000 to £40: What I Learned Shipping AI in a UK Engineering Company

In this talk, Obinna will share a real-world case study of building a production AI system to extract data from 4,700+ engineering drawings, reducing costs from £8,000 to under £40. Using this example, he will show how combining deterministic methods with LLMs led to a system that was faster, cheaper, and more reliable than a cloud-only approach. The session focuses on practical lessons from deploying AI in production, including when to call a model, how to manage cost vs accuracy trade-offs, and what breaks at scale.

Bio 1: John Carney

John Carney is Principal Consultant at PDFTA, as an Independent Consultant he’s worked across Data Engineering, Machine Learning Engineering, Data Science, and AI engineering; from startups to corporate giants. From greenfield projects to mature business processes.

He focuses on delivering value from data projects, having delivered £10s of millions in value across various projects. John specialises in joining teams, identifying the most important priorities, and technical routes to deliver solutions to value.

John also does a lot of work in building community in the data space. As the co-founder of PyDataMCR, the current chair of PyData London Conference, the Chair of the PyData Strategic committee, and the co-founder of the Field of Play conference. He’s always busy, but always happy to chat about Open Source software, or data in industry.

Bio 2: Obinna Iheanachor

Obinna Iheanachor is an AI/Data Engineer at Rotork, where he builds production-grade AI and data systems for engineering applications. He is also the founder of Wisabi Analytics, where he creates content and tools focused on practical, production-ready AI for data professionals.

News and Announcements

Have a news item or announcement you'd like to make about upcoming data events or job opportunities in Leeds? Comment below or contact us directly (lds@jumpingrivers.com) and we'll do our best to circulate this information at the end of the session.

Please contact the organisers if you would like to volunteer as a speaker for future events.

Join us this May for a special Leeds JS event focused entirely on web performance — one of the most critical (and often overlooked) aspects of modern web development.
We’re thrilled to welcome Harry Roberts (csswizardry.com), an award-winning web performance consultant and international speaker. Harry has worked with organisations like Google, the BBC, and the Financial Times to diagnose and fix real-world performance issues, helping teams build faster, more efficient websites.

Expect deep, practical insights into:

• Diagnosing real-world performance bottlenecks
• Building faster, more resilient frontends
• Making performance a core part of your engineering culture

We’ll also be joined by a Developer Relations expert from Leaning Technologies, bringing a unique perspective on high-performance web apps, WebAssembly, and pushing the limits of what’s possible in the browser.

⚡ Whether you’re a frontend engineer, full-stack dev, or just performance-curious, this session will give you actionable techniques you can apply immediately.

Agenda (approx):

• Welcome & intros
• Talk: Ana Gabriela Reyna Flores Leaning Technologies DevRel
• Talk: Harry Roberts — Thinking Like a Performance Engineer
• Q&A + community discussion
• Networking & drinks 🍻