Software Engineering Events in Liverpool

For our July meet-up, we will be welcoming Kseniia Korostelova, who will be delivering a talk on Modernising a Legacy .NET Platform Without Stopping Delivery

Modernizing legacy systems sounds exciting in architecture diagrams. But reality is usually much messier.

Tightly coupled services, shared databases, hidden dependencies, operational risk, delivery pressure, and years of accumulated technical debt make large-scale modernization far more complex than simply “moving to microservices” or “upgrading to .NET Core”.

In this talk, I’ll share lessons learned from modernizing a large-scale .NET platform operating in a high-throughput, highly regulated environment serving millions of users and processing thousands of transactions per second — all while continuing to deliver features and support live production workloads.

Rather than a big-bang rewrite, we adopted an incremental modernization strategy:

modernizing APIs and service boundaries,
extracting selected capabilities into dedicated services,
introducing orchestration layers,
and progressively migrating parts of the platform from .NET Framework to .NET Core.

I’ll cover both the technical and organizational realities of the journey:

what worked well,
what became unexpectedly difficult,
where microservices helped,
where they introduced new complexity,
and why modernization is often more about managing risk and dependencies than technology itself.

This session is not a step-by-step migration tutorial.

It is a practical, experience-driven look at how engineering teams evolve large legacy systems at scale without pausing delivery, disrupting production, or rewriting everything from scratch.

Food

We have a selection of food available including Vegan options but if you'd like to know more please drop one of our organisers a message before the event via the group message forum. (https://secure.meetup.com/messages/)

If you would need assistance to leave the building in the event of an evacuation then please let us know via the group message forum. (https://secure.meetup.com/messages/)

Schedule

Doors open from 18:00
Pizza at 18:20
Intro and welcome 18:40
Speaker Starts 19:00

Close ~21:00 (Don't feel bad if you have to leave early for a train/bus/lift home - no one will be offended)

Live Steam Link
https://youtube.com/live/SO1jaR-hJ_A?feature=share

(Please like, subscribe, and share to show your support)

Travel

http://dotnetliverpool.org.uk/how-to-find-us

Train - James Street station is a 10 minute walk from the Lab. Liverpool Lime Street is approx 15-20 minutes walking distance.

Driving - Underground parking available at Liverpool One.

The new home for building a stronger Liverpool Tech community through real lessons in Product, Engineering, and Design.

Liverpool's tech scene is full of brilliant people doing brilliant things.

Build Better Liverpool exists to bring them together.

What this is

This is a community event for Tech professionals across Liverpool and the wider North West, built around one simple belief: when our disciplines actually talk to each other, we build better.

But this isn't just a one-off event, this is the start of a community that supports each other, raises the bar and helps change the face of tech across the North West.

Who is this for?

Anyone working in or around digital product delivery! Whether you're an Engineer, Product Manager, Designer, Delivery Lead, or just someone who cares about building things well.

What to expect:

🎤 Talks from Engineering, Product and Design leaders

🗣️ Panel discussion with audience Q&A

🤝 Genuine networking with people who get it

🌍 A community that doesn't stop when the event does

Space is limited. If you've been waiting for a reason to get involved in Liverpool's tech community - this is it!

For our August meet-up, we will be welcoming Dieter Gobeyn, who will be delivering a talk on "What does an agent actually cost? Designing for token economics before you ship"

Most agent demos skip the question: what does an agent actually cost to run? A REST call costs the same every time. An agent doesn't, since the same prompt varies with reasoning depth, tool calls, retries and context growth. We'll map what you really pay for in Microsoft Foundry beyond model tokens and then look at several architectural options for controlling spend.. plus when NOT to build an agent at all. Expect some live demos in AI Foundry portal, and you'll leave with a FinOps checklist.

Food

We have a selection of food available including Vegan options but if you'd like to know more please drop one of our organisers a message before the event via the group message forum. (https://secure.meetup.com/messages/)

If you would need assistance to leave the building in the event of an evacuation then please let us know via the group message forum. (https://secure.meetup.com/messages/)

Schedule

Doors open from 18:00
Pizza at 18:20
Intro and welcome 18:40
Speaker Starts 19:00

Close ~21:00 (Don't feel bad if you have to leave early for a train/bus/lift home - no one will be offended)

Live Steam Link
https://youtube.com/live/ndE5Ab4Ju8E

(Please like, subscribe, and share to show your support)

Travel

http://dotnetliverpool.org.uk/how-to-find-us

Train - James Street station is a 10 minute walk from the Lab. Liverpool Lime Street is approx 15-20 minutes walking distance.

Driving - Underground parking available at Liverpool One.