Software Engineering Events in Manchester

Join us for Laravel Manchester #4 on Wednesday, 24th June 2026! 🎉

We'll be hosting regular meetups for developers, enthusiasts, and anyone interested in Laravel, with talks from Laravel lovers across the UK.

In this meetup, we'll be hearing from:

1. "Stepping up... the path from Senior Developer to Lead."
- Harry Messenger, Lead Developer at WEALTH at work
Ever wondered what it takes to make the transition from a well-rounded senior to becoming the tech lead of your own development team? Harry explains the skill areas, both hard and soft, which are essential to help you make the transition in a world of requirements, technical debt and, yes, the AI future...

2. "Is this the future of AI coding?"
- Ashley Hindle, Founder at FUEL
Straight off the back of delivering this talk at Laravel Live UK, Ashley will be sharing where AI coding is at, where it's going, and what that means for us. Looking at the tooling, SOTA models, open-weight models, pricing, approaches, and what the future of AI coding holds.

Agenda 🌟
17:45 - Arrival
18:30 - Welcome and talk #1
19:00 - Break
19:15 - Talk #2
19:45 - Drinks
20:30 - Event close

Your host
- Evan Burrell, Engineering Manager at Street Group

Location
Street Group HQ
11-13 Spear Street
Manchester
M1 1JU

See you there!

PS, big thanks to our sponsors, Tact, who'll be sorting food & drink for us (legends) and Street Group for providing the venue. Go give them a like on LinkedIn!

Details

PyDataMCR June Talks

THE TALKS

Empathy Data in LLM's - Part II - Lucy Stafford-Hughes

Building on her previous talk in Sept 25 on Empathy Data in LLM's, this talk explores the development of stable interaction patterns in large language models using anchoring and identity containers as a method looking at reducing hallucinations and improving response context and accuracy.

Lucy will look at observations across 2 different AI models on building stable patterns, including interaction with the latest research such as Anthropics work on emotion concepts and emotion vectors in Claude. The talk will also touch on why this matters for human-AI collaboration, and implications across future emergent behaviours.

Lucy is a consultant, writer, and AI researcher. Her areas of expertise include complex business systems, Agile ways of working, and human-AI interaction.

The meaning of lift - understanding marketing effectiveness - Josh Hayes (He/Him)

Data science is about more than just answering questions, it’s about understanding them. Often multiple stakeholders will ask the same, reasonable-sounding question, only for it to become clear that they actually all want something subtly different. The role of a data scientist in this case is to listen to the questions, understand what is actually being asked, and help the stakeholders to develop language to better communicate what they want to measure.

In this talk, Josh will talk through an example of this in marketing, discussing advertising spend, attribution modelling, and how we can measure and talk about the impact of campaigns.

Josh Hayes is a Senior Data Scientist at Autotrader, with nearly 10 years of experience across academia and industry. He holds a PhD in astrophysics, and has led teams of data scientists, analysts, and engineers at Natwest and Autotrader. Among various projects, he has led work calculating carbon emissions associated with financial lending, modelled evolution of the UK’s housing stock, and worked to improve real-time monitoring of key business metrics.

In addition to his professional work, Josh has a long history in public speaking to both technical and general audiences. He has featured at the Bluedot festival, worked as a contributor to BBC radio, and was a long-time presenter of the Jodcast astronomy podcast, alongside speaking at multiple academia and industry conferences.

LOCATION
We'll be at Autotrader, who are also kindly supplying catering. The capacity is limited to 50.
After the talks we'll all head somewhere local for some post-event socialising.

EVENT GUIDELINES
PyDataMCR is a strictly professional event, as such professional behaviour is expected.
PyDataMCR is a chapter of PyData, an educational program of NumFOCUS and thus abides by the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct: see https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct.html
Please take a moment to familiarise yourself with its contents.

ACCESSIBILITY
Toilets and venue are accessible.

SPONSORS
Thank you to NUMFocus for sponsoring Meetup and further support.
Thank you to Autotrader, Krakenflex and Horsefly Analytics for their ongoing support and sponsorship of PyDataMCR.

This summer OWASP Manchester is joining forces with SecureFlag to bring you a summertime capture the flag tournament
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All attendees will need to bring their own laptop in order to participate in the capture the flag activities.
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SecureFlag’s Secure-The-Flag tournaments transform security training from passive lectures
into an interactive, social event. Engineers compete to solve hands-on coding labs in a
time-bound challenge session.

Participants work inside fully provisioned hands-on development environments. They identify
vulnerabilities in running applications, then write and submit fixes that must pass both security
and functional tests. A live leaderboard tracks progress in real time, and the top three
performers win gifts from SecureFlag & our sponsor Anaplan.

Special thank you to SecureFlag for creating this host the CTF & all the background to make it a success

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Due to a corporate policy from the venue sponsor, to get into the venue & up to the event, you will need to register with your full name when signing up to the event AND show photo ID when checking in to the event on the night.
As we're still dealing with a large number of no-shows, if you don't attend without releasing your ticket, we may remove you from future events.
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Agenda:
6:00 - Open doors & networking & drinks
6:15 - Introduction & Kickoff
6:30 - Tournament begins
8:30 - Tournament wraps up & prizes announced
9:00 - Vacate venue -> to the pub for more socialising
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SPONSORS (Thank you for supporting our community!!)
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CoalFire - Venue Sponsor
Anaplan - Food & Drink Sponsor
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Join Tech Founders & Pros for a laid-back meetup to swap ideas, network, and spark new collabs in person!

Tech Founders & Professional Meet Up

Join us at the GM Digital Security Hub (DiSH) for the Tech Founders & Professional Meet Up on July 23, 2026 at 6:30 PM (BST).

This in-person event offers a valuable opportunity for technology founders and professionals to connect and engage in meaningful discussions within the industry in collaboration with Barclays Eaglelabs.