Tech Events in Amsterdam

Cloud conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Waag is part of the Amsterdam Museum Night. Join us for various workshops, performances and a visit to the exhibition Fluid Futures.

From micro-organisms and seaweed cultivation to wastewater treatment and ecological restoration: water connects life forms, technologies, infrastructures and communities. In Fluid Futures, artists explore these complex relationships and explore how people, technology and aquatic ecosystems can flourish together.

Do iOS 2026. After 7 successful editions in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 you are again invited you to Amsterdam to celebrate iOS development in all its aspects.

Dates will be November 11 and 12 for the conference.
The workshops will be on the 10th.

Location: NEMO Science Museum.

Do iOS is a two day conference in November 2026 in Amsterdam. With an optional separate workshop the day before the conference.

More details https://do-ios.com

Separate ticket purchase required.

Who is accountable when an autonomous agent makes the call?

Part of AI at Work, a series hosted by Isabel Shestopal and Epicenter.

When an AI agent places an order, approves a refund or acts on customer data, who is responsible? The coworker using it, the company deploying it or the provider behind it? And what role should government play in setting the rules?

In this edition of AI at Work, we’ll explore what the EU AI Act means for businesses and the people working in them. What should employees check before trusting an AI decision? What must companies put in place, and who steps in when something goes wrong?

We’ll also discuss the business case for safe AI. Can companies earn customer confidence and win business by showing that their AI is secure, reliable and under control? What does that take in practice, and what does it cost?

Finally, we’ll explore AI sovereignty: where companies build and run their AI, who can access their data and what happens if a provider changes its terms or becomes unavailable. How much dependence is a business comfortable with?

Join us for a practical conversation about using AI responsibly, sharing accountability and knowing when to keep a human in charge.

Panel

• Sohrab Hosseini, Co-Founder / CEO @ Orq.ai
• **Alexander Galt, **Digital Ethics Leader @IKEA & Board member at MyData
• Joseph Bianchi, Consulting founders on ai, org ops, & structural risk

Facilitated by

• Isabel Shestopal, Strategy Leader @IKEA
• Joey Bayer, Head of International Community, Epicenter Group

After a break, we're bringing the DevOps Amsterdam community together again.

Join us on November 10 at ING Cedar in Amsterdam for an evening of food, drinks, conversations, and three talks exploring some of the challenges shaping DevOps and platform engineering today.

And there's another reason we're excited to get the community together again: we're working towards DevOpsDays Amsterdam 2027. We'll have more to share about that soon. 👀

For this meetup, we'll go from AI-assisted incident investigation, through 23 real-world ways of using an AI agent in a platform engineering team, to the lessons learned from organizations building their own internal developer platforms.

Whether you're working in DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, cloud, operations, software engineering, or just curious about where all of this is heading, we'd love to see you there.

Food and drinks will be provided, and there'll be plenty of time to catch up with old friends and meet new ones.

Agenda
17:30 – 18:30 | Doors open, food & drinks
18:30 – 18:35 | Welcome
18:35 – 19:05 | Building AIOps with an Ironman Mindset – Nikhil Gupta
19:05 – 19:35 | 23 Ways to Use an AI Agent in a Platform Engineering Team at RTL NL – Anna Kosek & Myroslava Tarcha
19:35 – 20:05 | 7 Ways to Fail at Building a Platform – Michael Coté
20:05 – 21:00 | Drinks, networking & socializing
21:00 | End

Building AIOps with an Ironman Mindset by Nikhil Gupta

The Ironman triathlon is about endurance, disciplined preparation and controlled transitions. Flow and reliability are no different.
When an incident starts, responders need to understand customer impact, identify affected dependencies and decide what is safe to do next. But the evidence they need is often scattered across dashboards, deployment records, service catalogs, runbooks and other knowledge sources. Under pressure, responders have to reconstruct that operational context.
In this talk, Nikhil Gupta explores an AIOps design that continuously prepares this context and makes it available when it's needed.
Using a payment-service incident as an example, he'll explore investigations triggered by confirmed customer impact versus those triggered by an earlier anomaly. We'll see how an AI agent can choose read-only tools, collect evidence and propose verification steps while keeping the human responder responsible for operational decisions.

What you'll take away

• How to identify context gaps that force responders to reconnect evidence manually during incidents
• How to separate deterministic context preparation from probabilistic AI reasoning and human decisions
• How to bound agent investigations using read-only access, tool-call budgets, stop conditions and evidence trails
• Ways to evaluate AI-assisted investigations using diagnosis accuracy, responder rejection, time to first validated fact and lead time before confirmed impact

About Nikhil Gupta
Nikhil is a Product & Engineering Leader with passion for AI and Platform Engineering and is based in Amsterdam. Nikhil has experienced first hand how Platform Engineering and DevOps transformations play out in organizations of very different scale, from 20+ teams to 2000+ teams. Nikhil is leading the AIOps and Observability Engineering teams at ING. Nikhil like to write about Leadership, Platform Engineering, Observability and AI. You can follow him on LinkedIn and on Medium.com

🤖 23 Ways to Use an AI Agent in a Platform Engineering Team at RTL NL by Anna Kosek and Myroslava Tarcha

At RTL Netherlands, the team built Thanos, an AI agent that started life as a Slack chatbot and evolved into a platform engineering agent with more than 20 capabilities.

It reviews pull requests on Azure DevOps and GitHub, queries Grafana using natural language, generates architecture diagrams, manages work items and release notes, analyses build failures and supports automated incident root-cause analysis.

But the most interesting lesson isn't simply what the AI can do.
It's the human-in-the-loop patterns, identity-aware operations and trust model that made engineers actually want to use it.

In this fast-paced session, Anna Kosek will take us through 23 real-world use cases, complete with practical examples, honest failures and patterns you can take back to your own engineering teams.
No infinity stones required. Just a Kubernetes cluster and an open mind. 😉

About Anna Kosek
Engineering Manager Cloud & Data Platform at RTL Nederland.

🏗️ 7 Ways to Fail at Building a Platform by
Michael Coté

Building your own internal developer platform can look attractive. But when you build it, you also own it. Suddenly, you're in the business of developing and maintaining a product alongside your actual business.

Drawing on 10 years of platform engineering case studies from large organizations, Michael Coté will walk us through seven common risks of building your own platform:

Expansive scopes. Underestimating cost. Project mindsets. Death by customization. Skills. Security and compliance. Resume-driven development.

More importantly, he'll look at what organizations can do differently, including:

• Discovering the full scope of platform engineering across organizational silos
• Calculating costs and performance end-to-end
• Evaluating build-versus-buy decisions for internal developer platforms
• Creating a platform engineering strategy and staffing plan
• Applying product management thinking to platform engineering

Learn from organizations that have already encountered these problems so, hopefully, you don't have to repeat them yourself.

About Michael Coté
Michael Coté studies how large organizations improve the way they build software to run and grow their businesses. He's been an industry analyst at RedMonk and 451 Research, worked in corporate strategy and M&A, and was previously a programmer.
He's also the author of Changing Mindsets, Monolithic Transformation and The Business Bottleneck, and co-hosts podcasts including Software Defined Talk and Software Defined Interviews.

AI-Powered Review Analysis with DuckDB and Hugging Face: Build an Automated Customer Feedback Pipeline

*** HANDS-ON WORKSHOP, BRING YOUR LAPTOP! ***

Notes:

• Space is limited, so sign up for your spot, and note it is from 12:00 to 17:00. If you're not going to make it, please unregister.
• The workshop is on the 4th floor, rooms 04.508 and 04.509.
• Bring a photo ID for check in at reception.
• Lunch and drinks are included.

Abstract:
Ratings are slipping, thousands of reviews are piling up, and nobody knows why. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll build a pipeline that finds out automatically.

Working with 2.1 million real Amazon reviews from the Hugging Face Hub, you’ll use DuckDB to pinpoint which products are declining. Then you’ll connect that SQL to an LLM with Gradio’s gr.Workflow, so the model reads only the complaints that matter and reports the themes behind them. Finally, you’ll deploy it as a live Hugging Face Space, backed by Storage Buckets and callable as an API.

You’ll leave with a working app and a pattern you can apply to your own customer data!

Speaker: Pratik Patel is an AI Data Engineer and Developer Advocate at Hugging Face. He has written 3 books on programming, Cloud and OSS. An all around software and hardware nerd with experience in the healthcare, telecom, financial services, and startup sectors. He's co-organizer of Enterprise AI Atlanta and the Atlanta Java User Group, and conference chairperson for Devnexus. He also writes about his knowledge (and adventures) in tech, is a frequent speaker at tech events, and master builder of nachos.

The November event will be hosted by TiDB, powered by PingCAP.

Theme is distributed/scalable transactional database solutions.

Program:

• 18:00 - Doors open / refreshments / drinks
• 18:15-18:20 - Welcome
• 18:20-18:40 - PostgreSQL starter edition on TiDB Cloud / db9 - Ian Zhai, TiDB
• 18:40-19:10 - Food / drinks / networking
• 19:10-19:40 - TiDB Transactions on Object Store - Mattias Jonsson/Daniël van Eeden, TiDB
• 19:40-19:50 - Short break
• 19:50-20:20 - Sharding PostgreSQL with Neki - Rohit Nayak, PlanetScale
• 20:20-21:00 - Q&A / discussion / networking / food /
• 21:00 - End of meetup

Ian - AI agent wrangler, building db9 and asking for evidence when the agents say “done.”
db9: Building a Database with Autonomous Agents
Meet db9, a PostgreSQL-compatible database written in Rust with AI agents. I’ll share how we tackle gameable tests, shared blind spots, and the gap between passing checks and a working database, turning autonomous coding into reliable engineering.

Mattias & Daniël - Long timers in databases, especially in the MySQL ecosystem, since 2021 at TiDB, powered by PingCAP
Last year we introduced TiDB X, the new evolution of TiDB on cloud, where we integrate an object store as the core storage. We will go through what benefits its gives and how we changed some core part of the database architecture to leverage it, like LSM improvements with offloaded compaction, Index creation and more.

Rohit Nayak, Core Vitess team member and maintainer for six years and now a founding member of the Neki team, sharding PostgreSQL at PlanetScale.
Neki is a distributed database solution built on Postgres. The talk will give an overview of how we architected Neki from first principles to bring Vitess-level scale and reliability to PostgreSQL workloads.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) meetup in Amsterdam, Netherlands

DISCLAIMER: We are experiencing an overwhelming number of subscription requests. We won't be able to accommodate all of them, as we have a strict capacity of 200 seats. We will make a decision on approval around Nov 2 and open a waitlist. Please de-register if you are not coming. Thank you for your understanding.

We will prioritize founders -> investors -> corporates -> policy -> academics, striking a balance for representation of all groups.

Day 1 of the ChemAI conference.

Artificial Intelligence is driving a fundamental shift in chemistry and materials science — from intuition-led research to predictive design and increasingly autonomous laboratories.

We invite you to an exclusive gathering of top voices and actual builders discussing scaling businesses, industrial innovation, and strategic investments. 30% Vision, 70% Execution.

Hear from:

• Prof. Max Welling - CTO at CuspAI

• Prof. Steven Latré - VP of AI at IMEC

• Dr. Greg de Temmerman - Director Deeptech at TechLeap

• Dr. Dmitri Jarnikov - Sr Director Data Science at Prosus

• Dr. Aaike van Vugt - CEO at VSParticle

• Dr. Maksym Plakhotnyuk - CEO at ATLANT 3D

• Dr. Maryam Ghadrdan - CEO at Planck Technologies

• Dr. Stefano Martiniani - NYU, co-founder of Matterstack.ai

• Dr. Hanne Falsig - Scientist at TOPSOE

• Investor Panel by Hello Tomorrow with

• Yoram Wijngaarde - Founder & CEO Dealroom

• Johan Stins - Sr Investment Manager Invest-NL

• Johannes Triebs - PartnerU2V VC

In partnership with Techleap, Hello Tomorrow, TTT-AI, Startup Amsterdam, Amsterdam Chemistry Network, and AmsterdamAI.

If you’re joining us for ChemAI Deep Tech Builders, why stop there? Join us for the Conference on Nov 13 www.acnetwork.nl/chemai

Note: When approaching the event capacity (200), we might prioritize those who already have a ticket for Day 2.

ChemAI was founded as an independent, international platform to connect technology leaders, industry innovators, and top academics shaping this transformation. It is where AI meets real-world chemical and materials discovery, offering you real OMG-moments. Check the winter Amsterdam edition, and the summer New York edition, at www.chemai.world

What are open social media, and how do they differ from the platforms we use today? Find out at the Open Socials Club on Thursday 12 November, the helpdesk where you can ask questions and get practical help using open social media.

Hi Product People,
We are excited to invite you to our next event!
In this session, we will discuss how product leaders can grow products and organizations without losing focus, speed, or alignment. Through practical lessons on scaling teams and leading through outcomes, the talks will show how to turn strategy into meaningful impact—not just more features or faster delivery.

ABOUT THE TALKS

• The growth playbook: what you need to scale your product, and your org

Speaker: Francesca Cortesi, CPO at Vend

Most product orgs know they need to scale, but they keep hitting the same walls: constant pivoting that kills momentum, teams that slow down instead of speed up, and innovation that feels like feature bloat.
Drawing from scaling some of the leading marketplaces in the Nordics, Francesca will share her hard-learned playbook: why focus beats flexibility when finding market-fit, how to structure for speed without chaos, and when to stop optimizing features and start rethinking the product.

Francesca is a product leader who has made impact, innovation, and sustainable growth the cornerstones of her career. With nearly two decades scaling technology-driven companies across the Nordics, she has led major marketplaces, online communities, and e-commerce businesses from early potential to scale.

• Leading through Outcomes

Speaker: Alexandru Bleau, Senior Product Manager at E.ON

When nobody reports to you, the outcome is your authority. In this talk I'll show how leading through outcomes puts everyone on equal ground, turns a nod in planning into a real commitment, and gives you the most effective way to say no. And now that AI lets us build the wrong thing ten times faster, it matters more than ever.
Alexandru is a seasoned product leader, currently @E.ON One working as a Senior Product Manager. He has been building and developing products and services for 15 years, from advertising products, online services, and mobile apps to games, physical, educational, and travel products.

SCHEDULE

5:45 Arrive, grab a bite & drink

6:15 Welcome from ProductTank Amsterdam team and Funda
6:25 - 8:00 Talks and Q&A with speakers

Afterward, we’ll have plenty of time to mingle and talk product over drinks.

Location, Food & Drinks are sponsored by Funda. Thank you for supporting ProductTank Amsterdam!

AI has found its way into almost every corner of our work. It can help us move faster, but what happens when efficiency comes at the cost of critical thinking, sustainability, or responsibility for the products we create?

For World Usability Day 2026, we're bringing together three talks on how to use AI more responsibly. We'll discuss sustainability, critical thinking, and the ethical questions that come with using AI in our work.

TALKS & SPEAKERS

1. Taking sustainability into account when using AI by Daniela Romero Valdes, UX Researcher, and Jiawei van Kleef, Senior Product Designer at Fastned.

Fastned is building a fast-charging network to help people drive without fossil fuels. But AI also consumes energy. Daniela and Jiawei will share how Fastned's UX team evaluated AI tools, set principles for using them, and introduced AI into their daily research and design work as a co-pilot, not an autopilot.
Daniela works across teams on design validation, EV driver personas, market research, and strategic initiatives.
Jiawei works on the Fastned app and design system, focusing on using AI to make design work more efficient without compromising quality.

2. The illusion of understanding by Natalia Arsand, independent designer, mentor, and founder of Eixo.

Drawing on cognitive science, Natalia will explore how we make sense of information, what we might lose when we let AI do the thinking for us, and how to recognise when AI is actually helping.
Natalia spent ten years at Booking working in product design, design systems, and design operations. Now she helps designers and product leaders deal with complex challenges.

3. From tech ethics to AI ethics: What should we ask ourselves now? by Katherine Elizabeth Bustos Rodas, technology leader.

Ethical questions in technology existed long before AI. What has changed is the speed, scale, and impact of the products we create. Through three real-life cases, Katherine will discuss ethical challenges, from encouraging greener behaviour to protecting critical thinking and designing AI that people confide in.
Katherine has over ten years of experience in product, engineering, and AI. She has worked at TomTom and Felyx and currently volunteers as Head of Europe for Women in AI.

HOST
Fastned is a European EV fast-charging company building a network of charging stations to make electric driving easier and help reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

PROGRAM
18:00 Doors open
18:30 Talks + Q&A
19:30 Drinks & networking

📸 Please keep in mind that there will be pictures taken at the event. They will be uploaded to the meetup page and might be used on social media.

Join us to share ideas, challenge assumptions, and discuss how we can use AI more responsibly, both as individuals and as organisations. Save your spot!

The Whale, Index Ventures and Puzzle Ventures are hosting a small founder dinner in the city centre of Amsterdam.

It’s an invite-only dinner for 15 founders. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Your hosts,
Bastian Hasslinger (Index), Gloria Baeuerlein (Puzzle), Bas van den Brande (Whale)

Join us at AI House Amsterdam for an afternoon bringing together emerging AI & Robotics founders with investors, corporates, entrepreneurs and key players from the European innovation ecosystem.

Hosted as part of the European AI Innovation Month, the event will create a space to discover new ideas, meet emerging founders and connect with people shaping the future of AI and Robotics in Europe.

At the heart of the afternoon will be the Grand Finale of the EIT AI Entrepreneurs Lab 2026, where selected founders will take the stage following an intensive five-day journey across Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam.

Expect founder pitches, perspectives from the AI ecosystem, interactive moments and opportunities to connect with investors, corporates, founders and ecosystem leaders.

Who should join?

The event is particularly relevant for:

• Investors and venture capital professionals looking to discover emerging AI & Robotics founders
• Corporates interested in innovation, technology and startup collaboration
• AI & Robotics founders and entrepreneurs
• Universities, researchers and innovation organisations
• Ecosystem builders and community leaders
• Anyone actively contributing to Europe's AI and Robotics ecosystem

Agenda:

13:30 — Check-in

14:00 – Official programme begins

14:05 – Welcome by Orestis Trasanidis (EIT AI & Robotics Community / 28DIGITAL)

14:10 – Keynote by Dmitri Jarnikov (AI House / Prosus)

14:25 – Founder journey showcase: from Paris to Brussels to Amsterdam

14:35 – Keynote: "Mindset of a Champion"

14:50 – Startup pitches, Part 1 (3 min per pitch)

15:25– Break

15:35 – Startup pitches, Part 2

16:10 – Jury deliberation

16:30 – Winners announced

17:00 – Closing and networking

About the AI Entrepreneurs Lab

The EIT AI Entrepreneurs Lab brings together a selected cohort of emerging AI & Robotics entrepreneurs for an intensive founder journey across Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, combining entrepreneurial development, expert engagement, ecosystem exposure and connections across Europe.

Amsterdam marks the final stop of this journey, bringing the founders together with the wider ecosystem at AI House.

Places are limited.

Registration represents an expression of interest. To ensure a relevant and diverse audience, participation will be confirmed by the organising team following registration.

We look forward to bringing the AI & Robotics ecosystem together in Amsterdam.

🤖 AI Safety Discussion Group

📍 Location: Science Park 904, Room TBD
🕠 Time: 5:30 PM

Topic will be announced 2 days before the session! RSVP to see the update.

Read the topic's report, linked in this description later!

SAIN Amsterdam hosts weekly discussion events about AI safety topics. Topics range from scientific papers, to articles or incidents reports, but always fall within the general category of AI safety.

Everyone is welcome, whether you are deeply involved in AI safety or simply curious about the topic!

Want to have a say in the topic we'll discuss next time? Join the community here: https://safeainetherlands.org/community

Looking forward to seeing you soon!

We are delighted to invite you to the first session of the SC900 Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals series. This series of sessions aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the concepts and principles of security, compliance, and identity within the Microsoft ecosystem.

The session will cover the core principles and best practices related to security, compliance, and identity management. Please make sure you sign for the 4 sessions of SC900, this is only the first one :)

Date: 16th November
Time: Walk-in from 14:45, Session starts promptly at 15:00
Duration: 15:00 - 17:30
Location: DTX Wezelkoog 11, 1822 BL Alkmaar
Speaker: to be announced
Mode: In-person or Virtual
Teams Link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_N2FjMmEyMDItZDhmZC00YmQyLWE1ZGMtOGIxMTExOWExN2E1%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2272f988bf-86f1-41af-91ab-2d7cd011db47%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22b2cebb63-5b64-4066-8b03-f3b920d40eb4%22%7d

Please note that In-person/online attendance options are available. If you wish to attend in-person, kindly ensure your presence at the specified venue 15 minutes before the session start time. For the hybrid or virtual option, just join the link above.

Should you have any further inquiries or require assistance, please don't hesitate to contact us at www.linkedin.com/in/ilseparra/

The Software House and The Financial News Network invite you to a morning of expert talks, honest conversations with peers from the industry, and a good breakfast with a view over Amsterdam.

We’d love to see you there!

● **9:00 **| Registration, coffee, good food and even better conversations

● **9:30 | **Presentation: "One Year of Building with AI. What Worked, What Didn't" by Marek Gajda, COO @ The Software House

● **10:00 | **Quick quiz: win AirPods, a Kindle and more

● 10:05 | Panel Discussion: "One Year In. How Fintech Teams (Don’t) Build with AI" [Panelists from: Finom, Rabobank & Uber]

● 10:35–12:00 | Coffee, Food & Networking

• Sendil Nellaiyapen, Engineering Manager II @ Uber
• Koen van Gilst, Principal Engineer at @Rabobank
• Dmitry Ivanov, CTO at Finom
• Marek Gajda, COO & co-Founder, ex-CTO @ The Software House

You can build a fintech product over a weekend with AI. That's the promise many tech leaders hear.

At this Business Breakfast, Marek Gajda, COO at The Software House, will share what one year of AI-driven software delivery taught TSH teams. He'll bring examples from projects for banks & fintechs with the wins, the setbacks, and the new problems that replaced the old ones.

You'll get the full picture:

● where AI speeds up delivery,

● where it creates new work,

● and what changes for companies that handle money and customer data.

We will continue the discussion during a panel moderated by Michał Szehidewicz AI & Fintech Strategy Consultant @ The Software House. Product and technology leaders who spent the past year building with AI will share their own experience.

Did they face the same challenges, or different ones?

Join in with the latest Amsterdam JUG Meetup at Flagsmith, Plantage Kerklaan 35, 1018 CV Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Would you like to be a speaker at this event? Send a mail with your proposal to amsterdamjug@googlegroups.com.

Agenda

• 18:00 - 18:30: Doors open, food, and drinks
• 18:30 - 19:15: Fun with Flags: How OpenFeature Solves Your Feature Flag Headaches (Simon Schrottner, Flagsmith)
• 19:15 - 20:00 No Country For Old APIs - Wrapping Legacy Java Services As MCP Tools Without Rewriting Them (Željko Kozina, Chronomill)
• 20:00 - 20:45 When Silence Becomes a Security Vulnerability (Sarah Gruneisen, Xebia)
• 20:45 - 21:00 Wrap Up

Abstracts

Fun with Flags: How OpenFeature Solves Your Feature Flag Headaches (Simon Schrottner, Flagsmith)

Feature flags have revolutionized the software delivery lifecycle, enabling teams to decouple releases from deployments and create a more agile development process. They're often hailed as one of the key practices in modern software development—at least in theory.

However, as systems grow in complexity, so do the challenges associated with feature flagging. From supporting multiple languages and managing targeted evaluations to avoiding vendor lock-in and safely decommissioning obsolete code, what initially seems like a straightforward problem can quickly become daunting.

The OpenFeature community is tackling these challenges head-on by providing vendor-agnostic SDKs and a suite of powerful tools designed to simplify the feature flagging experience. Join me as we explore the common pitfalls of feature flagging and discover how OpenFeature can help bring the fun back into this critical aspect of software development.

No Country For Old APIs - Wrapping Legacy Java Services As MCP Tools Without Rewriting Them (Željko Kozina, Chronomill)

Somewhere in your estate is a Java service old enough to vote. REST endpoints by the dozen, one SOAP relic nobody will admit to, session auth, and the person who understood it all has retired. It works, which is why nobody touches it. And now the business wants AI agents to use it.

Every enterprise is under pressure to connect AI agents to systems that were never designed for them, yet most MCP material assumes a greenfield project or a toy demo.

This session addresses the situation attendees actually face: a brownfield estate of REST and SOAP services that cannot be rewritten. It is demo-driven, built on the official MCP Java SDK, Spring AI, and Spring for GraphQL, and it is honest about the failure modes: tool sprawl from auto-generation, auth translation, oversized responses, and unsafe retries against non-idempotent writes.

When Silence Becomes a Security Vulnerability (Sarah Gruneisen, Xebia)

Security conversations often begin with technical controls: secure pipelines, dependency scanning, credentials, guardrails, monitoring, and incident response. But a vulnerability may emerge long before any tool can detect it, in the moment someone notices a weak signal and decides that speaking feels too dangerous.

Drawing on more than two decades in software engineering and engineering leadership, Sarah Gruneisen explores the human conditions that determine whether critical information reaches the system at all. She introduces a five-layer security model built from the foundation upward:

1. Human safety
2. Courageous communication
3. Technical controls
4. Detection, response, and recovery
5. Learning and governance

Through stories, practical examples, and insights from leadership psychology, Sarah reveals how hierarchy, fear, belonging, nervous-system responses, and team culture shape security outcomes.

This session does not replace technical security expertise. It exposes what technical controls depend upon: people who can question assumptions, disclose mistakes, challenge authority, and say, “I think we missed something,” before a weak signal becomes an incident.

Participants will leave with a practical framework for helping truth travel through their teams and for making human safety part of the security architecture.

Bios

Simon builds durable standards and practices so teams can learn, grow, and operate without depending on any single vendor, tool, or person. He is passionate about developer experience, open standards, and building communities where people help each other grow. He regularly speaks at conferences and mentor individuals taking their first steps in the open source world. He is very open to conversations about open source, feature flagging, observability, and what comes next.

Željko has spent over 15 years in IT, mostly consulting for banks and insurance companies, with a focus on modernising legacy systems. Along the way, he developed deep expertise in JVM-based technologies and has become a go-to voice on topics such as API design. When he's not untangling someone else's technical debt, he's happily creating his own through a growing collection of personal projects he enthusiastically starts and occasionally finishes. Željko is passionate about sharing knowledge in a way that actually sticks, which usually means keeping things practical, a little entertaining, and free of unnecessary jargon. He is a GraphQL Ambassador and a member of the GraphQL AI Working Group.

Sarah brings a vibrant history rooted in both technology and transformation. She began developing software back in the late ’90s. Since then, she has embraced agile methodologies since 2003, adopted Scrum in 2008, and led with frameworks like Liberating Structures since 2017. Her leadership journey formally began in 2008, and she has been training leaders since 2019 through her company, Avagasso Coaching, where she runs the Leadership Landing program twice a year.

Free Info Session at VU Amsterdam | Open to Students, Supervisors and the Wider Community

Are you looking for a thesis project, a supervisor, a collaboration opportunity, or simply a way to contribute to making AI safer? Come meet Safe AI Netherlands (SAIN) and discover how you can get involved.

Explore opportunities ranging from research projects to other initiatives, meet the people behind SAIN Amsterdam, and find out how your interests and skills could contribute to safe AI.

No project idea yet? No problem. Come curious, leave inspired.

The session will be hosted by SAIN Amsterdam's Research Operations people, Satchit and Michele, and SAIN Amsterdam's Director Ana. We will focus on SAIN's research opportunities, but feel free to ask about our courses, events and other project opportunities!

The potential thesis projects *VU Students *could do through SAIN affiliated researchers include:

• How memes, reels and headlines shape public narratives about AI
• Reward hacking in LLM agents trained on verifiable rewards
• AI safety in universal AI using mathematical model of maximally intelligent AI (in collaboration with AIXI labs in London)

• Find all of SAIN's supervisors here: https://safeainetherlands.org/research

You can browse by their name, research / project topic and location!

2. Wether you would like to be supervised or be a supervisor, you can fill in this form: https://sainonboard.fillout.com/new

If you have questions, send us an email at projects@safeainetherlands.org or, even better, come talk to us in person at this info session!

Wonderful is valued at $5 billion and operates in more than 35 countries. Its secret weapon? Forward deployed engineers, embedded directly within customers to make AI work in production.

On November 18, Sako Arts, CTO Netherlands at Wonderful, joins Whale for a fireside chat with Joris (leading Deployment at Duna) about all things forward deployed engineering.

We'll cover:

• What marks a good forward deployed engineer
• Why embedding with customers beats one-size-fits-all SaaS in an AI-first environment
• Navigating white-glove service and scalability
• managing executives and day-to-day stakeholders
• How to structure change management

Agenda

• 17:00 – Doors open
• 17:15 – Fireside chat & Q&A with Sako
• 18:00–19:00 – Drinks and bites

**About **Sako Arts
CTO Netherlands at Wonderful, the AI platform putting agents on the front lines of customer service across voice, chat, and email

This September, Wonderful raised a $550 million Series C led by Insight Partners, more than doubling its valuation to $5 billion in under six months. Before Wonderful, Sako co-founded FruitPunch AI.

About Whale 🐳
We bring the next generation of operators and founders together - through expert-led sessions, dinner and hackathons.

Join our technical meetup for AI engineers & founders!

We share the latest AI devtools, APIs, RAG & Agent frameworks, techniques, models and much more!

// FOR WHO

• ✅ Anyone actively building with Generative AI
• ✅ Devs, Product peeps, Data lovers, ML engineers, Founders
• ⚠️ Basic LLM knowledge required to fully enjoy the talks!*

// AGENDA

17:30 👋 Walk-in

18:00 🍕 Pizza

18:30 💻 TBA

18:45 🎤 TBA

19:00 💻 TBA

19:15 🤝 Drinks & Networking

21:00 🔚 End

Your blood test results sit in a PDF. Your sleep data lives in one app, your steps in another. Most of us never connect the dots. Some people already use AI to do exactly that.

**Main speaker: **Mike Alexandrovski

Mike founded Dostavista in 2012 and grew it into Borzo, a same-day delivery company operating in 10 countries and headquartered in Amsterdam. Now he applies the same engineering mindset to his own health.

He built a personal health protocol system with AI that combines ~1,000 biomarkers, his full genome, wearables and MRI scans. It breaks the body into 100+ subsystems and generates one protocol for diet, supplements, exercise, lifestyle and checkups. He’ll walk us through it live, including where AI fell short and where human judgment still mattered.

**Also on stage: **Rafaela Buena

Rafaela is the founder of Gigi, an AI gut health companion for women. After years of gut symptoms no one could explain, she built the tool she wished existed, herself, with AI, from lived experience. She also runs AI workshops and coaching, after 15+ years in communications, brand and storytelling.

She’ll share her story: what AI helped her see, what she built, and what she learned along the way. Her experience, not a product demo.

Then it’s your turn: open mic

We’re opening the stage to 2 to 3 more people who use AI for their health or well-being. Reading lab results. Tracking sleep. Managing energy. Staying sane while everything around us speeds up.

15 minutes each. Real experiences only. No pitches, no medical advice.

Want to share? Pick the "I want to be a speaker" ticket and describe your story in 1 to 2 sentences. We'll confirm speakers by November 11.

Agenda

• 17:30 Doors open, drinks
• 18:00 Mike Alexandrovski: live walkthrough of his AI health protocol system
• 18:30 Rafaela Buena: an AI context layer for women’s gut health
• 18:45 Open mic: 2 to 3 stories, 15 minutes each
• 19:30 Q&A with Mike, Rafaela and the storytellers
• 19:45 Networking until 20:30

Who it’s for

Founders, builders and curious people who want to understand their own health data better, and anyone wondering how others keep their energy up in a year where AI changes everything every week.

Worth knowing

Nothing shared on stage is medical advice. Talk to your doctor before changing anything based on what you hear. And keep your own data private: you don’t need to share anything personal to join.

A community event

This is a community event, not a business. Ticket money goes towards the space. Pay what feels right, minimum €10.

Hosted by Vibe Coding Amsterdam. Small, real conversations over headcount.

GCUG-Meetup: September Edition 🚀

Gear up for another evening of tech inspiration! ✨
The Google Cloud User Group is excited to bring you another powerhouse event, please stay tuned for our program. 🤝

• Date: Wednesday, November 18th, 2026 🗓️
• Time: 17:30 PM - 20:45 PM 🕕
• Location: Xebia Amsterdam, Wibautstraat 200📍

Agenda

• 17:30: Doors Open + pizza's during arrival
• 18:00: Great talks on AI Security and other hot topics
• 19:30: Networking
• 20:15 : Quiz and & Wrap-up & last round ❓
• 20:30: End of meetup

RSVP Today! ✅
We're excited to have you join us! 👋 Please remember to update your RSVP if your plans change. This helps us ensure everyone gets a chance to attend and minimizes food waste. 🙏

See you the 18th of November!

Welcome to the biggest Practical AI Meetup in Amsterdam!

Join us once a month as we explore the world of artificial intelligence, its cutting-edge practical applications, and the astonishing projects that are shaping our future.

Why should you attend?

• Get up close and personal with the AI projects that are redefining the boundaries of technology and human potential.
• Learn from the brightest minds in the field and gain valuable insights into the ever-evolving AI landscape.
• Unleash your curiosity, fuel your creativity, and expand your network as you connect with fellow AI aficionados and pioneers.

What you can expect?

Mindstone events consist of three talks covering different aspects:

• What I Learned Building With LLMs: A technical talk breaking down the process for building a product using AI with real-life learnings and insights.
• How To Be More Productive Using AI: A practical demo and step-by-step guide on how to use AI to speed up and improve tasks.
• What Does The Future Look Like With AI?: A theoretical talk on the impact of AI on work, life and society.

After the talks we'll have pizza, drinks, and time to connect with everyone around you.

Don't miss the opportunity to see what's really happening in AI - you'll be surprised at what's already possible today.

We have limited spots available, so get your ticket ahead of time to avoid disappointment!

What if your website could tell an AI agent exactly what it can do?
AI agents are opening up new ways to navigate websites and perform tasks online. What does that mean for the websites we build—and how do we keep people in control?

Join WP Meetup Amsterdam for a practical introduction to WebMCP with Fellyph Cintra. WebMCP is a proposal to help websites communicate their capabilities to AI agents, making it easier for agents to understand which actions are available.
Using examples in WordPress Playground, Fellyph will explore how this could change the way we interact with web applications and what it could mean for WordPress developers and site builders.

What you’ll explore

• What WebMCP proposes and how it connects websites with AI agents.
• Practical examples using WordPress Playground.
• Where to start experimenting and what precautions to consider.
• How you can contribute to the proposal as it evolves.

If you build WordPress websites, develop plugins, or want to understand how AI agents might interact with your projects, this talk offers a practical starting point.

About Fellyph Cintra
Fellyph has been involved with WordPress since 2008 and has spoken at more than 20 WordCamps worldwide. His recent talks include WordPress Playground and AI at WordCamp Asia 2026, and the latest developments in Playground at WordCamp Europe 2026.

Curious about what this could mean for your website? RSVP and join us to explore WebMCP with the Amsterdam WordPress community.

Open Source meetup in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Cybersecurity / InfoSec conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands

How do you decide, now that we all know AI is (just) a tool?

A breakfast session for Founders, Commercial and Brand Leaders who are done with the hype and want to talk about real decisions.

Who’s opening

Mehak Chowdhary, ex-VP Marketing at TestGorilla, will show how to find the pipeline hiding in your own database using Warmbound, and how the team’s intelligence engine turns ICP pain signals into a prioritized insights and content for every aspect of your business. Every topic is checked against real Google and AI search demand before anyone writes a word.

What you’ll see

Real AI Builds from the TestGorilla GTM team:

• What they cost
• What changed
• How we’re measuring results and ROI

Then it’s your turn

Mehak and Thomas van Til, VP GTM at Contentoo, will split the room into two groups. Expect an honest conversation about their bets, their builds and what they learned, with plenty of room to swap notes with the room. They have already been down a variety of AI rabbit holes, so you don’t have to.

Everyone gets a say, the quiet thinkers as much as the big talkers.

Two questions:

• How do you decide what to build, buy or outsource?
• What does a good marketing hire look like when demand for content is growing faster than your headcount, and you can’t afford to lose authenticity?

We keep an intimate group to have an open conversation (potentially about a tool that’s clearly not going anywhere) and form new connections.

Get measurable value from the AI your team already has.

At this free evening, two people from other teams show how they use AI at work, and we show what you can start doing right away in Copilot, ChatGPT or Claude.

The evening starts with a welcome, where you meet the other guests and we say who we are and what it is for. Then two short talks: people from other teams who use AI at work show what they do, what changed and what went wrong. After that we show what you can start this week in Copilot, ChatGPT or Claude, on work like your own. We finish with networking, so you can stay and talk with the speakers and with each other.

Thursday 19 November, 18:00 to 20:00. Amsterdam; the exact address will be sent to approved guests. You don't need to bring anything, and the event is free. The number of seats is limited. Apply now!

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