Tech Events in Bristol

Join us for our next product meetup!

18:00 - Descend, Sip, Snacks, and Strategy
18:25 - Introduction and a warm welcome from our host
18:30 - First Talk
19:15 - Break for more sips and snacks
19:30 - Second Talk
20:15 - Wrap Up
20:20 - End and Depart, with the opportunity for extended discussions at the pub
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📢 Building a product insights agent: research as infrastructure
👤 James Reece
James is a Lead Product Designer at Kaluza, a player-coach and 0→1 specialist with 15 years in UX & product design. A builder at heart: rapid prototypes, product vision, and AI agents, including the product insights agent he'll be talking to us about.

📢 Growing pains: Parenting your AI agents to adulthood
👤 Joel Livermore
With 8 years in product, Joel is a Group PM currently working in payments at Dojo. with a career spanning startups to enterprise. He's spent his last year building AI agents by day and raising a newborn by night.

Sponsor: Graphcore - Build the future of AI compute
Graphcore is creating the technology powering the next generation of machine intelligence. We're currently hiring across a wide range of product and tech roles.
Find out more at graphcore.ai

Host: Kaluza
Kaluza is an energy technology company building the intelligent software behind a net-zero energy future. Our Energy Intelligence Platform helps energy providers streamline operations, elevate customer experience and optimise energy in real time — making clean energy work for everyone.

Season sponsor: Pilot Works
Pilot Works is a product and service design consultancy based in Bristol.
We use research and prototyping techniques to help our clients visualise and align on what they need to deliver, in order meet the needs of their users and achieve their organisation’s goals.
As well as hands-on consultancy we also provide training and coaching for individuals and teams.
Find out more at https://pilot.works

Additional Information
Photography and/or recording equipment will be used throughout the event, with images shared on social channels during and after the event.

By attending, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct

Cowork Cafe is a social, game development-focused work group that encourages game devs of all skill levels and disciplines to come together and work on their individual projects.

Developers, programmers, artists, designers, anyone working on anything game related can stop by and jam out with us on their current project.

How it works:
Cowork Cafe is 3 hours of pure relaxed jam time, where we get into the groove, develop, colab, and chat about our projects all we want. We do try to keep our discussions to a small scale for those around us who are in the zone.

Feel free to show up or leave during Cowork Cafe at any time. And remember to BYOH (Bring Your Own Hardware)!

This event is hosted at Replay Cafe. Join us at Replay, a vibrant board game café in Bristol known for its welcoming vibe and creative energy. Drinks and food will be available at the bar throughout the evening.

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If you wanna chat games or have a question, join our Discord server. We look forward to seeing you and developing games!

📸 We may take some photos at Cowork Cafe for promotional purposes. The photos are likely to appear on our Discord. If you would prefer not to be photographed, no worries, just let us know at the event.

A relaxed community for the next generation of people working in tech.

New to tech? Still figuring out what half the job titles even mean? Same.

techSPARK Next Gen is a laid-back, no-agenda-except-honesty evening f********or people early in their tech careers.

No sales pitches. No recruiters lurking with a LinkedIn QR code. Just a room of people roughly where you are, hearing from people who were once exactly where you are, before they figured a few things out (or didn't, which is arguably more useful to know).

For our first get-together, we're putting six people from wildly different corners of the tech world, software, product, data, design, marketing, sales, ops, on the spot with one question: what do you wish you'd known earlier in your career?

They get five minutes. That's it. No slides, no pitching, no polished career highlight reel. Just wrong turns, unexpected opportunities, confidence wobbles, career changes, and the advice they learnt the long way round, because nobody told them sooner.

Come for their wisdom. Or, their lack of it. Either way, you'll leave knowing you're not the only one who has no idea what you're doing, and neither did they, for quite a while.

The Details

📍 Where: Central Bristol

📅 When: Wednesday 23rd September

🕠 5:30pm — Doors open. Grab a drink, arrive, settle in, meet people.

🎤 6:00pm — Welcome + What I Wish I'd Known: six lightning talks, five minutes each.

🍕 6:30pm — Pizza arrives. From there, it's simply time to eat, have a drink, and chat.

👋 7:30pm — Official wrap up (though nobody's kicking you out).

No forced networking, awkward icebreakers, or organised breakout groups. Stay as long as you like, talk to whoever you like.

This is a small, intentional, event so it stays a conversation, not a conference.

Who This Is For

Broadly, people in the first 0–7 years of working in tech or a tech-adjacent role. Software, product, data, design, marketing, sales, customer success, operations, or something else entirely, first job, fourth job, or a total career pivot into tech. It's about career stage, not age or job title.

Come on your own. Come with someone from work. Come with mates. Come with questions, or just come and listen.

What's Next

techSPARK Next Gen runs every other month. At the end of the evening, you'll get to nominate who you'd like to hear from next, so if there's someone in the community you'd want to grab a coffee withand pick their brain, tell us.

Future topics on the cards:

• Is AI Going to Take Our Jobs?
• Productivity & Balance (perfect for January, when everyone's New Year energy has already fizzled)
• Recruitment: CVs, LinkedIn, and how to be seen without cringing
• Wellbeing: looking after your (very tired) brain

Next dates: Wednesday 25th November · Wednesday 27th January

techSPARK Next Gen A relaxed community for the next generation of people working in tech.

For our next Software Crafters Bristol meetup, we'll be hosting an "Open Space" style event focused on the topic of "Engineering in the Age of AI".

As AI becomes deeply embedded in how software is built, the standards, practices, and judgement calls that define quality are being fundamentally challenged. This event promises an evening of engaging discussions, knowledge sharing, and networking opportunities for engineers, tech leads, and engineering leaders grappling with what it means to maintain (and raise) the bar in an AI-driven world.

Format:
Our Principal Platform Software Craftsperson, Sam Griffiths and Senior Software Craftsman, Mattsi Jansky, will kick off the evening with their own reflections on the topic of software quality and how this is evolving in the era of AI-generated code. We then want to give everyone attending an opportunity to shape the agenda to focus on your preferences. Our event will therefore be run "Open Space" style, where you'll be given the chance to co-create the topics to be discussed.

Some ideas to get you started include:

• What does quality even mean when AI is generating, reviewing, and testing our code?
• How do we build engineering cultures that hold the line on craft when the pressure to ship with AI is immense?
• Where does accountability sit when a defect originates in AI-generated code?
• What quality frameworks, standards, and practices are actually holding up, and which need rethinking?
• How should engineering leaders be measuring and incentivising quality in AI-assisted teams?

Who should attend
Anyone in Bristol or the surrounding areas with an interest in software, engineering, or problem-solving, across all industries and experience levels.

Food and Drinks
Pizza and drinks will be provided upon arrival sponsored by Codurance, with vegetarian and vegan options available.

Want to bring a friend? Great! Just ask them to RSVP so we know they are coming.

AGENDA - TBC
We would welcome anyone who would like to give a talk to contact Matt/Adam and we we can add you to the agenda.

What happens when a WordPress site goes viral and is suddenly is receiving over 100,000 requests a second? Rick has spent years supporting, tuning and troubleshooting some of the world's largest and most high-profile WordPress sites, and the causes are rarely what you'd expect. This talk digs into how to optimise a site for high traffic: the failure points that come up again and again, plugins and custom theme code that don't work at scale, the diagnostic approaches that actually work under pressure, and the workarounds worth knowing about. Lessons that apply whether your site serves millions of visitors or a few hundred.

PyData Bristol - Social 🍺
After a long break we are back for a PyData Bristol Social at the Left Handed Giant Brewpub | Finzel's Reach Bristol!
This event is mainly to bring people together, hear interesting ideas, spark interesting discussion and by doing so, connect tech people together.
Come by yourself or bring your friends with you, we’d love to see you there!

🚪 6:00 pm - Meetup
🕡 6:30 pm - Talks commence (sharp!)
📚 Intro 5 Minute talk - PyData Organisers
🍺Social

We will meeting at Left Handed Giant Brewpub | Finzel's Reach Bristol, You should be able to spot the organisers there.

If you realise you can't make it, please un-RSVP in good time so we know roughly how many of us will be there.

The PyData Code of Conduct governs this meetup (https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct/). To discuss any issues or concerns relating to the code of conduct or behavior of anyone at the PyData meetup, please contact the PyData Bristol organisers, or you can submit a report through the link above.

Our monthly deep-dive into what is hot and happening in the world of AI automations right now!

18:00 - arrive and mingle
18:15 - intro
18:20 - AI demo 1
18:50 - break
19:00 - AI demo 2
19:30 - Q&A
19:50 - close
20:00 - networking, until we get kicked out the building

NOTE: there are other tech groups meeting in Desklodge House on the same night, so remember to ask for the AI Automations meetup!

Location: iO Associates, St Bartholomew's House, Bristol BS1 2NH.
Sponsored and Hosted by iO Associates (Tech & Digital recruitment specialists), we bring you an evening of Data and Networking.

AGENDA

18.00 – 18:25 Meet & Greet
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18:25 - 18:30 Introduction & Welcome
Welcome, and thanks to our sponsors
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18:30 - 19:15 Talk: Fabric Agentic AI for BI by Prathy Kamasani

Agentic AI can now understand a requirement, model the dimensions, wire up the relationships, write the DAX, and generate the PBIP files, but only if you know how to brief it and how to check its work. I'll walk through what agentic BI development actually looks like in Microsoft Fabric: an AI agent building a real semantic model and report from a written spec, with the corrections that build genuinely needed along the way.

The interesting part isn't the prompt. I'll cover the parts that make agentic development reliable: writing a spec an agent can act on without guessing, setting a quality bar before the agent starts, and reviewing agent output properly rather than taking it on faith. The example uses an open dataset, including a mistake the agent made and what that revealed about the spec.
You'll leave knowing what to check before you trust an agent's semantic model, and where it still needs a human in the loop.

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19:15 - 19:45 Pizza and Networking
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19:45 - 20:30 Talk: Business Focussed Data Modelling by Johnny Winter

How to collaboratively design your star schema with end users.

Despite claims to the contrary, dimensional modelling and star schemas are alive and well the in the modern data world. But whilst developers might have great technical skills and understand how to build a star schema, they may lack the business domain knowledge to ensure that what they deliver is fit for use by analysts and self-service users. On the flip side, these end users often know what they want and need from a data platform, but struggle to explain this in a way that makes it easy for developers to implement.

How can we improve the requirements gathering process to make sure we avoid the tensions that can arise from this?
This session will cover a data modelling requirements approach that looks to bridge the gap between business and IT by using an end-to-end process for working with business users to collaboratively design a dimensional model, making sure you build super star schemas and turn your self into a data modelling superstar.

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20:30 - Social/Pub

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Speaker Bios

Prathy Kamasani

Prathy is a Microsoft MVP and the solopreneur behind Data Nova, a Power BI and Microsoft Fabric consultancy and training provider, with 15 years across the Microsoft data platform. You'll usually find her organising the London Microsoft Fabric User Group or speaking at events like SQLBits and FabCon.
www.data-nova.io | LinkedIn | YouTube

Johnny Winter

Johnny is an independent data consultant who has been working with Business Intelligence software since 2007, specialising in full stack data platform development since 2016. He’s a self-confessed data nerd, and as well as running Greyskull Analytics, he runs a blog on Substack and has a YouTube channel where he likes to geek out about all things data. He's passionate about the data community and since 2023 has been a co-organiser of the Power BI & Fabric Manchester User Group.
greyskullanalytics.com | LinkedIn

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Photos
We ask that you do NOT take photos at this meetup.

We will invite people to be included in a group photo/s during the event. Speakers will let you know if it's okay to photograph their presentation (excluding other attendees).

You may see organisers taking photos during the talks. These will be of speakers, if they have agreed to this, and will not include faces of attendees.