Tech Events in Leeds

Hello and welcome to the May Yorkshire Azure User Group event!

For those that are new to our community, we are a diverse technical community hosting events across South Yorkshire on a monthly basis with some of the best minds in the industry. Everyone is welcome regardless of technical background, so feel free to join us for the evening - if you have any questions, just reach out to one of the organisers!

This month's event is hosted by our good friends over at Axiologik
in Leeds - the venue is a 5 minutes' walk from Leeds station. As usual food and drink will be provided.

Session #1 - Why Understanding Hardware Topology for Resource Allocation? By Femi Osho.

Delivered by Femi Osho, an open source enthusiast, this talk will have a look at why having an understanding of the hardware topology a workload is running on is important for efficient resource allocation.

Session #2 - TBC.

As always, we are grateful for all our speakers & sponsors for helping us keep this community alive - if you'd like to sponsor or speak at event yourself, please reach out to one of the committee members on LinkedIn.

~ The Yorkshire Azure User Group committee

Join us for our next Leeds Digital Health event on 14th May, bringing together the Leeds health and tech communities to explore the theme of “Overcoming the Challenges to Safely Implement AI in Health and Care.”

You can expect an evening of networking and insightful discussion on the role of AI in supporting health and care delivery. From governance and risk to adoption, trust, and integration into existing pathways, we’ll explore what it means to implement AI in a way that is safe, effective, and aligned with the needs of patients and professionals.

Designed for those working across healthcare, technology, and digital delivery, this event offers an opportunity to connect with peers, exchange perspectives, and gain practical insight into how AI can be implemented responsibly to support the future of health and care.

Confirmed speakers:
Owen Johnson - Associate Professor at University of Leeds
Jessica Paulsen - Deputy Director of AI and Software, MHRA

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.

After 4 years of wanting to do it, join Yorkshire DevOps and Yorkshire Azure User Group (YAG) for the Northern DevOps & Platform Conference hosted in partnership with CGI on May 19th.

FIND THE FULL AGENDA AND MORE INFO HERE

Food, drink and CAKE will be provided.

Speakers and Sessions:

• Matthew Skelton, Founder & CEO/CTO, Conflux
  Opening Keynote: Team Topologies as the Infrastructure for Agency with AI
• Darren Hull, Senior Lead Architect, Skipton Building Society
  TBC
• Alexandra Helen Moore, DevOps Strategic Advisor, CGI
  Enterprise DevOps
• Luke Smith, Principal Solutions Architect, Optum UK (EMIS Health)
  Augmenting the SDLC with AI
• Panel: Future of DevOps, Platform and AI
• Tom Black, Principal Engineer, Skipton Building Society
• Christina Howell, Fractional CTO & CAIO, Independent
• Jonny Brodie, Senior Platform / Cloud Security Engineer, Trustpilot
  TBC
• Andy Blagnys, Senior Architect, Axiologik
  Mandated Pipelines and the Architecture Glue We Pretend Exists
• Brian Walker, Technical Specialist, HSBC
  Types of Indexes in Databases
• Vernon Richards, Senior Engineering Manager, Phrase
  Your Pipeline Wasn't Built For This
• Andy Burgin, Principal Platform Engineer, Independent
  From DevOps to Platform Engineering — A Journey of Noise and Confusion

Lightening Talks:

• David Sugden, Axiologik — The Complexity Paradox
• Holly Jukes, Lloyds Banking Group — Stop Building. Start Deciding.
• Adam King, Digital Endeavours — From Alpha to Handover: Shipping Government Platform Infrastructure
• Additional speakers TBC

Tickets:

• Community tickets: £60 (50% off)
• Register before 30th April to receive a special edition conference T-shirt

Register here

If your organisation can fund your place, please select an organisation-funded ticket to help keep our event accessible and able to give free tickets to those who need it.

If you need support to attend or for any other enquires, email ethan.sumner@communitystack.io for a free ticket.

We'd like to thank CGI as headline sponsors, Conflux, Overmind & ADA Meher as platinum sponsors as well as Digital Endeavours & Dash0

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.

This is a free in-person event, open to all.

★ The talks

18:30 – Arrive, pre-talks networking & pizzas 🍕

19:05 – Intro to LeedsPHP and Sponsors

19:15 – Building without barriers (a11y for backend engineers) – Andy Carter
Backend engineers rarely talk about accessibility. Often through a lack of awareness or a misplaced assumption that it is someone else’s problem. However, the systems we build can create hidden barriers for people with disabilities. In this talk, we’ll explore real backend scenarios where accessibility matters and learn how we can build more inclusive products.

19:50 – Break

19:55 – TBC - TBC
TBC

20:25– Tidy up and walk to the pub (The Adelphi) for drinks

LeedsPHP Socials:

• Linkedin
• Website

Thank you to Estrato Cloud for sponsoring this event and to AutoProtect for hosting us in their office on the Leeds Dock 😁

This month, we will be at Parallax for a Google I/O Extended event. We have two great talks on the topic of Building the Future of Mobile with AI.

First up, Gil Nobrega.

1️⃣ I, Developer: Asimov’s Laws for the AI Coding Era

AI has turned the Software industry upside down. While these "magic tools" promise incredible velocity, they often conflict with the architectural integrity and maintainability required for production-ready software.

Can science fiction help us navigate this new era? This session explores that question by translating Isaac Asimov's famous Laws of Robotics into modern coding practices. Designed for everyone from aspiring developers to seasoned tech leads, this session delivers a practical, three-part framework to help you stop fighting your AI tools and start mastering them.

Gil Nobrega is a Senior Mobile Engineer who has helped scale apps for millions of users both at Tide and previously at EE. As a Flutter contributor and open-source maintainer with roots in theoretical physics, he is passionate about balancing high-velocity engineering with the rigorous architectural integrity required for global products.

Next up, Mark Wilcox.

2️⃣ The Present & Future of AI in Mobile Software

“The future is already here - it’s just not very evenly distributed” - William Gibson

What’s already happening in startups and with early adopters can tell us a lot about where AI is taking our industry. There are also a number of trends in hardware, model capabilities and the economics of AI that can help us predict where we might end up in the future.

Mark is a Principal Engineer at Olio, he started working in the mobile software industry a quarter of a century ago. He’s seen it change more in the last 6 months than the previous 10 years and believes the change is only just getting started.

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We’ll also be running a raffle, giving away 2 FREE Tickets to droidcon London 2026 🤖. To be in with a chance of winning make sure to come on the night!

Agenda

• 17:30 Event opens 🚶‍♀️🚶‍♂️
• 17:30 Pizza arrives, raffle tickets given out 🍕🎟️
• 18:00 Event starts 🚀
• 18:10 Talk from Gil 🗣️
• 18:50 Short Break 🎬
• 19:10 Talk from Mark 🗣️
• 19:50 Wrap up and prize draw 🎁
• 20:00 Event closes, optional drinks at a nearby pub 🍻

LeedsSharp are proud to present Samuel Jaja in "From Black Box to Glass Box: Systems Thinking & Observability as the Engine of Production-Ready AI"

Abstract:

Observability is not an afterthought in AI systems. It is how you build them.

Using a real multi-agent financial compliance system as the case study, I walk through what observability actually looks like inside a production AI pipeline: five specialized agents handling OFAC sanctions screening, AML detection, and regulatory rules enforcement, with every agent decision captured in an immutable Langfuse audit trail showing token usage, latency, cost, and data lineage in real time.

The talk covers three architecturally distinct ways to build the same system: raw SDK with custom parallel orchestration using asyncio, the OpenAI Agents SDK for rapid prototyping, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) for exposing tools across team and organisational boundaries. Each trades differently, and knowing which to reach for is the real engineering skill.

Attendees will leave with a clear mental model for when multi-agent architecture is genuinely necessary (not just fashionable), why observability is the feedback loop that compresses build-debug-ship cycles, and how Azure OpenAI changes the calculus when data sovereignty and auditability are non-negotiable in regulated industries.

Bio:

Samuel Jaja is a Generative AI Engineer at Capgemini UK. He founded PyData Hull, the youngest NumFOCUS chapter in Yorkshire, holds an MSc in AI and Data Science with Distinction from the University of Hull, and is the founder of Atlasync AI Ltd. He spoke at DDD North 2026 and builds production AI systems across regulated industries, including finance, energy, and construction.

PLEASE NOTE WE ARE MEETING AT A NEW VENUE!!

Access Details Please go to the Enablis offices, they are on the first floor of the building, both front door and office doors should be open. If there is a problem then press the buzzer. We will meet at 6pm for pizza and drinks, the talks will start at 7. Some of us go to the either the editors draft pub afterwards at 8pm (vote to be taken).

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 🍻