Tech Events in Leeds

Join us for Coffee and Code on Tuesday mornings, now with a new time, and a new venue.

We're meeting at Stage, on Great George Street, at the earlier time of 07:30.
An extra half hour of time to wake up and get your caffeine!

Coffee & Code is an informal get-together in Leeds city centre, typically weekly. Join us for a natter about tech, get working on your latest project, or just sip a coffee and listen to others.
Everyone is welcome, whether learning to code for the first time or doing it for a living.

We congregate downstairs at Stage where there is excellent WiFi and lovely quiet environment to start off the day.

Location
1st Floor Meeting Room,
Platform,
New Station St
Leeds
LS1 4JB
https://w3w.co/fortunate.brings.lasts

Format
Join us for an interactive, roundtable discussion in an unconference format. Everyone is encouraged to suggest topics related to software development, craftsmanship, or any tech-related challenges. After voting on the topics, we’ll focus on discussing the most popular ones.

It’s a great chance to dive into the issues that matter to you, share insights, and collaborate on practical solutions. Whether you're seeking advice, offering your perspective, or eager to learn from others' experiences, this is a space to tackle real-world problems together.

No preparation is needed, just bring your ideas, challenges, and curiosity!

Food and drinks are provided, with vegetarian and vegan options available.

Two talks on keeping your Umbraco site secure and your publishing on autopilot!

Our next meetup brings together two practical talks from the Umbraco community: one on stopping stolen logins at the door, and one on automating your content publishing with Umbraco.Automate.

The Talks:

“Correct Creds, Wrong Person: Stopping Stolen Logins at the Umbraco Door”
Dave Bullough

Stolen creds are cheap, and they work. See how infostealers harvest them, and how a privacy-preserving Umbraco plugin blocks them at login without your server ever sharing them.

“Automation for the People”
Owain Williams

“It’s the end of manual posting as we know it.” Every blog post published, every platform notified, no copy-pasting. Owain dives into Umbraco.Automate and shows how custom Triggers and Actions can push your blog content to Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn the moment it goes live, with conditional workflows built in the Umbraco 17 backoffice.

Who Should Attend:
Developers, architects, and anyone responsible for an Umbraco site. Whether you’re thinking about login security, want to reduce manual admin, or are simply curious about what Umbraco can automate, there’s something practical for you.

What to Expect:

• Two practical talks from Umbraco community members
• Real patterns from working implementations
• Q&A and discussion
• Food and refreshments

Agenda:
18:30 - Mingling + Food
19:00 - Introductions & Umbraco news
19:15 - Talks
20:15 - Open Social + Networking

📅 Thursday, 12th November | 6:30 PM
📍 MSQ DX, Leeds

This month we are celebrating 15 years of Kotlin. We'll be at Hippo Digital with several talks from local developers building cool stuff with Kotlin.

1️⃣ How Kotlin Found the Fun in Programming

Join us for a lightning talk on the history of Kotlin, its journey to find the fun in programming and where it's heading next!

Adam Al-Jidy is an Android lead and engineering manager at Lloyds Banking Group. With 10 years of experience in software development, he specialises in Android and mobile development and is a keen accessibility advocate

2️⃣ How Kotlin is accelerating the ARNS programme at MOJTalk

At the Ministry of Justice, Probation Digital uses Kotlin and Spring Boot as the standard tech stack for APIs and backend services. Learn how the ARNS (Assess risks, needs and strengths) programme is using Kotlin to accelerate delivery of new services critical to the everyday work of staff throughout the justice system.

James Boobier is a Lead Consultant and Software Engineer at Hippo. He is currently a tech lead at the Ministry of Justice and has over 10 years of experience building software for government projects.

3️⃣ The Sound of Silence: Slashing 1000 requests per second by 99%

What happens when mobile clients hit your backend with 1,000 requests every second just to check for updates? Massive overhead for mostly unchanged state. Lloyds has recently implemented a new mobile sync strategy by embracing silence. This new strategy has slashed API traffic by 99% while keeping clients perfectly in sync.

Alex Lawrence is a Senior Android Engineer at Lloyds Banking Group with six years of mobile experience. He currently leads an engineering team within the Economic Crime Prevention platform, helping customers resolve fraud and payment disputes directly within the mobile app.

Agenda

• 17:30 Event opens 🚶‍♀️🚶‍♂️
• 17:30 Food arrives 🍕
• 17:30 Eating and Networking 🍽️ 💬
• 18:00 Event starts 🎬
• 18:10 Talks from local developers 🗣️
• 20:00 Event closes, optional drinks at The Brew Society 🍻

Join us for our next Leeds Digital Health event on the 19th November.

More details on topic and speakers to follow,

Join Leeds Tech Leaders for an evening focused on one of the biggest opportunities facing modern organisations.

Leading Change, Without Losing Culture

As organisations evolve, leaders face the challenge of driving transformation while preserving the culture that fuels performance, engagement, and innovation. Join senior technology leaders for an interactive discussion on how to navigate change successfully, maintain team trust, and build resilient cultures in periods of growth, disruption, and uncertainty.

This event will explore real-world experiences, practical leadership strategies, and the lessons learned from balancing business transformation with strong cultural foundations. Ideal for technology leaders looking to lead change with confidence while keeping people at the centre of their decisions.

Welcome to our November 2026 meetup hosted by Enablis. Please see the directions provided on this page.

We are pleased to welcome Will Martin with "From Open Storage to Open Meaning: How Apache Ossie (Incubating) Completes the Open Data Lakehouse"

If you would like to volunteer as a speaker for our upcoming meetups, 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--18:50h: Welcome

18:50--20:00h: Will Martin, Data & AI Evangelist at Dremio,
From Open Storage to Open Meaning: How Apache Ossie (Incubating) Completes the Open Data Lakehouse

The open data lakehouse has a solid data foundation thanks to Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris: an open table format and catalog that any query engine can share without lock-in. But openness in storage doesn't mean openness in meaning. Business context, like “revenue” and “active customer”, tends to sit in downstream systems, like notebooks and BI tools. These definitions tend not to agree, and they don’t travel well between systems. That is, until Apache Ossie (Incubating) — the newly Apache-incubated open spec for semantic layers and ontologies, backed by Snowflake, Dremio, Databricks, dbt Labs, and Salesforce.
This talk will explain the current open data lakehouse stack and introduce Apache Ossie (Incubating). We’ll discuss how open source projects provide vendor-neutral options without sacrificing performance, and why shared semantics is the next open standards fight in this age of agentic analytics.

Bio

Will Martin is Dremio’s Data & AI Evangelist. Starting out with statistical analysis in particle physics, his professional journey has spanned multiple industries, including banking, shipping logistics, entertainment, healthcare, defence, and customer 360. With experience as a data engineer, solutions architect, and software developer, he has spent 15+ years collaborating with companies and organisations across EMEA and APAC, including roles at CERN, Deloitte, and Tamr.

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.

We have finally done it, and got ourselves organised and booked a proper venue to host our post Microsoft Ignite.

The fantastic team and community spirited Dynamics Monk have very kindly sponsored this event and are paying for the food and drink, so thank so much to them.

The awesome team at Airelogic have also kindly given us their office to host our in-person M365 North event.

We have pulled out all the stops, and the legend that is Garry Trinder (Microsoft - Senior Cloud Advocate) is coming all the way over to Leeds to do a session for us. He will be talking about all the latest and greatest announcements from Microsoft Ignite 2026. His team are involved in building some of the products being launched at Ignite this year as well.

We will be sharing tips and tricks, to help you get started. There will be insights from those in the know too We'd love you to join us and share your ideas and thoughts as well.

We are starting slightly early than normal as we are in-person, and we will have a SharePint in the White Cross Gallery pub afterwards.

Hopefully, this is the start of something special and having more regular in-person events.

Agenda
18:00 - Welcome
18:15 - Introductions
18:30 - Garry Trinder (Microsoft)
19:30 - Food
19:45 - M365 North Team - Ignite Insights
20:30 - Close
20:30 - 22:00 - SharePint.

PRACTICALLY AI LEEDS #2 🚀

After a fantastic launch event as part of Leeds Digital Festival, Practically AI Leeds is back for event number two!

Our first event brought together people from across the Leeds tech community for an evening of practical AI talks, great conversations and plenty of networking.

Now we're looking forward to doing it all again!

This time, we're teaming up with T5 Digital, who are kindly hosting and sponsoring the evening at Avenue HQ, Leeds.

As always, expect practical insights, real examples, no sales pitches and plenty of opportunities to meet others from the Leeds tech community.

🎤 Introduction to Agentic Development in AWS

David | Full Stack Engineer & Consultant, T5 Digital

What actually makes an AI agent, and how do you build one without it going rogue? Join David Jiménez Sequero from T5 Digital for a no-hype introduction to agentic development with AWS Bedrock AgentCore.

David will demystify agents and agentic systems: what they are, why are they useful and talk about how to build them safely in the cloud. Then we’ll live-build a multi-agent system on AWS, from a single command-line agent to a full support and stock-management team. Live demo, non-deterministic systems, what could go wrong?

💡 AI SPOTLIGHT

We'll also have our regular AI Spotlight!

A quick look at some of the latest developments, tools and ideas emerging across the AI world.

With so much changing every month, it's a chance to discover something new and get everyone thinking before the main session.

📅 AGENDA
17:30 – Doors open, pizza, drinks and networking
18:15 – Welcome and introductions
18:20 – AI Spotlight
18:30 – Introduction to Agentic Development in AWS
19:30 – Questions, discussion and networking
20:00 – Event close

Timings are approximate and subject to change.

📍 VENUE

Avenue HQ, Leeds

A huge thank you to T5 Digital for hosting and sponsoring our second Leeds meetup, including providing the venue, pizza and drinks!

Support from companies like T5 makes it possible to keep these events free, accessible and focused on the community.

👋 ABOUT PRACTICALLY AI

Practically AI is a community-led meetup focused on the real-world application of AI in software engineering and technology.

After growing our Manchester community over the last year, we're excited to be building something similar in Leeds.

Our events bring together developers, engineers, technology leaders and anyone interested in understanding how AI is actually being used.

Whether you're experimenting with AI-assisted development, building agentic systems or simply curious about where things are heading,
everyone is welcome.

No hype. No sales pitches. Just practical AI, honest conversations and a great community.

Looking forward to seeing everyone at Leeds #2! 🚀

LeedsSharp are proud to present Saeed Esmaeelinejad in "Your AI Needs a Second Opinion: Multi-Agent Apps in .NET"

Abstract:

⭐ Your AI Needs a Second Opinion: Multi-Agent Apps in .NET

The best decisions rarely come from one voice. They come from a room: someone who gets excited, someone who asks "what could go wrong?", someone who says "fine, but how do we actually do it?", and someone who keeps everyone on track. Most AI apps give you only one voice, and it usually agrees with you.

In this session we build a room instead. You invite a few AI characters to a round table, give them a question that matters to you, and watch them think it through out loud: they agree, push back and change their minds. You can join in at any moment, and when they're done, one of them turns the conversation into a plan and gets to work, but only after you say yes.

We'll show how little code this takes in .NET with Microsoft Agent Framework and .NET Aspire, what makes AI characters feel like real teammates instead of chatbots, and why keeping a human in the room makes the whole thing better. Bring a question; we'll put it to the council live.

Bio:

Saeed Esmaeelinejad is a Senior Software Engineer and Microsoft MVP based in Leeds, with over 10 years of experience in the .NET ecosystem. He has worked across multiple domains, including banking, VOD platforms, and security, and has led development teams on large-scale systems. Saeed is passionate about new technologies, knowledge sharing, and open-source contributions, and is a member of the .NET Foundation community.

Strive welcomes you to 'Tech and Business Networking', an event for tenured and newcomers at Brooklyn! Event is 18+. Limited Tickets.

Strive welcomes you to 'Tech and Business Networking', Leeds' hottest networking event! We are set in the perfect central location for all to join.

Are you interested in tech and business? Want to elevate your career? Meet Consultants, Analysts of all types, Bankers, Software Engineers, Entrepreneurs, and more who are active in the space or are eager to get started.

**This will be a multi-vertical event**********

There will be professionals with backgrounds in the arts, finance, tech, real estate, healthcare, and more. Come with an open mind, and leave with connections that wouldn't be possible otherwise!

Pack some business cards and come with an open mind!

Meet your future business partners, employers, coworkers, investors, and friends. You don't want to miss this opportunity to expand your network and create a brighter future.

We will have a space for our event to check-in.

The event will go from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM(feel free to come at any point in this timeframe).

Name tags will be provided.

Business casual dress code. Job fair attire.

Remember - it's not about who you know today, it's who you'll meet tomorrow!

We look forward to meeting you at the event!

Sincerely,

Strive Networking Team

Refund requests are permitted up to 24 hours after purchase, so long as we are not within 48 hours before the event start time. Refunds will be made in full and repaid to your method of payment. Note that we are unable to reimburse for eventbrite fees.

Disclaimer: By attending Strive Networking events you agree to photos/videos taken during the event being used to promote future events.

Connecting the legal community to learn, share and shape legal technology. The bold new era starts here.

A full day of talks, demos, and networking for the legal community, built around open and practical exchange.

You’ll have the chance to talk directly with speakers and take home clear, actionable ideas to improve how your firm approaches technology.

And of course, you’ll be well looked after - with great food, strong coffee, and enough time between sessions to catch up with peers, the Expedite Law and Rising Tide teams.

Who should attend?

Red Shift is for the UK legal community looking to understand what’s happening in legal technology, explore what’s possible and discover practical ways to make technology work better within their organisations.

Whether you’re responsible for technology, innovation, operations, transformation, IT, case management systems or the wider strategic direction of your firm, Red Shift brings together people who want to learn, share experiences and explore what comes next.

Cost: £65 + VAT per person to include lunch and refreshments

What delegates can expect from RedShift:

A day focused on what’s really happening in legal technology – and what it means in practice for law firms.

Delegates can expect:

· Technology in action – real-world demos and practical examples

· AI insights – exploring AI adoption and the human side of change

· Real-world experiences – what’s working and lessons learned

· Expert perspectives – presentations, panels and open discussion

· Practical takeaways – ideas to take back to your firm

· Networking – connect and collaborate with the legal tech community

Agenda to be announced shortly....

Don't just take our word for it:

“It was a brilliant event. I enjoyed meeting a range of people and found the content engaging. It was good to see the results of the survey and that it was carried out by a trusted source and relevant participants. It was also great to see how a firm closer to the front of the curve are leveraging the technology. Expedite and rising tide were great hosts!”

Adrian Reid – Garratts Law

For more information please visit https://red-shift.ai/

For parking information please visit https://www.thequeensleeds.co.uk/find-us/