Tech Events in Manchester

June NAUG event, please note slightly adjusted timings to allow for an earlier finish - England are playing Ghana, should allow enough time to get back home or to the pub to watch it.

Meetup location what3words:///daisy.coffee.awards

Session 1
Joe Hodkinson - Going Local in Azure

Session 2
Precious Ajuru - Private link for Multi Tenant Applications

Session details
Many organizations need to provide secure access to services across multiple customers, tenants, or business units while avoiding exposure to the public internet.

The challenge becomes even greater when overlapping IP address spaces prevent traditional networking approaches such as VNet peering.

In this session, we'll explore how Azure Private Link Service can be used to securely expose applications to multiple consumers while maintaining network isolation and simplifying connectivity. We'll walk through the architecture, discuss common design patterns, examine how Private Link helps address overlapping network scenarios, and review practical considerations for implementing the solution in Azure.

A bit about Precious

Precious Ajuru is an Azure Cloud Engineer and Microsoft MVP in Azure with a passion for cloud architecture, infrastructure, and AI. He holds multiple Microsoft certifications and regularly shares technical content through articles, community events, and user groups.

Precious enjoys helping organizations design secure, scalable Azure solutions and is an active contributor to the Azure community through speaking engagements and knowledge-sharing initiatives.

Agenda:
17:30 - 18:15 - Welcome & networking
18:15 - 19:00 - Joe Hodkinson - Going Local in Azure
19:00 - 19:15 - Food, drinks and general chatter
19:15 - 20:00 - Precious Ajuru - Private link for Multi Tenant Applications

Location Details
what3words:///daisy.coffee.awards
Address:18 Lower Byrom St, Manchester M3 4AP.

Morson Edge are based in a renovated space called the Bonded Warehouse which sits on the same site as the Old-Granada studio tour.

The entrance to the bonded warehouse can be reached from Lower Byrom street just next to the Museum of Science and Industry, the building entrance is on the right hand side across from the crystal maze. Google and apple maps may attempt to direct you to the rear of the building, if in doubt use the what3words location and look for the Crystal Maze too.

what3words:///daisy.coffee.awards

Welcome!
We organise friendly informal networking events for people in Tech to share ideas, learn from each other, and have genuinely useful conversations. There’s no PowerPoints or speeches to sit through - it’s all about great conversation and building connections.
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⭐ IMPORTANT: join Manchester Tech Network (MTN) at https://ManchesterTechNetwork.com ⭐
(it's free to join the MTN Discord group, only takes a minute and you can get to know everyone before/after the event, find new clients, new hires, co-founders, investors, people with similar tech interests etc in the group)
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Who are the events for?
People working in tech who want to connect with others in the Manchester tech community, including:

1. Software engineers
2. Product managers
3. Data / AI professionals
4. Startup founders & operators

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You’ll meet people who are:

1. Working in software engineering, product, data, AI, or startups
2. Building projects, products, or growing their careers in tech

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Why should you join?

1. Learn from others working in tech
2. Expand your network to help your career
3. It could lead to collaborations or new opportunities
4. It’s a lot of fun!

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✨ How it works
RSVP on Meetup
Secure your place and join a group of people working in and around tech.
Just arrive at the venue

• Grab a drink, find the group, and settle in
• Ask the bar staff for the "Manchester Tech Network" table booking
• Expect a friendly, welcoming group and a great atmosphere. The gatherings are generally self hosted with support from the venue.👋

About Manchester Tech Network (MTN)
We're building a private community of awesome Software Engineers, PMs, Designers, Founders, VC investors, etc, in Manchester. Membership includes access to their platform and events (online & in-person) to help with hiring, investment, finding clients & meeting people with similar interests!
​It only takes a minute to apply to join MTN: https://ManchesterTechNetwork.com

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📍 Location
We host events at relaxed venues in central Manchester:

1. Easy to get to locations
2. Pubs or bars with a good atmosphere
3. Spaces that are ideal for conversation 🍻

Spots are limited to keep the group high quality.
If you work in tech and want to meet others in your space, you’ll get a lot from this 👋

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!

Join us for June's PBIMCR meet-up

When: Thursday 25th of June 2026
Time: arrive for 530pm with talks starting from 6pm start prompt
Location: Slalom, 17 Marble Steet, M2 3AW
Complimentary drinks & pizza provided by our hosts Slalom & sponsors Robert Walters

Duncan Boyne
“Can Someone Turn the Heating On? An Accidental Case Study in Power BI”

A manufacturing company had a problem.

Their internal testing failure rate sat comfortably below 1%. Their customers, however, were seeing replacement rates as high as 15%.

The strange part? It wasn’t consistent.

Some customers barely experienced issues at all. Others saw failures come in waves. Summer spikes. Winter spikes. Complaints would rise, disappear, then return again months later.

• The data looked good.
• The engineers were smart.
• The dashboards were working.
• So why was the real-world experience telling a completely different story?

In this interactive session, I’ll walk through the accidental investigation that uncovered the issue, not through advanced AI, complex modelling, or some magical DAX formula, but through curiosity, context, and asking what felt like very dumb questions.

Questions like:

• What’s different between testing and storage?
• What happens after the product leaves the workshop floor?
• Why are certain customers affected more than others?
• And eventually:
• Why is nobody putting the heating on?

This session is part Power BI story, part consultancy lesson, and part reminder that data professionals are not just report builders, we are storytellers. Sometimes the numbers only make sense when you step away from the dashboard and start understanding the humans, processes, and assumptions behind them.

You’ll leave with a practical framework of questions every consultant and analyst should ask, along with a different perspective on how to approach problem solving, stakeholder conversations, and the stories hidden inside your data.

Darlington Chigozie Okeke
'Security Analytics with Microsoft Fabric & Power BI'

Machine-learning-based malware detection systems generate large volumes of structured and semi-structured data: behavioural features, anomaly scores, classification outputs, and confidence metrics. While much attention is given to building detection models, far less focus is placed on how these outputs are operationalised, analysed, and communicated at scale. This is where Microsoft Fabric and Power BI become critical.

In this session, I present a deep technical walkthrough of transforming ML-based malware detection outputs into a scalable analytics solution using Microsoft Fabric and Power BI, based on my MSc Cyber Security research into heuristic-based Trojan detection on Windows.

The talk focuses on:

• Designing Fabric Lakehouse schemas for ML-generated security telemetry

• Modelling detection outputs (labels, probabilities, feature scores) as analytical fact tables

• Using Spark SQL and T-SQL for feature aggregation, windowed analysis, and trend extraction

• Building semantic models optimised for high-cardinality, time-series security data

• Writing advanced DAX measures for detection accuracy, false positives, and behavioural drift

• Visualising long-term trends and anomalies using Power BI dashboards

Rather than revisiting ML theory, the emphasis is on data modelling, analytics engineering, and performance optimisation within Fabric and Power BI. While the data originates from a security context, the architectural patterns demonstrated apply equally to observability, fraud detection, and other event-driven analytics workloads.

This session is aimed at Power BI and Fabric practitioners who want to push beyond traditional BI scenarios and work with complex, real-world analytical data.

Topics Covered: Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Analysis Services, Azure AI, OneLake, Real-Time Data

1st time attendees what to expect:
Engaging tech talks/demos/presentations and an opportunity to network in a friendly community environment with complimentary drinks and pizza served.

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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ProductTank Manchester: AI Prototyping Hackathon 🚀

We're back on Wednesday 8th July for something a little different.
This month we're swapping talks for a hands-on AI prototyping hackathon, giving product people the chance to become product builders for an evening.
Working in teams, you'll have just 90 minutes to identify a user problem, design a solution, and build a working prototype using AI-powered tools.
No coding experience required.

The Challenge

Imagine Manchester City Council has commissioned your team to create a digital product for Manchester Day 2026 – the city's biggest annual celebration.
Manchester Day brings together communities, artists, performers and visitors from across the city for a day of parades, music, storytelling, culture and creativity.
Your challenge is simple:
How might we create a product that helps people get more out of Manchester Day 2026?
You might help people:

• Discover events and performances
• Plan their day
• Navigate the city
• Explore Manchester's cultural links with Barcelona
• Learn about performers and community groups
• Enjoy the event with friends and family
• Access information more easily
• Or solve an entirely different problem

The best ideas will combine strong product thinking, clear user value and rapid execution.

Sponsored by Lovable ❤️

This event is being run in partnership with Lovable, the AI-powered app building platform.
Lovable will be providing attendees with access to additional credits, allowing teams to build and prototype their ideas during the event.
Whether you're an experienced product leader or completely new to AI-powered prototyping, you'll be amazed at how much you can create in a short space of time.
Please bring a laptop, as you'll need one to participate.

Who Should Attend?

This event is open to anyone interested in product, technology and building digital experiences.
Our community regularly includes:

• Product Managers
• Product Leaders
• Startup Founders
• Designers
• Engineers and Developers
• Researchers
• Delivery Managers
• People looking to move into Product
• Anyone curious about AI-powered product development

You don't need any prior experience with Lovable or AI tools.

What You'll Get

👋 Meet fellow product people from across Manchester
🚀 Experience AI-powered product building first-hand
💡 Collaborate with people from different backgrounds and disciplines
🏆 Compete for prizes and community glory
🍕 Food and refreshments
🍺 Post-event networking

Agenda

6:00pm – Arrival, food and networking
6:30pm – Welcome, challenge briefing and Lovable introduction
6:45pm – Team formation
7:00pm – Build begins
8:30pm – Finalist demos and audience voting
8:50pm – Winners announced
9:00pm – Close and optional drinks nearby

Awards

🏆 Best Overall Product
👥 Best User Outcome
🚀 Most Innovative Idea
Spaces are limited and this event is expected to fill up quickly.
Please only register if you're planning to attend, and remember to bring a laptop.

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Please note

• Venue and event details may be subject to change.
• We sometimes take photos at our events for community and promotional use. By attending, you consent to any photographs you appear in being used in this way.
• Your name will be used for registration and check-in purposes only.
• Tickets are free but limited. If you can no longer attend, please update your RSVP so somebody else can take your place.

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.