January Birmingham Digital & DevOps Meetup

After an incredible turnout and buzzing atmosphere at our September event, we’re back to kick off 2026 with a bang! This will be the first of only four events this year, so don’t miss out.
Join us for an evening of expert talks, networking, and pizza – the perfect antidote to those post-December blues.

Schedule:

• 17:30 – Doors open: Welcome drinks & networking
• 18:00 – Doors close, first presentation kicks off
• 18:00 – 18:30 – Talk 1: Chris Walker – Demystifying OAuth2
• 18:35 – 19:05 – Talk 2: Simon Emms – Code for success with Stripe and Temporal
• 19:05 – 19:20 – Food & networking
• 19:20 – 19:50 – Talk 3: GitLab – Applying Agentic AI across the SDLC
• 19:50 – 20:00 – More food & networking

Why Attend?

• Limited spaces – secure your spot early!
• Fantastic speakers sharing cutting-edge insights
• Pizza, drinks, and a friendly tech community

Talk Overview:

• Demystifying OAuth2 - Ever wondered how apps securely talk to each other without sharing passwords? Join this session to demystify OAuth2—from its core principles to the inner structure of access tokens. Perfect for developers who want to understand the ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind modern authentication.
• Code for success with Stripe and Temporal - The inherent challenges of distributed systems force developers to deal with failures, timeouts, and retries, leading to complex code that's difficult to debug and cumbersome to maintain. Even worse, software and hardware defects can cause applications to crash, resulting in the loss of application state. Temporal is an open source platform that solves these problems, enabling you to build resilient applications and have fun doing it.
  During this session, you’ll learn the basics of Temporal and see how it works through a ridesharing application written in TypeScript. This application manages each ride as a Temporal Workflow and uses Stripe’s usage-based billing to charge customers according to time and distance. Through code walkthroughs and live demonstrations, you’ll see the application withstand a network outage, deal with an unrecoverable error, overcome a bug in the code, and support a “human-in-the-loop” approval process..
• Applying Agentic AI across the SDLC - We will be taking a look at the evolution of AI tooling designed to improve efficiencies across the SDLC. We will discover how agentic AI tools have emerged to assist us in our everyday DevSecOps tasks with a focus on the GitLab Duo Agent Platform.

If you would like to speak at one of our future meetups, please reach out to our organisers, who will be happy to speak to you. We would love for more people from the community to be involved!

Help us make this another unforgettable evening of learning and socialising. Sign up now and start 2026 on a high note!