Design Groups Melbourne

A panel on PMs shipping with AI

Join us this month for a panel with PMs who have experience shipping and working daily with Ai. Bring your stories and questions as there will be plenty of time for Q&A. **Our Panel** * [Daragh Kan](https://www.linkedin.com/in/daraghkan/) \- Head of Product at Cuttable * [Dave Slutzkin ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveslutzkin/)\- Co\-founder and CEO at Cadence * [Melissa Cupples](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcupples/) \- Head of Product \(AI & Automation\) Doors 6pm Start 630pm Thanks to our fabulous hosts for our location **InvestorHub.** [InvestorHub](https://www.linkedin.com/company/invhub/) is a Melbourne-based scale-up with the mission to make being listed a superpower. Our software allows listed companies in Australia and the UK to manage their end-to-end investor relationships, from their investor-facing website, a detailed investor CRM, analytics, and more. We're [hiring](https://investorhub.pinpointhq.com/) for Product Managers, Product Designers, Engineers and more right now! If you're interested in co-sponsorship please let us know. Some beverages will be provided but right now it's BYO food.

Marie Grillz Lab Workshop April

GRILLZ LAB INTRO TO CUSTOM GRILLZ JEWELLERY Hosted by Marie Grillz This hands on workshop teaches the creative process behind custom grillz as a form of wearable jewellery sculpture. Participants will learn how artists design and prototype grillz using wax carving techniques commonly used in jewellery manufacturing. You will also learn about technical skills such as Gumline carving, Plaster mould ratios, Wax/Heat control and be exposed to jewellery trade connections/suppliers for materials. All tools and supplies will be provided at the course so you don’t need to stress about purchasing anything extra! Marie is partnered with a professional dentist to take your impression. This must be completed in advance prior to attending the workshop. After purchasing your ticket please contact us via instagram about booking your dental appointment. NOTE: This workshop is intended for creative education and jewellery making and not a dentistry course. After signing up for the event a full deposit is required to secure your spot. Please contact @mariegrillz on instagram About Your Instructor: Jennifer is the designer and grillz artist behind Marie Grillz. With a Bachelor in Fashion Enterprise, Fashion Design and certificate in Jewellery manufacturing from Melbourne Polytechnic + completed a mentorship program from an established Australian grillz jeweller. Jennifer specialises in translating fashion aesthetics into precious metal mouth jewellery. Her main research has been exploring body adornment. Taking this into her jewellery career, her art sits between fashion accessory and body adornment, and she will be teaching the same creative prototyping methods she uses in her studio practice. Workshop Outline: *Welcome & Intro* * Overview of the session * History of Grillz * Looking at sample grillz styles * Discuss your design possibilities, materials, and what’s achievable in wax *Plaster Molds* * Demo : Live demo of pouring and preparing a plaster model and regulations regarding impression taking in Australia * Hands-on : Create a plaster model, understand the best practices to create a good model Snack break!!! *Wax Design* Demo : Live demo of wax melting and carving for grillz, heat control Hands on : Design, lay, and carve your own wax grillz on your model Important Details: * This workshop does not cover stone setting, polishing, metal casting, or dental impression work will not be taught, though relevant information will be shared. * All activities are creative and jewellery-focused. FAQ What do I need to bring? * A notebook (optional, if you like jotting things down) * Complete your dental impression at dentist partnered with Marie Grillz in advance Dress code: * Comfortable clothing you don’t mind getting dirty * Closed toe flat shoes only (no sandals or heels) * Bring a hair tie if you have long hair Experience level: The workshop is beginner friendly and guided step by step, so whether it’s your first time or you’ve worked with jewellery before, you’ll be supported throughout. What you will receive at the end of the workshop: * Grillz in person workshop notes * Grillz booklet on how to make grillz and everything I’ve learnt during my journey in the industry and industry contacts. What you will take home: 1. Your wax model 2. One Grillz cap designed by you! The design is up to you, please bring inspiration. Your grillz will be casted in sterling silver that is made specially to fit your teeth. If you wish to cast your grillz in solid gold this will be weighed and you will pay per gram.

Wednesday Coffee & AI Afternoon @ Chido Bar Mercure Doncaster 3108 🌸

Hi Radiant Ladies, Technology is growing so fast. Do you sometimes feel a little left behind? Or wonder what your grandkids are talking about when they mention AI? 😄 Come and join me for a relaxed Coffee & AI Afternoon at Mercure Hotel. I’ll show you a few simple, practical, and creative ways you can use AI in everyday life — to save time, spark ideas, and even have some fun. No technical skills needed. Just curiosity. Please bring your phone (fully charged!) and your beautiful self. We’ll enjoy coffee, learn together, laugh a little… and stay for dinner at Mercure afterwards for those who would like to. Let’s explore something new — together. 🌸 🅿️ Parking Info: If you’re coming from Doncaster Rd, take the third exit at the first roundabout to find the hotel car park. You’ll get 3 hours of free parking.

Wednesday @Tao Dumpling - Happy Hour 6 pm (BYO) & Dumpling Time 6:30 pm

Melbourne Serverless Meetup Group event for April 2026

**Note - NEW location for this month only at the AWS Builder Studio!** IMPORTANT - the list of attendees will be provided the day before to security. Just go up the stairs / escalator to level 1 and check with your Photo ID to security. Please get in touch ASAP if you would like to talk at a future event, send us an email at Melbourne(at)serverless.org.au for more info! First time speakers are more than welcome and we can provide you assistance if you need with your presentation beforehand. Please reach out Melbourne(at)serverless.org.au. It can be a regular talk, lightning talk, demo, workshop, whatever is your thing our community will love it - as long as it is serverless related! Venue: AWS Builder Studio, Level 1, 555 Collins St. Melbourne 📅 Agenda 📅 5:30 PM - Doors Open! 6:00 PM - Welcome from the organizers / housekeeping 6:05 PM - **"Changing the engine mid-flight: A startup data pivot" - By Susan Brander, CTO Kaleida** What happens when your startup’s data model is held together with duct tape, but you still have to fly the plane, ship features, and act cool about it? Startups move fast, and sometimes that means making the best architecture decisions you can, and being utterly wrong because you don’t yet fully understand the domain you’re building for. At Kaleida, we chose DynamoDB as the cheapest way to get our product off the ground quickly, pushing relational logic into separate tables and thinking we’d gotten it right and assuming if we hadn’t that we’d clean it up later (if we survived). SPOILER! We survived and thrived! Later came around fast, and it looked like: \- bloated documents * Relational logic spread across tables * Queries dragging us down We knew we’d modelled it wrong, and that not changing it soon would only multiply the difficulties in the future. So, mid-flight, we changed engines. This talk is a candid case study of what it takes to evolve your architecture under pressure: * found our real data inside our current data * Pivoted to a One Table design * Pulled off a zero-downtime migration * Did it all while shipping features and pretending we weren’t panicking. If your team is battling tech debt, scaling pains, a data model that no longer reflects reality, (or you just want to hear about someone else’s war wounds) then come along. 6:35 PM - Pizza & Networking 7:00 PM - "**Let the Agent Read the Boring Reports: AI-Powered Database Auditing for PROTECTED Compliance on AWS**" - **By Christina Chen, Senior DevOps Engineer, Mantel Group** Nobody reads CSV audit reports. But under Australia's IRAP PROTECTED framework, organisations must continuously monitor and evidence database user activity — and assessors want proof. This talk builds a two-stage event-driven pipeline: Lambda extracts MySQL RDS user activity to S3, then a Strands Agent on Bedrock autonomously assesses findings against ISM controls, and generates assessor-ready output 7:30 PM - Networking and finish the Pizza! 8:00 PM - Doors Close, see you next time!

Melbourne AWS User Group #158 - April 2026

🎉 **Melbourne AWS User Group – April Meetup** 🎉 📅 Wednesday, 29 April 📍 NAB Events Hub – 395 Bourke Street, Melbourne ⏰ Food at 6:00 pm, talks from 6:30 pm (with live stream) Join us for our April meetup as we dive into real-world AWS architecture and cutting-edge AI workloads on Kubernetes. This month, we’re exploring how organisations make practical architecture decisions on AWS, and how modern AI tooling and GPU-powered platforms are enabling scalable, real-time applications. This month’s lineup features: • Trent Hornibrook sharing how Bell Financial approaches architecture decisions on AWS. • Yongkang He is presenting a live demo on building and scaling Stable Diffusion on Amazon EKS. A huge thank you to our sponsors: 🥇 Mantel Group – Gold Sponsor, 🥈 Cevo – Silver Sponsor, 🏛 NAB – Venue Sponsor The event will be live-streamed on YouTube as always: https://www.youtube.com/@AWSMelb/streams *** 🗓️ **Agenda** 6:00 pm – Food & Socialising 6:30 pm – Introductions 6:40 pm – What’s New in AWS 6:55 pm – How Bell Financial Architects on AWS (Level 200); Speaker: Trent Hornibrook 7:25 pm – Building and Scaling Stable Diffusion with Amazon EKS (Level 300); Speaker: Yongkang He 7:55 pm – Marketplace (Who’s Hiring) 8:00 pm – Networking + Close *** 🎤 **Talk Details** **How Bell Financial Architects on AWS** Speaker: Trent Hornibrook Level: 200 In this session, Trent will share how Bell Financial approaches architecture decisions and the key choices they’ve made when designing and operating workloads on AWS. This talk provides practical insight into real-world decision-making, trade-offs, and architectural patterns used in a financial services environment. *** **Building and Scaling Stable Diffusion with Amazon EKS** Speaker: Yongkang He Level: 300 Imagine generating AI images from text prompts — powered by Kubernetes, GPUs, and built with the help of Amazon Kiro. In this session (with live demo), we’ll walk through building and deploying a full AI image generator using Stable Diffusion XL on Amazon EKS. From containerisation and GPU nodes to scaling inference and pushing to Amazon ECR, you’ll see how it all comes together in a real-world setup. 💡 Key takeaways: • Build and scale Stable Diffusion on EKS • Use Kiro to accelerate development from code to deployment • Understand GPU scheduling and autoscaling in Kubernetes • Live demo of real-time image generation on AWS *** 🙌 **Want to Speak at a Future Meetup?** We’re always looking for new speakers and believe everyone has an interesting talk waiting to be shared. If you’d like to present at a future event, reach out at the meetup or via our website: https://melb.awsug.org.au/speak/

Denim and Lingerie Workshop

Tall Dark and Art Photoshoot Workshop with Model Josephine

🎨 Street Art Photo Walk & Conversation - Melb CBD

Join us for a relaxed street art walk through Melbourne's CBD, exploring laneways, murals, and hidden creative spots while enjoying easy, natural conversation along the way. If you love photography, bring your camera or smart phone (charged) to snap some fun photos along the way. We often pose in front of our fave artworks. Be prepared to be silly with me 🤪… (optional of course) This event is about moving at a comfortable pace, noticing what’s around us, and letting conversation unfold organically as we walk. There’s no need for art knowledge - curiosity is more than enough. The walk has a **light structure to help things flow**, but nothing rigid. You’re welcome to chat as much or as little as you like and enjoy the experience in your own way. After the walk, there will be the option to stay on for dinner nearby for anyone who’d like to continue the conversation (completely optional). This event is best suited to adults **approx. 25–50 who are young-at-heart** and enjoy exploring the city, being outdoors, and connecting through shared experiences. Strict age limit = 18+ Recommendation: Download the "Street Art Cities" app which we will use to hunt down the art. Please comment below if you're keen to stick around for dinner too. Stay updated in our WhatsApp group here: https://chat.whatsapp.com/EwT1BMFaCSJ32cfApGYt8U

Tall Dark and Art Photoshoot Workshop with Model Sarah

Engineering Machine Consciousness Monthly Meetup

The discussion topic for this meetup will be identity and whether or not history is a necessary condition for consciousness as Dretske proposed. James

Tuesday Coffee/Lunch @ Afloat Southbank 3000 💛

Hi Radiant Ladies, One of our ladies suggested this beautiful restaurant. Let’s enjoy a relaxing afternoon by the water at Southbank together. Lyn