Amazon Alexa

**🏢 Hosted at:** Fabric Group **🚀 Building the Wrong Thing Faster: AI and the Build Trap** AI has dramatically compressed the time it takes to build software. But it hasn't stopped us building products that nobody wants. If anything, it's accelerated the problem - to the point we've invented a new word for the output: ***slop***. Drawing on observations from Brendan's consulting work and conversations with friends at ***Google, Meta and Spotify***, He'll explore how this ***isn't really a new problem*** and why now, more than ever, we need human centricity, sound product strategy and product discovery. **🎤 Speakers:** ***Brendan Marsh*** is a Product & Org Advisor and Director at ***Organa***, where he helps organisations improve product strategy, org design and execution at scale. He previously served as ***Chief Product Officer*** of a mental health non-profit and spent five years at ***Spotify*** during its hyper-growth phase, first as an ***Agile Coach*** supporting innovation and product discovery teams and later as a ***Product Manager*** responsible for the Mac and Windows clients (40M+ MAU). ***Ruben Cardoso*** is the ***Head of Product & Design*** at ***Fabric Group***. An experienced UX/UI designer specialising in product design and delivery, with a strong track record running discovery-to-delivery cycles for large enterprise clients. ***Dzmitry Yaltykhau*** is the ***Delivery Practice Lead*** at ***Fabric Group.*** Leads large-scale product design and delivery programs end-to-end from presales through discovery, build and rollout while driving best practices, coaching and AI-accelerated ways of working across the team. **🗓 Agenda:** Arrival and light refreshments Featured Talk Panel discussion with contributions from Fabric and the audience

We are back for our second of four meetups in 2026. Whether you’re deep in the code or just curious about the future of streaming, it's a perfect chance to grab a slice of pizza, a cold drink, and catch up with the local engineering scene, make some friends and check out Kick.com (Easygo) HQ. Talks in May are from two leaders in Video Technology Industry sharing: **[Garrett Singer (US Remote) - Software Engineer @ Netflix](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gesinger/)** Garrett shared technical strategies and insights on reducing toil and debugging video-related operations in software engineering pipelines. **[Zac Shenker (US) - Senior Director, Media Strategy @ Fastly](https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacshenker/)** We’re making the most of a rare visit from the States from Zac Shenker- a genuinely great guy and renowned leading expert in video streaming who is currently shaping the industry's most ambitious new streaming architectures by drawing on his experience from events like the Super Bowl. **[Sean Curran - APAC Director @ Eluvio](https://www.linkedin.com/in/curransean/)** *Kill the Encode Farm: The Case for Just-in-Time Video* Eluvio is a decentralised, blockchain-backed distribution network that replaces traditional CDNs and cloud stacks by streaming premium video directly from source objects with just-in-time transcoding and built-in monetisation. 📍 Easygo – 271 Collins Street Melbourne 📅 Tuesday 26 May, 6:00–8:00pm 👉 RSVP is essential for Easygo building access **Sponsors** Our thanks to **Easygo** for hosting and sponsoring pizza + drinks at the venue. Melbourne Video Technology is a volunteer group, as part of many groups independently run around the world. Tonight’s hosts will be: [Jeremy Brown - Kick](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremybrownau/), [Nick MacPherson - Fastly](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasmacpherson1/) and [James Broberg - StreamShark](https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-broberg-8654052/)

A taste of [GrafanaCON](https://grafana.com/events/grafanacon/) is coming to you! Join your local observability community for an evening of open source inspiration, real-world stories, and meaningful connections - all in a laid-back, meetup-style setting. This event will feature a recap of the [GrafanaCON](https://grafana.com/events/grafanacon/) keynote, combined with fresh voices from your own community. Grafana team members walk through Grafana 13 and the most impactful improvements across the platform. Learn about how Grafana is becoming easier and safer to operate as production infrastructure, with updates that improve configuration management, recovery, and long-term maintainability. The session showcases significant advances in core user workflows, including more flexible and powerful dashboards, with improved performance. Whether you’re building dashboards, scaling Kubernetes, contributing to open source, or just getting started - this meetup is for you! **🎟** Free to attend 🍕 Pizza + soft drinks provided 🤝 Built for connection **💡** Real talks from real practitioners Agenda: 5:00-5:30PM: Arrivals and pizza 5:30-6:15PM: GrafanaCON recap presentation [Brian Stinehart, Staff Solutions Engineer at Grafana Labs] 6:15-6:30PM: Q & A 6:30- 7:00PM: AWS DevOps Agent Integration with Grafana [Ankita Saxena, Technical Account Manager at AWS] 7:00-7:30PM: Observability in Agentic AI: Upgrading OpenTelemetry with OpenInference [Thiago Shimada Ramos, Cloud Engineer at DNX, Chapter Organiser at Cloud Native Melbourne] Note that by registering for this event you consent to related event & product communications from Grafana Labs and agree to our [code of conduct](https://grafana.com/events/events-code-of-conduct/).

Hi Radiant Ladies, Get ready for one of our most popular and glamorous days out! We’re off to the Myer Champagne Bar for a gorgeous lunch together — think beautiful food, wonderful conversation, and the best company around! And because we’re already in Myer, we simply have to take a stroll through the ladies fashion! Shop, treat yourself, browse, try things on — no judgement, all fun! 👗🛍️ This event is always a favourite and fills up quickly, so don’t miss your spot! Come and treat yourself — you deserve it! 💛 Lyn 🌸

Come along and join in a relaxed evening of dev and tech talk, drinks and dinner.

🎉 **Melbourne AWS User Group – May Meetup** 🎉 📅 **Wednesday, 27 May** 📍 **NAB Events Hub – 395 Bourke Street, Melbourne** ⏰ **Food at 6:00 pm, talks from 6:30 pm (with live stream)** We're fresh from the excitement of **AWS Summit Sydney**, and the energy is still high! This month, we’re keeping that momentum alive by bringing a piece of the Summit back to Melbourne, alongside an inspiring journey of a cloud newcomer. This month, we’re following the path from a first-ever cloud deployment to managing complex, event-driven IoT systems. Whether you’re just starting your cloud journey or looking to refine how you monitor production-scale data platforms, there’s something here for you. **This month’s lineup features:** * **Nolan Cui**, sharing his authentic "From Zero to First Deploy" journey, highlighting the lessons learned and mistakes made during his first steps into the cloud. * **Matthew Gillard**, presenting an extended version of his **AWS Summit Sydney** talk on data observability, specifically focusing on practical patterns for event-driven IoT platforms. 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. 🗓️ **Agenda** * **6:00 pm** – Food & Socialising * **6:30 pm** – Introductions * **6:40 pm** – What’s New in AWS * **6:55 pm** – **From Zero to First Deploy: My AWS Beginner Journey** (Level 100); Speaker: **Nolan Cui** * **7:20 pm** – **Data Observability Without the Pain** (Level 200); Speaker: **Matthew Gillard** * **7:55 pm** – Marketplace (Who’s Hiring) * **8:00 pm** – Networking + Close 🎤 **Talk Details** **From Zero to First Deploy: My AWS Beginner Journey** **Speaker:** Nolan Cui **Level:** 100 Nolan is still quite new to AWS, but his passion for cloud tech has led him from "just exploring" to building his first working cloud setup. In this lightning talk, he walks through his first hands-on experiences, the mistakes he made, and the valuable lessons he learned along the way. Nolan will also briefly touch on how he plans to apply these lessons by moving oward a fully serverless design for his upcoming real-world projects. **Data Observability Without the Pain: 3 practical patterns from a production IoT platform** **Speaker:** Matthew Gillard **Level:** 200 Modern IoT platforms are inherently data platforms. When events flow through APIs, queues, Lambda functions, and device networks, tracing a single event can become a nightmare. This fast-paced talk provides three practical observability patterns drawn from building and operating a production healthcare IoT platform that processes tens of thousands of events daily. Using **OpenTelemetry**, **AWS X-Ray**, and **Honeycomb**, Matt will explore techniques for gaining visibility into asynchronous event pipelines and correlating activity across distributed services. You’ll leave with concrete patterns you can apply immediately to your own event-driven systems. > **Note:** This is an extended, deep-dive version of the talk Matt is presenting at **AWS Summit Sydney**! 🙌 **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/](https://melb.awsug.org.au/speak/)

RSVP on our GDG community platform -> https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-melbourne-presents-gdg-melbourne-may26-meetup/ This event is hosted at the Mantel Group Office, with the recording of the talks to be shared afterwards on YouTube if you can't make it. There will be food, networking and some surprise swag!Agenda: 6:20 - Intro 6:30 - Talks 8:00 till late - networking & chat (& drinks optional)Speakers and Talks: Talk 1: Katie Barnett\, Engineering Manager @ Bilue\| Google Developer Expert for Android \| GDG Melbourne Co\-Organiser \| Women TechMakers Melbourne Ambassador What's New on Android Talk 2: Tulsi Sapkota, Senior Software Engineer @ Linktree Replace Yourself with Agents How we built an agent that monitors our Buildkite pipelines, reasons about inefficiencies, and raises PRs to fix it. A practical story about trust, confidence thresholds, and what happens when the agent is better at your job than you are. Talk 3: Saugato Paroi, IT Support Engineer @ PageUp Building AutoCloud: How I turned "why is deploying so hard?" into an AI-powered platform. It started with a frustration every developer knows — you build something that works beautifully on your machine, then hit a wall of IAM roles, Terraform files, networking configs, and CI/CD pipelines just to get it live. I watched that gap kill momentum for too many projects, including my own. So I decided to build the tool I wished existed. AutoCloud is an AI-powered platform that takes a local project or Git repo and turns it into a production-ready cloud deployment — no deep infrastructure expertise required. In this talk, I'll walk you through the journey: the problem that sparked it, the architectural decisions, the hard lessons, and how AI made it all possible. How to find us: Doors open at 5:45 PM at our host the Mantel Group, Level 2/452 Flinders St, Melbourne. Message via Meetup or Slack if you are arriving after 6:00, as the lifts won't let you up. This is an in-person only event. If you have any accessibility requirements, please reach out via the Meetup or Slack to the organiser group to discuss, and we will do our best to help you out. Agenda *** Speakers Katie Barnett - Google Developer Expert for Android (Engineering Manager, Bilue) Katie is passionate about all things Android. She has taken on a wide variety of challenging projects including in the live event, media and travel space. Her favourite thing is to see someone having a delightful experience using something she has worked on. Katie is very active in the development community, she is one of the organisers of GDG Melbourne and is a Women Techmakers Ambassador. Sh… Tulsi Sapkota - Linktree (Senior Software Engineer) Shaugato Paroi - PageUp (IT Support Engineer) Hosted By Katie Barnett, GDE Android / GDG Organiser Suesi Tran, Senior Flutter Developer Poornima Sivakumar, GDG Organiser Lovee Jain, GDG Organiser Zach Jensz, GDG Organiser Ujjawal Raj, GDG Organiser Bramley Turner-Jones, GDG Organiser Yuba Raj (UV) Panta, GDG Organiser Kartik Arora, Android Engineer Google Developer Expert in Android Android Engineer @ Bilue Carolyn Ai Chi Wong, Complete your event RSVP here: https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-melbourne-presents-gdg-melbourne-may26-meetup/.

You are probably well aware of the **nightmarish** freelancer marketplaces... Upwork ❌ Air tasker ❌ Fiver ❌ The offers on there are flat-out disgusting. (Pennies and a five star review IF lucky👌). I have a few tips for finding clients in alternative spaces and giving yourself the best chance of landing them. Happy to share these with you guys, and hear some of your own strategies too. Topics Covered: • Free methods for finding prospects that the rest of your industry isn't hunting for. • The two-sequence pitch that is purpose built for uncovering client desires so you can shapeshift your offer to match. • A clean closing system that feels organic. Location and time below, look forward to seeing new and familiar faces. Max capacity = 10

With our next EUXMELB meetup on the 28th of May, I'm excited to announce that **Natalie Ellis, Partner and COO at The Product Bus, will be presenting 'Your skills *are* the product'.** According to Harvard Business School 95% of new products launched every year *fail.* Natalie is here to argue that the reason for these failures isn't a lack of talent or tools, but because no one stops to ask whether the market actually wants or needs these things before shipping them. Online rhetoric discusses how AI is transforming the design, product and engineering worlds, but from her perspective, Natalie believes AI is actively multiplying the rate of failure because it's now possible to build something no-one asked for in an hour from your Mac mini. Natalie is here to tell us why evidence-based, commercially focused product thinking is more critical than ever for countering the wasted time and resources spent shipping products no one asked for. She will explain why the skills designers and researchers already possess are the real commercial asset and how people in these roles can start treating them as such. Natalie has spent her career turning consumer insights into product and commercial decisions across startups, enterprise, government digital services and institutional programs. Following a decade rising through a global market research agency, she jumped ship to an early-stage market research startup before spending several years as a product strategist designing and delivering national digital health services. As Partner & COO at The Product Bus she is passionate about helping founders, teams and businesses make real progress through evidence based decisions and passionate about helping them stress-test ideas before they commit to building. She escaped the city for rural life in the Alpine Shire several years ago where she has become an accidental pumpkin farmer and enjoys crocheting while watching crime drama. Event will start at 5:30pm with Pizza, Drinks and networking with the talk starting at 6pm. We are in the Jenny Florence Room on Level 3 at The Ross House Association. **Please enter code #TBC and come up to level 3 where you will need to enter the code again to gain access.** This event is sponsored by [askable](https://www.askable.com/) ([https://www.askable.com/](https://www.askable.com/)) and Experience Design "UX" Agency [blueegg](http://www.blueegg.com.au/) ([http://www.blueegg.com.au/](http://www.blueegg.com.au/))

NuCalm is a patented, drug-free neuroscience technology designed to rapidly reduce stress, improve sleep quality, and aid recovery by shifting the body from a "fight-or-flight" state to a deeply relaxed parasympathetic state within minutes. [https://stamina.xosialx.com/nucalm.html](https://stamina.xosialx.com/nucalm.html) It uses neuroacoustic software, a biosignal processing disc, and light-blocking eye masks to guide brain waves from active beta states down to alpha/theta (relaxation/meditation) levels NuCalm uses a patented, clinically proven pitch and frequency matrix with non-linear oscillating algorithms to safely present your brain with precise signals, prompting what is known as a frequency-following response. Your brain synchronizes with the incoming NuCalm signals helping you naturally and effortlessly manage your state of mind by speeding up or slowing down your brain wave frequencies. NuCalm has mapped all of your brain wave frequency zones and created products to safely and predictably guide you to whatever mental state you desire. The amazing thing is, NuCalm is all-natural and works every time you use it within minutes. The best thing to do now is to watch the video on the website and download the NuCalm app. All you need is a headset and eye mask. This app purchase is covered with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get started today and FEEL the difference even 15 minutes can make. WATCH THE VIDEO ON THE WEBSITE. [https://stamina.xosialx.com/nucalm.html](https://stamina.xosialx.com/nucalm.html)

Topic to be announced. **THANK YOU** *Franklin University* for hosting our meetup! To learn more about *Franklin University*, please visit their website: https://www.franklin.edu/ **DIRECTIONS** Franklin University Fisher Hall 300 E. Main St, Columbus, OH 43215 Map: https://maps.app.goo.gl/jxjBA2hUmS5qrvhq8 Parking is FREE! Please park in Lot C in front of Fisher Hall. See attached map. NOTE: Map the address only. When mapping with Google Maps it may use the Fisher Hall at OSU, which is NOT correct. **Want to sponsor the pizza and/or bar tab?** Please contact me if you would like to sponsor this meetup's pizza and/or bar tab: angelo@mandato.com

**Important time note:** Please plan on arriving between 5:30 and 6:00 as the elevators lock after 6 and you'll need to message us and we'll need to come get you. The building address is 4450 Bridge Park The entrance is 6620 Mooney St, Suite 400 You will need to scan your ID at the door to get a visitor badge. **Abstract** Like it or not, AI agents are now capable of turning a quickly written paragraph of requirements into a pull request that is ready to be integrated into real-world production applications and it's now our responsibility to make sure AI doesn't go rogue and take down prod - or corrupt our data by misunderstanding the requirements or our existing schemas. In this session we'll explore strategies to protect our codebases through unit and integration testing, documentation, and code review along with additional ways of providing context and guard rails to our AI agents as they carry out the work we've assigned them to do. By the time we're done, you'll have a firm grasp of the problem and understand some helpful options for protecting your codebase from vibe coding mishaps getting YOLOed into prod. **YouTube Link** TBD

Couldn't make Knowledge? Or want to debrief the dancing robots or Autonomous Workforce? Join us for a Knowledge '26 recap, insights sharing, a couple rounds of golf, and fun at Topgolf. As always, drinks and food will be provided. More details to come — mark your calendar, RSVP, and save your spot today!

Start your week the right way with Manic Mondays. Giving you an enjoyable Bachata lesson with a push of cool moves. The second hour has Beginner/Intermediate Salsa on 1. You must understand basic Salsa skills to participate. 730pm-830pm Bachata Cool Moves 830pm-930pm Salsa On 1 (Beginner/Intermediate) 15 for One Class 20 for Both Free Parking & Plenty of Dance Space. Viva Dance Columbus 2809 Festival Lane Dublin OH 43017

QA or the Highway is a one-day, affordable, regional, professional conference featuring real-world experience and thought leadership in the QA and testing industry. This is a ticketed event please register here: https://www.qaorthehwy.com/ Featured Keynote Speakers: **Matthew-Hope Eland** **(Wizard at Leading EDJE)** \- An AI Specialist and Wizard at Leading EDJE who is known to teach software engineering\, AI\, and data science concepts in the most ridiculous ways possible\. Matt has used machine learning to settle debates over whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie\, reinforcement learning to drive the behavior of digital squirrels\, data analytics to suggest improvements to his favorite TV show\, and AI agents to play board games and create an AI agent with the personality of a dog\. Matt is the author of "Data Science in \.NET with Polyglot Notebooks" and "Refactoring with C\#" as well as several LinkedIn Learning courses\. Matt helps organize the Central Ohio \.NET Developer Group\, runs several blogs and a YouTube channel\, has a Master’s of Science in Data Analytics\, and is a current Microsoft MVP in AI and \.NET\. **Tatyana Arbouzova** **(CEO at Innovate QA)** \- Tatyana Arbouzova is an engineering and business leader with a strong background in Quality Engineering across multiple industries\, including Big Tech\, Healthcare\, and Entertainment\. She has held leadership roles at world\-class companies such as Microsoft\, VMware\, Disney\, and The Pokémon Company International\, where she focused on building quality\-driven cultures and scaling teams to deliver high\-impact products\. With decades of experience\, Tatyana has helped organizations transform their quality practices so teams can deliver software efficiently\, confidently\, and with measurable business outcomes\. Today\, Tatyana advises software companies on adopting AI to optimize quality practices and improve how software is delivered at scale\. She is also a passionate community builder and the founder of Innovate QA\, a thriving Seattle\-based community and conference for quality professionals\.

**How does a TennisColumbus Season / League run?** The league advertises the season dates and builds a queue of committed players for the season. **Kickoff Day - June 10th** The start day of the season, players are sent a kickoff email that contains important information about the league, the link where your league standings and players contact information. We guarantee 6 playing partners at your playing level, but have been averaging closer to 15+ partners in most cities. The number of different levels we run is solely based upon the number of players enrolled for the league kickoff. Typically we are running a Skilled-3.0, Competitive-3.5 and Advanced-4.0 in most cities. **Your Task - "Flexible Scheduling"** After this kickoff email is sent, it is the **player's task to communicate with other players**. Players should work with their partners to find an agreeable time and location to play the match. While TennisColumbus doesn't mandate your playing schedule, it is recommended that players schedule at least one match per week. By request of the players, we started to allow players to play 1 rematch per season. The regular season is all about playing as much as you can. As of Feb. 10, 2026 we've had an amazing 2,017 players play more than [20 matches in a season](https://www.tenniscolumbus.com/info/MatchesInSeason). **Where to Play?** Play at your local free tennis courts, tennis parks, condo courts or tennis clubs. The league strongly suggests that players jointly try to pick a tennis court location convenient to both. We provide an extensive list of [tennis courts](https://www.tenniscolumbus.com/TennisCourts), including # of courts, lighting, hitting walls, etc. We strive to keep this list up-to-date. TennisColumbus sets up a must play dates to push players out on the courts. The final deadline is the date marking the end of the season, at which point players with 3-5 wins (Actually total is specified on the division page) will qualify for a post-season playoff to determine the league champion. **How to Play?** Players can use three mostly standard playing formats: 2 out of 3 sets, 2 sets with 10 point super tie-breaker or the 10-game pro set (First to 10, used when court time is limited). On Feb. 2018, we added Fast Tennis 4 game pro set format as a valid format. **Playoffs** Each season concludes with a playoffs where players with anywhere from 3 to 5 season wins qualifies for a single elimination tourney. The champion is awarded based upon the league [Prize Pool](https://www.tenniscolumbus.com/info/prize_pool3). Each singles league champion also receives a playing entry into one of two national championships we run. **[JOIN TODAY](https://www.tenniscolumbus.com/join)** Full price is $39.95 to play in a season. The earlier you sign up we typically offer discounts during these tough economic times. Just go to the [Join Page](https://www.tenniscolumbus.com/join) and complete the short form. We'd be happy to find you dedicated tennis playing partners.

Join Voice Over Pros Of Ohio for an exciting morning of networking, and exploring opportunities in the world of voice acting. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting out, this event is perfect for expanding your network, learning how to start a VO business, and for honing your skills. Connect with fellow voice actors and VO experts, that will help you succeed in your voice over business. This event will feature discussions on professional development, entrepreneurship in the voice over industry, with tips for navigating the world of voice acting. Don't miss this unique opportunity to learn from others, collaborate with like-minded individuals, and take your voice over career to the next level. Join us Saturday, May 30, from 10am - 12pm and learn how to start or grow your voice over business. Let your voice be heard! The $10 fee covers refreshments and door prizes.