Help Desk

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/)

Get outside and join us for a day of planting trees and shrubs on a beautiful property near Trentham. Come and help to protect waterways, improve ecosystems and create habitat for wildlife. Share the day with a fun bunch of outdoorsy folk who like doing good! No experience required - we will train you on the day. Morning tea and lunch are provided for free. **[YOU MUST REGISTER VIA THIS LINK!](https://events.humanitix.com/help-plant-native-seedlings-at-little-hampton-farm)** This link tells you everything you need to know - what to bring, where to go, FAQs - you MUST register and get your free ticket on this page! (This is a FREE event - large Corporate Groups are asked to pay a supporter's charge, but NOT individuals) You'll meet friendly, like-minded people, and return home knowing that you've done something meaningful. You'll need your own transport, approximately 90 minutes' drive north-west from Melbourne CBD. TreeProject is an award-winning, not-for-profit organisation that has been growing and planting native seedlings for farmers and Landcare groups for over 30 years. We have grown over 2 million trees! This year alone we are growing over 150,000 trees, and helping landowners plant about 50,000 trees! Come and join us!

**🏢 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

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

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/).

Visitors and newcomers are very welcome, please see https://hackmelbourne.com/newcomer-faq/ for more details. COVIDSafe restrictions are also in place, please see https://hackmelbourne.com/covid-19-restrictions/ for the latest. Short walk from Glenferrie train station. Car parking at Hawthorn town hall. Bring a laptop and a project you are working on. There is also a number of group projects that you are welcome to join in. We have starter kits for Arduino, a couple of 3D printers, various tools and equipment available for use. Typically our sessions run from 6:45pm till later in the evening (depending on our members' availability to close) but if you're new please come early.

* **Topic:** Real‑time & Batch on Microsoft Fabric * **Date:** Thursday 28th May 2026 at 6.00 pm - 8.00 pm * **Networking:** 6 pm - 6.30 pm and 7.20 - 8 pm * **Presentation Time**: 6.30 pm - 7.20 pm *(includes welcome, presentation 30 mins & community marketplace)* * **Location:** Thoughtworks HQ Level 35/360 Collins St, Melbourne VIC 3000 * **Ticket:** Free of cost, however, registrations and RSVP are required! * **Sponsor:** Thoughtworks **Real‑time & Batch on Fabric** This session presents the end state of a mixed real‑time and batch analytics platform on **Microsoft Fabric**. Live event streams are handled using KQL/Eventhouse, enabling low‑latency dashboards and operational insights with minimal processing overhead. In parallel, near real‑time and batch data is processed using governed, lightweight Fabric patterns designed for efficiency and scale. The outcome is a single, capacity‑aware Fabric platform where real‑time and analytical workloads coexist cleanly, with Power BI as the unified consumption layer. **About The Speaker** Arjun Shankar has over a decade of experience turning data challenges into scalable, cloud-first platforms that drive real business decisions. He has worked across banking, finance, transport, insurance, and energy, specialising in the Azure stack: Synapse, Data Factory, Databricks, PySpark, and Fabric. From reducing platform costs, to accelerating delivery, and putting self-service analytics in the hands of the people who need it. Outside work, he's usually out on a trail, training for his next marathon, or keeping up with two young boys. We’re excited to bring the Data Engineering Melbourne Meetup group together for an evening with Arjun and his insights!

Too many kids as well as teenagers and adults have problems with study. Today's meetup will inform you about the basics in STUDY TECHNOLOGY that provides an understanding of the basics of learning and supplies exact ways to overcome all the pitfalls one can encounter during study. This is applicable to young children, teenagers (or their parents that are trying to help them) and adults alike. Study Technology shows how one studies in order to comprehend a subject so one can apply it. Laws on which learning is based and workable methods have also been discovered for anyone to apply for themselves or when teaching others. Too many students graduate from school and college unable to put to use what they’ve learned in school. It’s not that they’re stupid or that their teachers didn’t know how to teach. More than likely it traces back to the one thing missing from most educations—learning how to learn in the first place. We all went to school, yet isn’t it odd that no one taught us how to study? The information presented at this meetup can help anyone improve others or his own ability to learn. It is a practical tool that parents and teachers alike can use to enhance a child's study performance. You’ll learn the barriers that lie between your own or a child's education. And you will very quickly learn how to overcome them. This technology will enable you or a child to pursue any subject with skill and confidence. Teachers who have "hard to handle/distributive " or slow learners in class will absolutely love the amazing turn around most often seen in improved behaviour and student performance in class. If you or your child has difficulties at school (or learning new things at work or online) than this meetup is important to you. If you can not make it to our meetup than contact the organizer and arrange it to suit your time. This technology can if one was to live far away be taught online. (extension course) You may offcourse also opt to have this technology taught to your own child by experienced volunteeer staff or learn about this yourself and transfer this knowledge to those you want to have better grades. Yes it is possible to improve anyone's study performance. All it takes is just 5 steps. See you at this meetup. Pam

Get outside and join us for a day of planting trees and shrubs on a beautiful property in the Yarra Valley. Come and help to protect waterways, improve ecosystems and create habitat for wildlife. Share the day with a fun bunch of outdoorsy folk who like doing good! No experience required - we will train you on the day. Morning tea and lunch are provided for free. **[YOU MUST REGISTER VIA THIS LINK!](https://events.humanitix.com/help-plant-native-seedlings-at-healesville-4)** This link tells you everything you need to know - what to bring, where to go, FAQs - and you MUST register on this page! You'll meet friendly, like-minded people, and return home knowing that you've done something meaningful. You'll need your own transport, approximately one hour's drive from Melbourne CBD. TreeProject is an award-winning, not-for-profit organisation that has been growing and planting native seedlings for farmers and Landcare groups for over 30 years. We have grown over 2 million trees! This year alone we are growing over 150,000 trees, and helping landowners plant about 50,000 trees! Come and join us!

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/))

🎉 **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/)

**Your workshop:** Product managers are often working from incomplete information - a customer or leader asks for a change, but the real need underneath it isn't always clear. And even when ideas are strong and teams invest real effort, there's no guarantee that what gets shipped will actually change behaviour or become part of everyday practice. This workshop is an opportunity to slow down for an hour and explore how behavioural and implementation science can help design the human side of your work. From understanding what people are really trying to do, through to validating ideas, bringing your team along, and measuring impact that goes beyond the pilot phase. We'll work through some practical frameworks and implementation science strategies for influencing change. You'll also have time to apply these to something from your own work and share with the group. Come ready to think, discuss, and leave with something you can actually use. Doors: 6pm Start: 630pm **Our workshop lead:** [Dr. Alex Waddell](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrawaddell/) is a behavioural and implementation scientist and the founder of CoFormed, a consultancy that partners with expert teams to turn excellent ideas into real-world impact. Alex brings expertise across behavioural science, implementation science, and service design to help teams design the human side of change by understanding what drives behaviour, what gets in the way, and what makes something part of everyday practice. **Our Host:** Zendesk https://www.zendesk.com

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!

**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

Do you feel introverted when you are in a group setting? Are you shy? Do other people have more fun than you do? There are simple life hacks you can use to improve your connection to others and improve your social life. Talking is one thing. Truly connecting is altogether another. It's the whole experience of connecting with people and forming relationships. It includes the joy, understanding, and love formed among people. * In our meetings, you will learn: * A simple life hack to increase your liking and tolerance of other people, or even of yourself! * How to become more interested and enjoy conversations with people. * How to be comfortable in social settings. * How to be yourself * How to become more extroverted and, * How to make connections with people. Feeling lonely, isolated, or bored? This local meeting is exactly what you need! Come join us! Be sure to click on the red "Attend" button below to come to the local event. We look forward to seeing you there. This group is created by the Dianetics and Scientology life improvement center.

Have a small business? Ever wish you could just ask some questions around how to grow your business, get more customers or just know what the freak you are doing with sales? Now is your chance!! Every month we are hosting the "Ask an Expert" at the Columbus Metro Library, Main campus. I will be there to answer your Sales related questions. Drop-in for sales coaching designed to help small business owners, entrepreneurs, and sales professionals sharpen their sales approach. Whether you have questions on how to refine your pitch, are looking to close deals more quickly, or are working on building better client relationships, Smashing Your Sales Goals Coaches are here to help. Drop-in to get expert insights, actionable strategies and real-time solutions to grow your business and generate higher profits. Drop-In Sales Coaching is FREE + OPEN to the public. No appointment needed. First come, first served. EPIC Learning created. Accelerate Columbus supported.

Come assist Van Buren Shelter (https://ymcacolumbus.org/locations/vanburen) staff in serving dinners and cleaning up on the 3rd Tuesday of each month. Dinner for the women is 5-6 pm and for the families is 6:15-7:15 pm. There is ample free parking available in the shelter's lot. The recommended area to park is in green in the image above. There will be a new entrance for the time being. We are asking all volunteers to enter through the Donation Dock door, the orange mark on the image above. This door is located between the Single Adults and Family Shelter. You will see 2 large garage doors with a large green trash compactor in the center. Please head to the closest garage door to the building wall, with a ramp leading up. There, you will see a door with a sign stating instructions on how to enter the building. Please ring the doorbell, and a staff member will come and escort you into the building. If a staff member takes longer than 5 minutes, please call the front desk at 614-689-2020. This is a new process for us, and we do not want to keep you waiting! We appreciate your patience as we navigate this temporary change. The shelter needs a volunteer count the day before the event so sign-up ends Monday at 4:50 PM. Afterwards some of us go to the Omnipresent Atheists Weekly Meetup in progress to have a bit to eat or drink (http://www.meetup.com/omnipresentatheists/). Volunteers must be 14 or older. Since we will be working around families, the YMCA does not permit volunteering by individuals with convictions for violent or sexual crimes. The YMCA reserves the right to run background checks on volunteers. For questions, comment on this page or contact: Andrew, awhit12@yahoo.com, (614)937-5802 (cell). Please let Andrew know if you volunteer anytime other than our COUNT events so that he can count your hours toward our service record.

Our monthly PHP meetup. A virtual shindig courtesy of Zoom. Check back here for the details around 6:15 pm

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\.