Software Configuration Management

For our March meetup, we're back at the fabulous Accurx offices. We have two excellent talks lined up, the agenda will be: * 6:30pm - arrive, drinks, networking * 7:00pm - Welcome & Housekeeping * 7:15pm - **Talk 1: "Devops 2014 Revisited - a Dozen Years of Noise and Confusion"** It is 11th February 2014, a nervous Andy Burgin takes the stage at Agile Yorkshire and begins to share the current thinking from the burgeoning DevOps movement. Fast forward 12 years: DevOps is different — or is it? During a recent clear-out at chez Burgin, an old, forgotten laptop was discovered discarded between a box of floppy disks and a collection of old Computer Shopper magazines. While the laptop was no longer functional, a painstaking data recovery process rescued the files on its hard drive via a collection of old adaptors and half-working wires. Among the files saved from the Wakefield Council recycling centre was a copy of the very PowerPoint deck presented at that meetup 12 years earlier. But what was in this digital "time capsule"? What happened to DevOps? What did it become? Is it now a tool, a job title, or did something "bad" happen to it? Are the thoughts shared over a decade ago still relevant today? Join Andy as he looks at how we travelled from DevOps to Cloud, SRE, Platform Engineering, Team Topologies, Developer Experience, and VibeOps - Most importantly, we'll explore what the future of DevOps can learn from its past. **Speaker:** Andy Burgin, Principal Platform Engineer @ Flutter UK and Ireland *Andy is a Principal Platform Engineer at Flutter UK and Ireland. He considers himself a Kubernetes, AI and DevRel fettler, spending far too much of his spare time running software in containers that really shouldn't be. He is a small part of the organising team for DevOpsDays London and ran the DevOps meetup in Leeds for almost a decade hosting over 50 events. He’s attended and has spoken at a bunch of DevOps conferences and in his own words is an "all-round DevOps nuisance".* * 7.45pm - food, more drinks & networking * 8.00pm - **Talk** **2: "Navigating From Tension to Flow: A Human-Centred Guide to Overcoming Misalignment"** Behind every stalled project, missed milestone, or unclear decision is a story of tension between what people want, what’s needed, and what’s possible. But tension isn’t failure. It’s feedback. This talk explores how to recognize and respond to tension using Team Topologies principles, flow first thinking, and a healthy dose of human insight. We’ll show how organizational patterns, team boundaries, and interaction modes can either amplify or ease misalignment — and how trust, empathy, and bold conversation are just as important as structure, if not more so. Packed with real-world examples, this session blends organizational design with emotional intelligence to help you design for flow — and for people. **Speakers:** Faye Benfield, Product Leader, Independent & Rich Allen, Fast Flow Facilitator @ Conjurer *Faye Benfield is a Product Leader with over 15 years experience in product management, agile delivery and digital transformation. Specialising in helping organisations adopt product practices, Faye has a proven track record of embedding product teams, evolving ways of working, and aligning stakeholders to achieve strategic goals. Faye has held leadership roles, including Head of Product and Delivery at Parkinson’s UK and Head of Product at Comic Relief, where she spearheaded digital transformation initiatives and cultivated effective, people-centred teams. As a consultant at Armakuni, she combined hands-on coaching with practical tools and techniques to help clients navigate the complexities of product delivery, with a focus on balancing human dynamics and practical constraints.* *Rich Allen is a sociotechnical architect, consultant and creator of User Needs Mapping, a practical technique for aligning teams around what matters. With over 20 years’ experience across software engineering, technical leadership, and organisational design, Rich helps organisations reduce friction, clarify boundaries, and improve flow by working outside-in from real user needs. He was a foundational contributor to the development and teaching of Team Topologies, helping shape the core materials now used in Team Topologies training and consulting worldwide. Rich is the author of User Needs Mapping: Aligning Teams Around What Matters.* * 8.30pm onwards - drinks and networking. So, please come and join us, we look forward to seeing you there. The LOPUG team. * Food and drinks provided * Good time will be had by all

**We are holding an Agile Standup dinner at the Mercato Metropolitano food court.** https://mercatometropolitano.com/locations/elephant-and-castle/ The focus of the evening is to enjoy amazing food while networking, learning and discussing using agility to create better software, products, teams and organisations. **The evening will take the form of a round table discussion** \- Bring a great question or describe a problem which you'd like to share\, we will then discuss it at the table\. **Who might come along?** Whether you're a seasoned agilest or completely new to it, you are most welcome. **The Dinner** \- Be prepared to pay for your own food and drinks\, what you choose is up to you\. **On the night:** The event starts at 6:00pm, hopefully we'll not be that hard to find. When you arrive, join us and order a drink. We'll aim to eat at around 7pm. Afterwards there will be an opportunity to meet, mingle, discuss and maybe even find mentors or future work colleagues. If you have any questions, just drop us a line. We will finish at around 9:00pm, but you can leave earlier, if you need to. *Photographs may be taken throughout the evening, please let the organisers know if you would prefer not to be featured in them.* Looking forwards to seeing you there.

For our March meetup, we're looking forward to welcoming Phil Seamark to show us how to create interactive Power BI visualisations that show data just how you want them to. *\*\* Please only register if you are able to attend as the number of available places is limited \*\** # Visualize Without Limits: AI-Powered Custom Visuals for the No-Code Era Creating custom visuals used to be slow and complex. In this session, see how modern AI tools and the Power BI Visuals SDK turn that challenge into a fast, approachable process. Learn step-by-step techniques to build, customise, and ship visuals—quickly and confidently **Agenda** 18:30 - Welcome, drinks, pizza & networking 19:00 - Main Session 20:00 - Close **Venue** Tenth Revolution offices in London. Aldgate House, 33 Aldgate High St, London EC3N 1DL Please provide your first and last name when registering for the event, as this is provided to building security to allow you entrance into the venue.

Unless otherwise announced this is an in-person social gathering for Smalltalkers to get together and talk about Smalltalk (the Programming Language!). Everyone is welcome from the grizzled and experienced to the merely curious.

Welcome to our March event. We're delighted to welcome [Matt Johnson](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mhjwork/), CEO, Rayo, and [Dan Keely](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-keeley/), Principal Data Engineer, Rebura. **Matt** talks about hard-won AWS lessons on keeping cloud costs under control - plus a real “oops” story of how one small mistake can blow up your bill (and how to stop it happening again). **Dan** talks shares how hardware-style production thinking makes your data platforms more reliable, maintainable, and cheaper to run A big thank you to our sponsors [The Scale Factory](https://rebrand.ly/scalefactory) and [Cloudscaler](https://rebrand.ly/cloudscaler)! **Programme:** **18:00:** Arrival, registration **18:15:** Talks start **20:00:** Networking with food and a drink provided by the generosity of our sponsors. **Talk 1:** ***When things go wrong: Managing cost in the cloud with Matt Johnson.*** There are lots of sessions that talk about the theory of cost management and tooling available on AWS, but far less look at the real world challenges of using them in production, as well as the rough edges they have - not to mention what happens when things go wrong! In this session Matt will cover some of the hard lessons learned from working with AWS over the last 14 years, with a real-world example of how a simple mistake can cause problems, and how to avoid them in future. The presentation is aimed at both those new to AWS and to veterans of the platform, and also includes practical guidance on how to improve your cost management on AWS. Matt has been using AWS since 2011, including 8.5 years at AWS in the public sector tech org. He has presented at 6 separate re:Invents and dozens of other events, covering a wide range of topics. Now as CEO of Rayo, Matt continues to help customers deliver mission outcomes using cloud technology. **Talk 2:** ***Predictable Designs in Data Engineering on AWS with Dan Keeley.*** What if we treated data engineering systems the way world-class hardware teams treat products headed for mass production? John Teel (Texas Instruments) has spent years taking complex hardware from prototype to dependable, high-quality production at scale. In this talk, Dan borrows those “production-grade” principles - predictability, repeatability, and ruthless attention to failure modes, and translates them into practical patterns for building data platforms on AWS. This is less about any single AWS service and more about building data systems that behave consistently, even as requirements, volumes, and teams change. **What you’ll learn:** Attendees will leave with practical, reusable approaches they can apply immediately: * How to make systems maintainable * How to keep costs efficient without heroics * How to borrow best practices across engineering disciplines Dan is a community driven data engineer and now c-level team builder working with a wide range of Data technologies in the cloud. He is on the steering group for the biggest tech conference in London - BigDataLDN. He has won a number of awards, including being named in the top 50 data leaders and influencers in the UK. \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- If you are interested in speaking at one of our events please check out our [call for papers here](https://awsuguk.org/call-for-papers/). We are advocates for greater inclusion & diversity in UK Tech and are especially keen to receive talk submissions from people in underrepresented groups. If you are interested in speaking at a future meetup but would like to discuss what to expect or need assistance please contact our Inclusion & Diversity Lead Natalie Gray - graynataliej@gmail.com or DM her [@natjgray](https://twitter.com/natjgray) Check out our [website](https://awsuguk.org) for more information about our community. Remember to follow us [@AWSUserGroupUK](https://twitter.com/AWSUserGroupUK) and on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/aws-ug-uk) for the latest updates and you can find videos of our past meetups on [YouTube](http://bit.ly/2dZnvEE). If you want to chat with other members, join our [Community Discord Server](https://discord.gg/yMa8Rvtsmy).

***P.S: [Luma](https://luma.com/4hs6hs36) Registration is Required for this event.*** **Theme:** ***Agentic Coding 🤝 [ACP](https://agentclientprotocol.com/)* (Agent Client Protocol)** **💻 Coding Agents and ACP with JetBrains** 💎 State of [ACP ](https://www.jetbrains.com/)from **[Jetbrains](https://www.jetbrains.com/) & [Zed Industries](https://zed.dev/)** 🎙️Panel with **[Jetbrains](https://www.jetbrains.com/) [Zed Industries](https://zed.dev/) [Mistral AI](https://mistral.ai/) & [Vibe Kanban](https://vibekanban.com/)** **Agent Client Protocol ([ACP](https://agentclientprotocol.com/)) and the Future of Interoperable Coding Agents** Coding agents are part of everyday development workflows. Whether you are using an IDE or working in the CLI, coding agents are helping developers write, refactor, test, and debug code. But today’s ecosystem is fragmented, we have so many coding agents Claude Code. Codex, Gemini CLI and many others. Every editor, every tool, and every agent often speaks its own language and has own harness. Not single coding harness will solve you all needs and you should be able to switch or have a choice to use different harnesss What if you could use **any coding agent** inside **the editor you love**? That is exactly what the **Agent Client Protocol ([ACP](https://agentclientprotocol.com/))** enables. ACP is an open protocol that standardizes communication created by Zed Industries, between code editors and coding agents. It works for both local and remote scenarios. Think of it as the LSP for coding agents. Just as the Language Server Protocol unified language tooling across editors, ACP aims to unify how editors interact with intelligent coding agents. **Sponsors** Big Thanks to our Sponsor **[Jetbrains](https://www.jetbrains.com/)** And thanks to **[Tessl](https://tessl.io/)** for hosting the venue. **What You Will Learn** In this session we explore how ACP is shaping the next generation of coding agent interoperability. • What the Agent Client Protocol is and why it matters • Current State of ACP and Future • How ACP standardizes communication between IDEs and coding agents • How to use ACP inside your favourite IDE • How to build an ACP client • Practical considerations for using ACP effectively • The future of coding agent interoperability If you are building or using coding agents, this session will give you both conceptual clarity and practical direction. 🎤 **Talks** **Talk 1: State of ACP and Future (45min)** Speakers: **[Sergey Ignatov](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergey-ignatov/) Director of Engineering, JetBrains** \*\*[Ben Brandt ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminbrandt/)\*\*Zed Industries **Description :** This talk with In this session Sergey and Ben will introduce ACP and share Future plans of Agent Client Protocol from the company behind the ACP (Zed Industries) and Jetbrains ACP: \- Overview \- State of ACP \- Ecosystem around it \- Future \- Recent Implications: OpenClaw\, Custom Agents with Agent Frameworks like LangGraph\, LlamaIndex and Cursor Wrapper etc 🎙️ **Panel and Q&A 25 min** **Topic:** Agentic Coding, ACP anf Future Panelist: **[Sergey Ignatov](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergey-ignatov/) Director of Engineering, JetBrains** \*\*[Ben Brandt ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminbrandt/)\*\*Zed Industries \*\*[Clément Drouin ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/cl%C3%A9ment-drouin-785643137/)\*\*Software Engineer at Mistral AI \*\*[Louis Knight-Webb ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/knightwebb/)\*\*Vibe Kanban We will close the evening with a focused panel discussion and audience Q&A on coding agents, interoperability, and the future of agent powered development. The questions on the current and future of ACP. Bring your hard questions. **Agenda** 6:00 PM – Doors Open 6:00 – 6:40 PM – Welcome and Refreshments 6:40 PM – Opening Remarks and London Agentic AI 6:45 – 7:30 PM – Talk 1: State of ACP and Future 6:30 – 7:35 PM – Break 7:35 – 8:00 PM – Panel Discussion (Jetbrains, Zed, Mistral AI, Vibe Kanban), Audience Q&A 8:00 – 8:05 PM – Closing Remarks 8:05 – 8:200 PM – Networking/ Wrap Up Walk to the [Big Chill ](https://www.bigchillbar.com/) 8:30 PM onwards – [Big Chill pub](https://www.bigchillbar.com/) and informal networking **Who Is This For** • Agentic coding builders • Engineers working with coding agents • IDE plugin developers • AI tooling engineers • Infrastructure and DX builders • Anyone interested in interoperable agent systems If you are serious about coding agents and want to understand how interoperability standards like ACP will shape the future of development workflows, this is the meetup for you. **Venue & Important Data Usage Message:** Thanks to Tessl for providing venue for the event. 📍 Tessl 210 Pentonville Rd, London N1 9JY Tessl [Policy](https://tessl.io/policies/privacy-cookies/): *P.S: Full Name, Email Data Collection and Usage Update:As per Tessl building security, all attendees must provide their first name, last name, and email address. Your email will only be used for event-related purposes. After the event you will be automatically subscribed to event updates from the AI Native Dev Community from Tessl. You can unsubscribe at any time.* Also published on original Meetup & page [here](https://www.meetup.com/london-agentic-ai/events/313554470)

🎉 Come along to the London Scala Talks! 🎉 In this event you'll hear from Tomasz Godzik and Noel Welsh. **Agenda** 6:00pm - 🥤 Doors open. Come along and grab a drink! 6:40pm - 🗣️ Tomasz Godzik: Metals Version 2! 7:20pm - 🍕 Intermission: Join us for some free food and drinks! Vegan, vegetarian options are provided. Let us know if you'd like something special - we'd be happy to accommodate. 7:50pm - 🗣️ Noel Welsh: Code as Communication: Lessons from Crashing Production 8:30pm - 🥤 Socialising: Grab a drink and let's discuss the talks. 9:00pm - 🍻 Join us in a pub to discuss the talks! 🌐 **This event has a live stream** Watch this space for more details. **🗣️ Tomasz Godzik: Metals Version 2!** Metals is the Scala Language Server, providing IDE features within editors such as Visual Studio Code, Cursor, Zed, and Helix. This makes it essential for anyone looking to use new agentic tools. Many companies are now utilizing LLM trends to boost developer performance, but a major challenge has has been that Metals becomes less efficient as codebases scale - a common issue in large organizations. Metals 2 is a new indexing and compilation approach, designed to make indexing as fast as possible and ensure the codebase remains functional even if parts of the project fail to compile. Applying this to both Scala and Java code, Metals 2 aims to become the premier JVM language server. Let’s explore how this can enhance your workflow. ⭐ Tomasz Godzik ⭐ Scala tooling engineer aiming to solve large problems with elegant solutions **🗣️ Noel Welsh: Code as Communication: Lessons from Crashing Production** Code is a form of communication: with the computer but also with other developers, be they human or otherwise. In this talk I'll discuss some aspects of communication in code. We'll look at what can go wrong, the problems it can cause (including embarrassing examples from my own experience!), and ways we can improve things. ⭐ Noel Welsh ⭐ Noel is a developer, teacher, and author. He's worked with companies big and small across Europe, the USA, and even once in Africa. He's the organizer of ScalaBridge London, a diversity focused group helping people get better at Scala. When he's not programming Scala he is probably writing about it. His next book, Functional Programming Strategies, is out soon! ———————————————————— 🗣️ Would you like to present, but are not sure how to start? Give a talk with us and you'll receive mentorship from a trained toastmaster! Get in touch through [this form](https://forms.gle/zv5i9eeto1BsnSwe8) and we'll get you started 🏡 Interested in hosting or supporting us? Please get in touch through [this form](https://forms.gle/3SX3Bm6zHqVodBaMA) and we can discuss how you can get involved. 📜 All London Scala User Group events operate under the [Scala Community Code of Conduct](https://www.scala-lang.org/conduct/). We encourage each of you to report the breach of the conduct, either anonymously through [this form](https://forms.gle/9PMMorUWgBnbk1mm6) or by contacting one of our team members. We guarantee privacy and confidentiality, as well as that we will take your report seriously and react quickly.

We are back! This is going to be a monthly IN PERSON meet up in London. A very big thank you goes to Accurx who is hosting us in their amazing Shoreditch offices. This will include access to facilities including coffee! 😻☕️ **Want to know more? 👇** As with all CoffeeOps, this is an interactive, chatty, build your own adventure type of meet-up. Instead of booking in experts to *learn* *from*, we gather a group of practitioners to ***learn*** ***with***. We have been running for over 4 years now and often get feedback that this is the most useful meetup people join! The event is approximately 90 minutes and always starts by brainstorming topics to discuss. The group then votes on the most relevant/interesting to them and we then cycle through the topics trying to discuss each deeply, but in a time bound slot. To get an idea of topics, you can check out our remote board [here](https://easyretro.io/publicboard/h404NF84Uje4tCcxpJdHr4Ycs9B3/a4a35d2b-181b-409b-832e-a729be1af79c). The general gist is anything is fair game, though we tend to revolve around software delivery and definitely lean towards the more Ops-y or DevOps-y side of things.

Join us for Grafana talks mixed with snacks and community conversations! Schedule 18:00-18:30 Welcome, snacks, drinks and networking 18:30-19:00 **From Service to Line Number: Getting Started with Continuous Profiling** by Christian Simon, Principal Engineer at Grafana Logs, metrics, and traces tell you which service is slow or expensive. Profiles tell you which code path - down to the line number. With profiling now part of OpenTelemetry, and the eBPF profiler requiring zero instrumentation, there's never been a better time to add this missing piece to your observability stack. 1\. Value of Continuous Profiling 2\. How do you set up continuous profiling \(Pyroscope \+ OTel eBPF profiler\) 3\. Deriving insights from Profiles using Grafana Assistant 4\. Demo 19:00-19:40 **My Cool Grafana Dashboard Show and Tell - Lightning Talks** **Lightning talks:** **1\. What if Your Career Had Metrics?** **Roxana Turc, Software Engineer at BNY**, will show how she used Grafana to build a **career dashboard—tracking learning, work, and growth**, and why seeing her progress this way changed how she thinks about development. **2\. Using Grafana for Visualising IoT Air Quality Sensor Data** by John Sinha, Lead Technical Business Analyst IoT air quality sensors produce noisy, high-resolution time series data, but how you visualise it determines what you actually see. This lightning talk walks through a Grafana dashboard designed to **present environmental data clearly, covering time and value scaling choices, linear vs. log views, and practical denoising techniques.** See how small visualisation decisions can dramatically change the story your sensor data tells. 3. **How I discovered pigeons sabotaging my project with Kafka and Grafana** \- by Hugh Evans\, Developer Advocate at Aiven Learn how how a lightweight Kafka + Grafana observability stack helped Hugh **catch his avian adversaries** and iterate on a hobby project **without enterprise-scale complexity or costs**.

Hello folks! The next Ansible meetup is scheduled for **Thursday 12th March**. **Location** Metro Bank have kindly offered us use of their offices at 1 Southampton Row, London WC1B 5HA, short walk from Holborn Tube. The entrance is just down from the bank itself on Southampton row. Facing the Metrobank branch with Sainsburys behind you, head to the right past the bank and its on your left about 25mtrs. **As always, please bring photo ID.** **Agenda** Speaker: Gregor Berginc - Xlabs CEO Session Title: Ansible Beyond the YAML: Understanding Automation as a Supply Chain Summary: This talk explores what really runs during an Ansible execution beyond playbooks and roles. We’ll look at the hidden layers of the automation supply chain and why understanding them matters as automation scales. The goal is to share a mental model that helps practitioners move fast while understanding what truly runs in production. **Lightning Talks & Discussion** We will have lightning talks, and **accepting talks and discussions on the day**, so bring your laptop and slides/Playbooks or just start a discussion. We are looking for a for 5-15 minute lightning talks. Slides and demo optional, we are here for the discussion. We've love for you to [share your Ansible story](https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-london-meetup/issues/new?template=submit-a-talk.md). **Refreshments & Pizza** Besides the talks, we'll have the obligatory refreshments and pizza. So come along, mingle with fellow Ansiblings, and hopefully learn something interesting from the experiences shared. **Talks wanted!** We are looking for talks (5-20 minutes) for this, and future meetups. If you have something you'd like to talk about at a future meetup, submit your talk via the [London GitHub Repo](https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-london-meetup/issues/new/choose). Here's a list of topics people would like to hear about – can you give a future talk on any of these [popular requests](https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-london-meetup/issues/37)? We look forward to seeing you on Thursday 12th March.

It's a ClickHouse Observability Meetup at SRE Days London! We've joined forces with the SRE Days team to host an evening meetup at their stunning venue. Join us for a few deep-dive talks, some food, and beverages. In fact, we are so excited that we have a discount if you want to attend the entirety of the event. Just head on over to https://luma.com/sreday-2026-london-q1 and use the code CLICK80 for a massive discount. Looking forward to seeing you there! Agenda: 5:30 - Arrival 6:00 - Uncovered: The Hard Truth About OpenTelemetry's Vendor Neutrality - Adriana Villela 6:30 - Observability Updates in ClickHouse - Dale McDiarmid 7:00 - How we built an SRE Agent with Clickhouse and eBPF - Chris Battarbee 7:30 - Running Grafana at Scale - Rory Crispin

**SREday: In-Person Event on SRE, DevOps & Cloud in LONDON** Conference focused on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, and cloud infrastructure, bringing together engineers, platform teams, and leaders to share real-world experience building, scaling, and operating reliable production systems. 🫆[Speakers & Topics](https://sreday.com/2026-london-q1/) 🎟 [Tickets](https://luma.com/sreday-2026-london-q1?from=embed)

**DevOps Not Dead: In-Person Event on DevOps, Platform & Cloud in LONDON** Conference focused on modern DevOps, platform engineering, and cloud infrastructure. It brings together engineers, SREs, and platform teams to share practical experience in CI/CD, Kubernetes, automation, cloud architecture, reliability, and operating production systems at scale. **🎤 [Speakers & Topics](https://devopsnotdead.com/2026-london-q1/)** **🎟 [Tickets](https://luma.com/devopsnotdead-2026-london-q1?from=embed)** Get your ticket — 50% OFF with promo code: MEETUP50

Product Is… is BACK! After a break since April last year, we're excited to return in 2026 with lots of really interesting new themes and discussions to be had. Let's start with one. Here's the thing: you've been learning to write better prompts. But what if the prompt is the easy bit? What if context is where all the real work lives - and what if product people are the only ones who know how to do it properly? Will Chan, Senior Product Manager at Risk Ledger and organiser of the AI Signals meetup, will lead us through why context engineering might be the most important skill you're not thinking about. This event will be at Synechron's office on the seventh floor, 95 Gresham Street, London, EC2V 7NA. A massive thank you to Synechron for providing the venue. Doors open at 6:30 PM, we kick off at 7:00 PM, and wrap up by 8:30 PM. Drinks and snacks will be provided. Come ready for proper discussion, new connections, and ideas worth thinking about. \-\-\- THE THEME \- PRODUCT IS\.\.\. PROMPT AND CONTEXT ENGINEERING \-\-\- For product managers, designers, and researchers, context is everything. Context is the currency that sets product people apart from other disciplines like development or commercial teams. Product professionals need to understand the widest range of contexts - from users to business to implementation. As AI tools become embedded in our work, something interesting is emerging. To create effective prompts, context has to be injected accurately. But here's where things get fascinating - you may need to create prompts to create context to create prompts. It's turtles all the way down. The more time you spend using AI in products, the more you find yourself going back in your process. You're creating prompts for the final prompt, for the output you need to be as effective as possible. You might spend longer creating the prompt than doing the work itself. Join us as we explore what context engineering means for product people. How do you manage context in a rapidly changing world? What does this look like in a qualitative world where product people live in the grey area? Is context engineering the right term, or is it something else entirely? These are the questions we'll be tackling together. \-\-\- THE SPEAKER \- WILL CHAN \-\-\- Will is a Senior Product Manager at Risk Ledger and organiser of the AI Signals meetup. With over 10 years of experience building and scaling SaaS products in regulated, data-heavy environments, Will specialises in taking complex problems and turning them into products that drive measurable outcomes. Across legaltech, telecoms, workforce management, and retail media, Will has led discovery through delivery for AI and automation initiatives, improving adoption, containment, conversion, and operational efficiency at scale. Most recently, he's owned AI strategy and delivery for customer-facing platforms, doubling feature adoption and embedding AI safely into real workflows rather than demos or prototypes. Alongside delivery, Will enjoys developing product talent. He's coached PMs, shaped product playbooks, and led teams through clearer discovery, prioritisation, and execution practices. Will is passionate about practical AI application and real customer impact over hype. \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- ABOUT 'PRODUCT IS\.\.\.' \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- PMs, UX & UI designers, user researchers, developers - you like to dream big when it comes to digital products… Now it's time share your perspective! 'Product is…' grounds itself in informed, knowledgeable context and healthy conversation - vital ingredients to tech success. One keynote speaker sets the tone on a theme of less travelled subject matter before all attendees add their perspective during the second half of round table-style discussion. Don't expect standard tech meetup fare like "How to improve your CV/Portfolio for that dream job at Facebook" or "How this new framework/approach will improve your workflow" - this meetup is food for the mind, but also a place to meet like-minded big-thinkers! We welcome everyone who works in tech - EVERYONE has a valuable perspective that we learn from. \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- WHY WE CHARGE FOR TICKETS \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- We do not aim to make a profit from this meetup, our goal is to create healthy and interesting conversations, meet new people and make new connections. Speakers and the organising team give up their time free of charge to ensure the events are enjoyable for all. A small charge is required for attendance - this allows the organisation team to cover overheads, including the Meetup.com subscription, plus food and drink for the evening.

Drake Lundstrom is presenting: Code Anywhere by Talking to your Phone Abstract: Have you heard the trend of people deploying code anywhere from checkout lines to doctors' offices? In this talk, you will learn how to talk to your phone and have an app on Azure to show your friend 5 minutes later. The basic DevOps tools you already know, plus a little bit of AI magic, are all you need! If you want to follow along, the demo will be in Azure with GitHub Actions and GitHub Copilot, and you can have it set up on your phone by the end of the session. Just come in with an Azure account and a GitHub repo. Join us for pizza, drinks, and networking @ Improving's office. Doors open at 5:45.

Come chat about Atlassian tools and best practices at the Nationwide Sunny Street Cafe and Breakfast is on Atlassian! Let's get the day started off with breakfast with your ACE Leaders! We're always excited to talk about Atlassian Products, share our knowledge and hand out swag! Come chat with us about new product news and anything you are working on within the Atlassian product stack. This is a great opportunity to come see what we are all about, hear new business news and share with other Atlassian users your questions and experiences. We'd love to see new and old friends come out to chat and learn about Atlassian! Agenda --- Moderators Kimberly Deal - Columbus Atlassian User Group Leader Kevin Stanley - Columbus Atlassian User Group Leader Hosted By Kimberly Deal, Atlassian User Group Leader Kevin Stanley, Chief Everything Greg Sprowls, Agility Lead --- Global Partner Atlassian (http://atlassian.com) Millions of users globally rely on Atlassian products every day for improving software development, project management, collaboration, and code quality. Partner Atlassian --- For over a decade, Atlassian customers have come together to network, share ideas, solve problems, and find new ways to use Atlassian products. Today, more than 15,000 people take part in Atlassian community events in more than 30 countries. --- Complete your event RSVP here: https://ace.atlassian.com/events/details/atlassian-columbus-presents-rise-and-shine-with-atlassian-downtownnationwide-22/.

Builders, creators, architects, admins, consultants - come one, come all. This one's for you. We're bringing a little friendly competition to the Columbus ServiceNow community while highlighting the cool things people have built on the platform. Five presenters will take the stage to showcase something they've built, solved, designed, or imagined on the ServiceNow platform - and a panel of judges (plus YOU, our amazing audience) will score them live. So basically, America's Got Talent but make it ServiceNow's Got Talent. Bring a notepad if you'd like 'cause you'll definitely be learning something new. Each presenter gets 10 minutes max to wow the crowd with: • A demo • A real-world business solution • A bold idea • A UX transformation • Or a creative use of the platform Judging Criteria: 🏆 Business Value 🚀 Innovation ✨ User Experience This event is about celebrating ideas, sharing knowledge, and showing how ServiceNow can drive both business impact and meaningful user value. Come learn. Come support. Come get inspired. Refreshments and bites will be provided. And maybe next time… you’ll be on stage.

Want to be a speaker? submit your talk to our Call for Presenters!!! https://sessionize.com/cbus-hug-2026/

Discover Kiro, AWS’s innovative development environment that adapts to your workflow. Whether you prefer specification-driven development or a more intuitive, vibe-based approach, Kiro empowers you to build applications your way. In this session, speakers will explore Kiro’s core functionality and its evolution through re:Invent 2025, along with demonstrations of prompts used to create APIs, hooks, and steering documents. In the latter part of the session, watch as we build a complete example from scratch, showcasing Kiro’s agentic AI workflow in action for spec-driven development and vibe coding. What You'll Learn - Core Kiro concepts and development philosophy Feature evolution: pre and post re:Invent 2025 Practical examples: API creation, hooks, and steering docs Live coding demonstration with real-time problem solving Who Should Attend - Developers, solutions architects, and technical leaders interested in modern AWS development tools and AI-assisted coding workflows. **Speakers Bio:** Matthew Jorat: Matthew Jorat is a Customer Solutions Manager at AWS with nearly three decades of expertise in AI, cloud transformation, migration, modernization, IT, technology, and business. His career spans infrastructure engineer, solutions architect, security auditor, customer success director, support and services director, and operations officer. He was an early adopter of AWS services as a customer, and his current role at AWS uniquely blends his technical and business skills as he partners with executive teams to translate strategic priorities into measurable business outcomes through cloud adoption, AI implementation, and operational excellence. Matt leads end-to-end AI initiatives for enterprise customers, identifying high-impact use cases and maintaining relentless focus on measurable ROI. He holds eight AWS certifications and serves as Adjunct Professor at Franklin University teaching cloud computing and AWS architecture. His expertise encompasses GenAI, agentic AI systems, migration, modernization, and optimization strategies that drive transformation at scale. [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattjorat/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattjorat/) Girish Bhatia: Girish Bhatia is a seasoned technology delivery leader with deep expertise in cross-domain program management. He holds multiple AWS certifications, including AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, AWS Certified Developer – Associate, and AWS Generative AI Practitioner, and is also an AWS Community Builder. Girish brings over two decades of experience in the information technology industry. Throughout his career, Girish has led major technology-driven business transformation from modernizing on-premises applications to driving large-scale cloud migrations. His work includes API-based integration platforms, data-center and mainframe modernization, and enterprise cloud adoption initiatives. Based in Columbus, Ohio, Girish works at a tech-forward fintech company. He is passionate about AWS serverless architectures, Generative AI and emerging cloud technologies. An avid learner and builder, he continues to explore and apply the latest innovations in AWS to help organizations accelerate their digital transformation. https://www.linkedin.com/in/girishbhatia/[https://www.linkedin.com/in/girishbhatia/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/girishbhatia/) **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 **Abstract** TBD **YouTube Link** TBA

We will show a variety of methods for building agents that run in Microsoft Foundry. This covers the different types of agents: Prompt, Multi, and Hosted, as well as the development lifecycle using evals and traces.