Waterford Tech Meetup

Meetup – Thursday, 12th Feburary 2026 | 7:00 PM
Venue: Waterford Treasures Museum (X91 K10E)

Join us for our next Tech Meetup at the Waterford Treasures Museum. The evening will feature engaging technical talks, networking, food and drinks, and spot prizes, with a focus on practical challenges shaping today’s technology landscape.

Speaker 1: Kateryna Romashko (Red Hat)

Kateryna is a newly minted Associate Engineer within the Emerging Technologies team in Red Hat. She moved to Ireland from Ukraine in 2022 and settled into continuing her education in SETU, wherein she undertook an internship in Red Hat in January of 2025.

Tech Talk: From Zero to Hero: An Ex-intern's tale

The path into a software career can be daunting. Reading job specifications or course descriptions often feels overwhelming, particularly for students trying to navigate an increasingly complex technology landscape.

Twelve months ago, Kateryna began her internship with zero experience, maximum anxiety, and little clarity on the road ahead. Since then, she has accepted a permanent role as an Associate Engineer. While she does not claim to be an expert, her story offers hope to anyone starting their career, changing direction, or simply trying to survive in a world of AI Agents.

Speaker 2: Keith Bell (Wolters Kluwer)

Keith Bell is a Lead Software Engineer at Wolters Kluwer with over 20 years of experience building and maintaining software products across healthcare, risk management, and loan origination.

Passionate about clean code and sustainable software development, Keith has spent much of his career advocating for high standards in code quality, pragmatic engineering practices, and continuous improvement. Most recently, he led a dedicated Technical Debt team for two and a half years, improving long-term maintainability and engineering effectiveness across multiple teams.

Today, his focus is on helping teams build software that not only ships valuable features, but remains understandable, adaptable, and healthy over time.
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Tech Talk: TODO: Fix This Later (We Didn’t): The Myth of “We’ll Clean It Up Later”

Ever opened a file and thought:

“What… the hell… is going on here?”

Good news: you’re not alone.
Bad news: there’s a strong chance you wrote it.

Most software doesn’t get rewritten, it just slowly turns into an archaeological site. Layers accumulate. Comments lie. TODOs age like fine milk. And despite everyone’s best intentions, teams fall into the comforting promise of “we’ll clean it up later”, a magical place that exists right next to “after this sprint” and “once things calm down.”

In this light-hearted talk, Keith shares stories from real-world codebases and explores why technical debt is so easy to create, so hard to pay down, and why improvements often go unnoticed while breakages are remembered.

After all, nothing lasts longer than a temporary TODO.