Tuesday 14th July 2026;
Aviva, Wellington Row, York, YO90 1WR;
City centre, a short walk from York railway station.
Join us for our next face-to-face meetup: learn and chat about all-things AWS, and meet other cloud practitioners in the area.
Talks by Adrian Roberts and Ethan Sumner.
18:00: Doors open - turn up, meet people, grab a drink
18:00 - 18:30: Pizza arrives, chat with more people
18:30 - 18:40: Intro/welcome
18:40 - 19:10: Talk 1: "From Prompt to Production: Shipping a Real Site with AI and AWS", Adrian Roberts
19:10 - 19:30: Break
19:30 - 20:00: Talk 2: "Using AWS to Build a SEND Support Platform", Ethan Sumner
20:00 onwards: post-meetup drinks in The Judge's Lodging, at 9 Lendal (YO1 8AQ)
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Talk 1: From Prompt to Production: Shipping a Real Site with AI and AWS
Speaker: Adrian Roberts
Everyone’s seen the demos where AI writes a to-do app in five minutes. This is the other story: what it actually takes to get an AI-built site running in production on AWS, and some lessons learnt along the way.
I’ll walk through one real site, end to end. I’ll share my stack, and How I used AI coding tools to do the build, where they earned their keep and where they wasted my time. Then the AWS path that put it live: Amplify, Route 53, CloudFront, RDS and a GitHub workflow that deploys on push.
Live demo included, plus the costs, the dead ends, and the bits still held together with tape.
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Talk 2: Using AWS to Build a SEND Support Platform
Speaker: Ethan Sumner (Barclays + Community Stack)
Navigating Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) support can be complex, fragmented and overwhelming for families, schools and support organisations.
In this talk, Ethan shares his journey so far using AWS to design and build a SEND support platform, combining a data platform, chatbot and supporting digital services to help people find clearer guidance, discover relevant local support and better understand the pathways available to them.
The session will cover the problem he is trying to solve, early architectural thinking, and how AWS services can be used to build something accessible, scalable, secure, and responsible for a real-world public-impact use case.
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Food and drink
Food will be in the form of pizza - please let us know if you have any specific dietary requirements prior to the day and we will endeavour to meet your needs. We’ll also be providing a range of drinks.
Code of conduct
Like a large number of other communities, we have an anti harassment policy and code of conduct (https://www.meetup.com/York-Amazon-Web-Services-User-Group/pages/32649582/Code_of_Conduct/), in order to support the inclusive nature of our events. It is necessary for all attendees, speakers, sponsors and volunteers at any AWS Leeds to agree with the code of conduct.
Helping with diversity and inclusivity
The organising team for AWS York are keen to promote diversity and inclusivity, in terms of speakers, how events are run, and the composition of the organising team. If you would like to contribute to this aim, particularly if you think you have experiences that you might not consider to be typical for the majority of the tech community, we would be really excited to talk with you at the event.
