Amsterdam's mapping community gets back together for an evening of show-and-tell and hands-on OpenStreetMap work for humanitarian and local projects. Maptime Amsterdam, hosted by Cas van G. and Salim B., at TomTom's building. Doors at 18:15, welcome at 18:30, then a community showcase where regulars share mapping projects, case studies or work in progress, short and informal, no slides required. From 19:45, focused OpenStreetMap mapping sessions, laptops open. Wrap-up from 21:00. Free, at TomTom, De Ruijterkade 154, behind Centraal. Bring a laptop if you want to map. Why go: a friendly, practical room where GIS professionals, developers and curious beginners actually contribute to open map data together. Best for anyone working with geospatial data, or who wants to start.
The annual gathering of the Bazel build community, run by the Linux Foundation and landing in Amsterdam this year. Training day on 13 October, then two days of sessions, the Bazel State of the Union and live Q&A with the core team. Build and developer-productivity engineers — a genuinely specialist conference that rarely comes to the Netherlands.
A two-day, intermediate course on making scientific Python run efficiently on many cores: recognising which problems can be parallelised, measuring performance, then working hands-on with Dask arrays, Numba, delayed evaluation, parallel design patterns and asyncio. Run by the Netherlands eScience Center's Digital Skills Programme in the Carpentries style, with learners coding along as instructors write on screen. The emphasis is on how the methods compare and when to use each. 9:30 to 17:00 on 13 and 14 October; lunch and closing drinks included. €50 for people affiliated with Dutch research institutions, €200 for industry; master's students are not accepted. You need basic Python, NumPy and Jupyter. Late cancellations incur a no-show fee. At Science Park 402. Why go: two focused days from the people who write research software for a living, at a fraction of commercial training prices. For researchers, research software engineers and data scientists whose code has outgrown one core.
More than 30 robots on the floor of Amsterdam's biggest basketball arena: an open robotics expo, a robot football match, a dance contest and a race, then a serious panel on the cutting edge of AI in robotics. Organised by AI on the Amstel with the City of Amsterdam (Amsterdam Trade & Invest and StartupAmsterdam), sponsored by Prosus and Qwen. Robots come from the TU Delft, VU and UvA robotics groups, Monumental, Nebius, Prosus and the Dutch police, plus start-ups including Antfarm, BTScout, Manus and VNYX. The panel features Sebas Visser (founder and CTO, Monumental) and Pepijn Kooijmans (who leads Hugging Face's open-source robotics work), moderated by Seb Vaessen, who leads European venture investing at Prosus. Doors 16:00, show from about 18:00, until 21:00. Free; more than 1,100 have signed up. Children are welcome but must be registered. Why go: the biggest gathering of Amsterdam's robotics scene this year, with hardware you can actually see. For founders, engineers and investors in embodied AI.
An Amsterdam AI discussion evening on the Roeterseiland campus of the University of Amsterdam, bringing researchers and practitioners together around the societal questions raised by AI. Conducted in Dutch.
Three practitioner talks for analytics engineers: an agentic tool that turns business context into a validated star schema and a dbt project, what "context engineering" for AI agents means for data teams, and an entire open-source data platform that fits in one git repo. At 18:00 Jasper Stoop (Eraneos) demonstrates Dimo, which generates documented, tested dbt models from live warehouse metadata. At 18:30 Sean McIntyre (dbt Labs and Fivetran) on bringing well-governed data in as context for AI agents. At 19:00 Eva van Kalmthout and Stan Verwer show datavloot, running dlt, DuckDB, dbt, Dagster and Elementary from a single repository. Light dinner from 17:30, drinks at 19:30. Free, at Eraneos, De Passage 126-136, an eight-minute walk from Bijlmer ArenA station. It is full: join the Meetup waitlist. Why go: three concrete, demo-led talks with no vendor fluff, from the country's most established dbt community. For analytics and data engineers on modern data stacks.
An evening at Van Lanschot Kempen on internship and early-career routes into technology roles for women. Recruitment-adjacent, useful if you are hiring or job-hunting at that level.
A product-community session on where product accountability actually sits between product, engineering and leadership, and what happens when ownership is ambiguous. Venue is not published on the group's event page.
A closed-door evening for Dutch start-ups that have raised money in the past 12 months and the investors who backed them, run by FundFest with the Dutch Startup Association. FundFest is a quarterly gathering, hosted by Lucien Burm, Friso and Johan Schaap; this is the eleventh edition, and more than 130 people are already registered. The format is networking among people who have recently been on either side of a funding round. Tuesday 13 October, 18:00 to 21:00. Free, but every ticket is approval-gated: start-up tickets for Dutch companies funded in the past year, investor tickets for those who have invested in Dutch start-ups in that period, and a small "other" category. The exact address is shared once you are approved. Why go: a rare room where everyone has recently raised or deployed capital, so the conversations about rounds, terms and next raises are first-hand. For funded founders and active angels and VCs in the Dutch ecosystem.
A two-day commercial conference on validating and deploying AI inside regulated GxP life-sciences environments — qualification, data integrity, audit trails and the regulatory posture that comes with putting models anywhere near GMP or clinical processes. Narrow by design, and genuinely useful if you work in pharma or medtech quality and computational systems validation.
Three technical talks on making AI agents trustworthy: preserving an agent's reasoning as checkable structure, "dreaming" as a memory architecture for long-running agents, and grounding an agent's claims about your data model in real evidence. At 18:00 Arman Kavian on explainable agentic workflows. At 18:40 Florian Buetow asks whether agents can dream, comparing replay-based memory with standard retrieval. At 19:20 Ricardo Granados Lopez walks through a live pipeline that tests where trust in an AI's reading of your SQL can be automatic and where it cannot. Pizza and drinks from 17:30, networking from 20:00. Hosted by Hernani F. and the AdvancedAI Amsterdam organisers. Free, at Xebia's office, Wibautstraat 200. Why go: talks that assume you already build with agents and want to know why they fail, which is rarer than it should be. For ML and software engineers shipping agentic systems.
Mindstone's monthly Amsterdam meetup: short practical talks and demos on how people are actually building with AI, followed by pizza, drinks and networking. This month: Riccardo Murciano on "The First Output Is a Coin Flip", a technical demo of building a product with AI and what he learned; Umut Ozbay on the anatomy of an AI agent, a step-by-step practical demo; and Diogo Soares on AI-driven real-time event analytics dashboards, plus a closing talk on AI's impact on work and society. 18:00 to 21:00. Free, at the Maarten Luther Kerk, Dintelstraat 134. Register through Mindstone's community page; setting up a Mindstone profile beforehand speeds up check-in. Why go: an accessible, demo-heavy evening where practitioners show their working, with a broad crowd of builders and AI-curious professionals. Best for people moving from using AI tools to building with them.
Two talks on what enterprise AI needs once it leaves the demo: a company's own secure AI platform with controlled tool use and multi-agent orchestration, and how to see what autonomous agents are actually deciding, retrieving and executing. At 18:30 John-Paul Straver, AI architect at Trivium Packaging, walks through Canny, the secure enterprise AI platform his team built on company knowledge, workflows and multi-agent orchestration. At 19:45 Boaz Kwakkel, AI observability specialist and co-host, on real-time tracing and automated evaluations for multi-agent chains, where perimeter security is no longer enough. Food and drinks from 18:00; closing drinks at 20:30. Run by the Dutch chapter of the GenAI and Agentic AI Security Guardians. Free, at Cisco's Amsterdam office, Haarlerbergweg 13-19 in Zuidoost. Why go: an end-user case study from a manufacturer rather than a vendor, paired with a focused talk on agent observability. For AI platform, security and governance leads in large organisations.
A recurring Ascent Valley networking evening at Side Quest Bar for people working in AI and tech in Amsterdam.
Appsterdam's long-running weekly social at Café Bax — developers, designers and makers from across the Amsterdam app and web scene, no agenda and no tickets. Turn up and find a table.
De Balie takes on AI, disinformation and democratic institutions in its usual format — a real argument on stage, in front of an Amsterdam audience that turns up for it. Civic-tech and policy people, and anyone whose product touches public discourse.
The 13th edition of this OT-security conference for power and utility operators: SCADA and ICS hardening, IT/OT convergence and incident response for critical infrastructure. Two days, senior practitioner audience.
KickstartAI's flagship Dutch AI conference for technical practitioners, explicitly built around how things work in practice rather than what AI might do. Engineers, data scientists, ML leads and the CTOs who have to fund the decisions. Depth over hype is the stated editorial line and previous editions have honoured it.
Monthly drinks at Startup Village on Science Park, where most of Amsterdam's deeptech and university spin-out community is based. Free, informal, and a better route into that world than any conference floor.
The ABN AMRO Developer Group signs off its meetup series with a final gathering at the bank's Gustav Mahlerlaan headquarters — engineering talks and a send-off for a group that has hosted a steady run of developer evenings in Amsterdam Zuid. Worth attending if you have been part of that community or want to meet the engineers who ran it before it winds down.
A storytelling and networking evening in Amsterdam Noord aimed at people who need to hold a room — founders pitching, operators presenting internally, anyone whose job involves persuading. Practical delivery coaching followed by open networking.
Appsterdam's weekly Saturday morning co-working session at The Coffee Room — bring your laptop and whatever you are working on. Long-running, informal, open to anyone who writes code.
An informal developer evening from AI Builders Club: short technical talks, games and time to actually talk to the people building things. Lower-key than the group's monthly flagship, which tends to make it the better one for conversation.
Amsterdam's indie game developers meet at De Nieuwe Anita for an afternoon of playtesting, showing work in progress and comparing notes on shipping small games. Game development is one of the more under-served corners of the Dutch tech scene and this is its regular anchor — relevant to engineers, artists and designers who want a break from SaaS.