Two days at the RAI on enterprise security and cloud architecture — zero trust, identity, cloud-native defence and the compliance load that comes with them. Free expo pass; co-located with the wider TechEx Europe show.
The transformation strand of TechEx Europe at the RAI: legacy modernisation, data platforms and the organisational side of digitising an established business. Free expo pass.
The IoT and connected-devices track at TechEx Europe, covering industrial IoT, edge deployment and device security at the RAI.
Two days at the RAI on intelligent automation and robotics in industry — RPA and agentic process automation through to warehouse and manufacturing robotics. Free expo pass, co-located with TechEx Europe.
Eight co-located enterprise technology conferences under one roof at the RAI: AI & Big Data, Cyber Security & Cloud, Digital Transformation, IoT, Data Centre, Intelligent Automation & Robotics, Physical AI and Edge Computing. The organisers put attendance above 8,000 with more than 200 speakers across the two days. Doors 08:45 on 19 and 20 October at RAI Amsterdam, Europaplein. The exhibition floor and the open theatres are free with an expo pass; the conference tracks are paid. This is enterprise technology rather than startup programming. Why go: the free expo pass makes the show floor worth a day on its own, and the breadth means you can map several vendor categories in one trip instead of three. Best for engineers, architects and technology buyers inside larger organisations.
The AI and data track within TechEx Europe at the RAI — enterprise ML deployment, data platforms and the governance layer around them, with a large exhibition floor. Free expo access; paid passes for the conference tracks.
The Physical AI strand of TechEx Europe at the RAI: robotics, embodied agents and AI systems that act on the physical world rather than just text. Free expo pass.
A two-day hackathon run by LabLab AI alongside TechEx Europe at the RAI, where teams build AI applications and agents on site while the expo is running next door. Starts 09:00 on 19 October and continues through the second day at RAI Amsterdam. Free to enter, and entry puts you in the building while the eight co-located TechEx conferences are on. Why go: an unusually low-friction way to get real build time and conference access in the same week, and the only part of TechEx where you leave with something you made rather than a tote bag. Best for engineers and ML practitioners who would rather ship than walk a show floor.
Small invite-only group sessions run by Deeploy on the AI & Big Data Expo Europe floor at the RAI (stand 274), on keeping control of AI in production: which systems and agents are running, who owns them, what they connect to, and how their output is safeguarded. Aimed at people leading AI development, risk or compliance. Entry is by application with a business email so the organiser can verify the profile; accepted applicants are then scheduled into one of the sessions.
A drop-in session run by Women in Product NL on the TechEx Europe show floor, for product people working at the intersection of digital transformation, AI and the business. Sneha Divakar and Joy Adamson, who lead the Dutch chapter, host alongside other community members. 14:00 to 14:45 on 19 October at the Amsterdam RAI. The session itself is free to join, but you need a paid TechEx conference ticket or a free expo pass to get into the building. Why go: a large expo is a hard place to meet anyone on purpose, and a 45-minute anchor with a named community makes it tractable. Best for product managers and product leaders who are going to TechEx on their own.
Elastic's first Amsterdam hack night, run with Hopsworks: you get an open Formula 1 seasonal telemetry dataset and a few hours to enrich it, find something in it, build dashboards or predict lap times, with Elastic engineers in the room to unblock you. Doors, pizza and drinks 17:45 at the Elastic office on Keizersgracht 281; intro 18:00, short demos of Elastic Agent and the partner tooling, then building from 18:25 until presentations and prizes at 20:25, wrapping at 21:00. Hosted by Jim Dowling, Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan and David Pilato. Prerequisites and the repository are published in advance — bring a laptop. Free, with limited places. Why go: a genuine hands-on evening with the people who build the search and vector tooling, rather than a product talk with a Q&A. Best for data and platform engineers who want to try Elasticsearch and a feature store on real data.
with Andrea Angelo Cicu (Go-to-market lead, Biscuit)
A one-hour session on cold outreach, run by UvA Founder Space at its Valckenierstraat space. Andrea Angelo Cicu has sent more than 200 cold emails and messages, used them to pull well-known Dutch founders into events and initiatives during his time at Tulip, and is now the first commercial hire at Biscuit, where he leads go-to-market. He walks through how he writes them, how he gets a stranger to say yes, and how to make the ask worth their time. Doors at 17:45, start at 18:00. The room closes once it begins, so latecomers are not admitted. Free. Why go: cold outreach is the one founder skill nobody teaches and everybody needs. Best for early founders and students who are about to start fundraising or hiring.
A two-day industry conference for distribution system operators on outage prediction, grid resilience and the software behind keeping the lights on. Senior utilities and grid-technology audience.
The data-centre track at TechEx Europe — power, cooling, capacity and the infrastructure build-out behind AI demand. Specialist audience within a much larger event.
A paid half-day workshop run by a freelance technology journalist on how startup founders get press coverage: what makes a story, how to pitch it and how newsrooms actually decide.
with Hisham Al Hashemi (Business Development, TechMeUp) · Karen Gordon (Recruiter, KGT Consulting) · John Clancy (Co-founder, UpLeveled) + 2 more
A career evening for people trying to get into Dutch tech, run by Kooch Community with UpLeveled, TechMeUp and KGT Consulting: what recruiters here actually look for, the routes in that do not need a traditional tech background, and how training gets financed. 18:00 to 20:00 at The Social Hub Amsterdam City on 20 October — short talks then open networking, with Hisham Al Hashemi of TechMeUp, recruiter Karen Gordon of KGT Consulting, John Clancy and Karl Horky of UpLeveled, and Kooch organiser Nazanin Mirsharifi. Free. Why go: the financing half is the part nobody else covers, and you can put your CV in front of a working Dutch recruiter in the same evening. Best for career switchers, people who have recently moved to the Netherlands, and junior developers job-hunting.
An evening of four storytellers at BounceSpace, the former factory cafe by the Vondelpark, built around Harvard's Dark Horse Project - people who traded money and status for work they actually wanted. An hour of stage stories, then an hour of networking with drinks and snacks included in the ticket. 15 euro, 10 euro early bird. Aimed at people at a career crossroads rather than at any one industry. Currently on a waitlist.
A two-day, two-track conference on message queuing and the future of messaging systems - expert-led talks for teams whose event pipelines cannot afford to fail - at PHIL in central Haarlem, about fifteen minutes by train from Amsterdam Centraal. Talks are also streamed. In-person tickets from EUR 490.
The European conference for the BEAM ecosystem — Erlang, Elixir, Gleam and the runtime underneath them — with language creators and core maintainers on the programme. Distributed systems, fault tolerance and concurrency treated as engineering rather than folklore. Two days from 09:00 on 21 October at the Philharmonie in central Haarlem, about fifteen minutes by train from Amsterdam Centraal. New this year is an unconference room that attendees self-organise — the hallway track with a door on it. Tickets from EUR 595; the Amsterdam Elixir group publishes a community discount code, and an RSVP on Meetup is not a ticket. Why go: the one European week when the people who maintain the BEAM are all in one building, and the unconference makes it easy to get time with them. Best for backend engineers running Elixir or Erlang in production.
A practical legal clinic for early-stage founders, run by Zebra Legal as part of Startup Village's Nursery programme and open to public registration. Two topics across 10:00 to 11:30. First, choosing a co-founder: the firm's framing is that it is more consequential than any hire and more lasting than most partnerships, and the session gives pointers for choosing well. Second, employment law from day one — interns, the choice between employees and independent contractors, and what nought-hour contracts mean for flexibility, cost and compliance. At Startup Village, Science Park 608. Free. Why go: founder legal advice is usually either a generic blog post or a billed hour, and this is neither. Best for first-time founders about to make a first hire or formalise a co-founder split.
A hands-on AI-literacy afternoon from PWN Netherlands, co-designed and facilitated with Bureau Veritas: small-group work on where AI genuinely helps in professional work and where it quietly does not. 16:00 to 19:00 on 21 October at Apollo — Merin, Herikerbergweg 1 in Amsterdam Zuidoost. Open to non-members as well as PWN members; tickets EUR 43.13. Why go: a facilitated working session rather than a panel, which means you leave with a view on your own tools instead of notes on someone else's. Best for professionals outside engineering who are being asked to adopt AI at work and want an honest read on what it is good for.
The October edition of AI Builders' technical meetup for AI engineers and founders, at StartDock on Prins Hendrikkade: three short talks, then drinks. Walk-in 17:30, pizza 18:00. Arian Pasquali of Orq.ai on benchmarking LLMs head-to-head on your own prompts in Orq Arena; Giorgio Orsucci on AI design work; Marko Ladika of Producting.ai on how his multi-agent orchestration failed. Networking from 19:15, finishing at 21:00. Free, with tickets issued through Luma. The organisers say basic LLM knowledge is assumed. Why go: a failure post-mortem on the programme is a good sign — this is a room where people compare what actually broke rather than demo the happy path. Best for engineers and founders building with agents and RAG.
with Matthijs Huiskamp (CEO, Altura) · Jasper Spiegeler (CEO, OMRT) · Saumitra Dubey (Partner, Smartfin) + 2 more
A founder-and-investor panel at AI House on what raising actually looks like in 2026: what investor-ready means now, which numbers matter, how long a round takes, and where deals stall in diligence. Matthijs Huiskamp (CEO, Altura) and Jasper Spiegeler (CEO, OMRT) give the founder side; Saumitra Dubey (Partner, Smartfin) and Arun Bhahirathan (Principal, Prosus Ventures) the investor side, moderated by Jitse Rupp of 0Delta. Doors 17:30, panel 18:10, audience Q&A 18:55, drinks until 20:30. Free, co-hosted with Prosus and Cloudflare. Attendance is curated, so you request to join rather than book. Why go: it is pitched at late-seed and Series A founders who have raised before, and the Dutch-versus-international question gets aired properly, which it rarely does. Not a first-time fundraising session.
Amsterdam UX's research-focused session — practitioner conversation about research methods and getting findings acted on. Venue announced closer to the date.
The Amsterdam Java User Group's autumn meetup, hosted in ING's Cedar building on Bijlmerdreef: four talks on security culture, AI on the JVM and keeping language models alive in production. Doors and food 17:30, talks from 18:00. Sarah Gruneisen on when silence becomes a security vulnerability, built around a five-layer model that starts with human safety rather than tooling; Zoran Sevarac on AI in Java for the financial industry; Hossein Kazemi on building durable AI workflows for regulated work; Iudzhin Uord on an LLM pipeline that survived two years in production. Free. Why go: four substantial talks is a long programme for a user group, and three of them are about running this in regulated production rather than prototyping it. Best for JVM engineers and platform teams in finance.
with Chris Howard (Lightning talk: Agentic Open Source, Uber) · Melda Salhab (Michelangelo AI, Uber) · Qiushen Wang (Michelangelo AI, Uber) + 1 more
An evening at Uber's Amsterdam office on two open-source projects, run by AAIF Community Amsterdam with Uber and Polars. Uber has released the core of Michelangelo AI under Apache 2.0 - the platform its engineers have used since 2016 to build, train, deploy and monitor ML, from ETAs and pricing to fraud detection, and now its agent workloads. Chris Howard opens with a lightning talk on agentic open source; Melda Salhab and Qiushen Wang demo Michelangelo; Chiel Peters, CTO of Polars, covers the Rust query engine, lazy evaluation and growing a company around an open project. Doors 17:30, talks from 18:00, food and drinks from 19:15. Free. Why go: architecture, trade-offs and real production numbers rather than a product pitch. Best for ML, data and platform engineers who run this infrastructure themselves.
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.
The weekly Wednesday social evening at Technologia Incognita's hackerspace at ACTA — open house for hardware, electronics and software projects.
This edition asks how account executives at Dutch SaaS companies are actually using AI to hit target and build pipeline — peer talks from working AEs rather than a vendor demo, followed by drinks at Bonnie's canal-side office on Herengracht 107. 17:30 to 21:30 on 22 October. Free, but registration closed on 8 October and the Eventbrite checkout no longer shows any ticket tiers, so contact the organisers rather than turning up. Why go: revenue-side events are usually tool pitches, and a room of practising AEs comparing what works is the exception. Best for AEs, sales leads and founders selling B2B software in the Netherlands — if you can still get in.
October's Data Thursday at B. Amsterdam — two talks and food for the city's data-engineering community.
with Ayan Banerjee (Feature Platform, Adyen) · Vitalii Zhebrakovskyi (Fraud Detection, Adyen) · Pedro Mazala (Engineer, Ververica)
Production stories about Apache Flink, hosted by Ververica on the 11th floor at Adyen. Ayan Banerjee and Vitalii Zhebrakovskyi, from Adyen's Feature Platform and Fraud Detection teams, explain how Flink computes the real-time features behind fraud detection, scheme routing and bot detection across millions of payments a day. Pedro Mazala of Ververica covers Flink with Iceberg at scale - checkpoint frequency, small files, compaction, snapshot management, sink parallelism and the trade-off between freshness and query performance - and where streaming storage such as Apache Fluss is heading. Engineers from Booking.com also speak. 18:00 to 21:00, free. Why go: one of the few Amsterdam rooms where people running streaming infrastructure at payment scale say what it actually costs. For data and platform engineers already on Flink, or weighing event-driven systems.
Edition 72 of the Line Up lecture series at design studio Thonik in Amsterdam Oost, with designer Fanny Hamelin taking the room through her practice — from her very first typeface to the realities of running a type foundry. Doors from 19:00 for a 19:30 start at Thonik, Grensstraat 47, finishing around 21:00. Paid: a general admission tier is live on Eventbrite, but the studio does not publish the price on the listing. Why go: a working designer talking about the business of a foundry rather than showing a portfolio reel, in the studio of one of the Netherlands' better-known design practices. Best for type and graphic designers, and for product people who care where visual craft comes from.
A full-day, hands-on AI workshop for women, pitched at beginner-to-intermediate users: working through real tasks with Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini rather than watching demos. Run by SimpleAI at the Vrije Universiteit on De Boelelaan 1105. 09:00 to 17:00 on 23 October, lunch included. Women only. Free — the Eventbrite listing confirms a zero-priced general ticket, which is unusual for a day of this length and means places will go. Why go: a supervised full day changes how you work in a way a lunchtime webinar does not, and the beginner-to-intermediate framing means nobody is expected to arrive fluent. Best for women in any role who are being asked to use AI tools at work and want practice with someone to ask.
A day-long gathering of the Climate KIC community at ARTIS, bringing together climate-tech founders, researchers and funders for sessions on where climate innovation is actually getting deployed.
Appsterdam's Saturday morning co-working session at The Coffee Room on Kinkerstraat: bring a laptop and whatever you are stuck on, and work alongside other programmers who can unblock you. Runs 09:30 to 11:30 sharp, so arriving near the start matters if you want help. Maike and Daniel host, and the regulars cover Android, iOS, Flutter, C++, JavaScript, Python, Rust and UX tooling including Figma and Sketch. All levels explicitly welcome; free, no ticket. Why go: the cheapest way in Amsterdam to get a second pair of eyes on your own project rather than listening to someone else's talk. Best for solo developers, learners and anyone whose side project has stalled.
A morning gathering for Ukrainian women working in science, research and technology in the Netherlands, and for the people hiring and funding them — research talks, career routes and community building. A sharply defined network that rarely surfaces on the mainstream Amsterdam calendar, and a useful room for anyone recruiting technical research talent.