Amsterdam — Week of 31 Aug 2026

A community meetup run by members of Lenny's Newsletter in collaboration with Product Meetup Amsterdam, at A Beautiful Mess on Oosterdokskade. The draw is the room rather than a speaker line-up: product managers, growth people and founders who read the same material and can have a specific conversation about product and growth rather than a general one. There is a tab for free drinks. One of the higher-signal product gatherings in the city.

IntelliSys 2026, the 12th Intelligent Systems Conference from SAI Conferences, is a two-day gathering of researchers, academics and industry practitioners from over 60 countries, focused on advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning and computer vision. Held at the Mercure Amsterdam City Hotel, the programme spans keynotes, peer-reviewed paper sessions and poster presentations across the breadth of intelligent-systems research — from foundation models and agents to applied ML in industry. A strong fit for AI/ML engineers, data scientists and technical leaders who want a deeper, research-grade view of where the field is heading. Onsite participant registration is £750 (GBP); a virtual option is also available. Paid, registration required in advance.

The Amsterdam Java User Group returns, hosted by BeFrank at De Entree in Zuidoost. Doors and food from 17:00, with the first talk — David Veen on why teams must take ownership of technical debt rather than treating it as someone else's backlog — followed by a second session. A long-established JVM community with a practitioner audience: platform engineers, backend developers and tech leads from the city's larger engineering organisations.

The final boat session of the summer, and the largest — two boats instead of one, double the capacity, same deliberately wobbly conversation format. Floating Tech Talks started as an experiment in whether moving a tech meetup onto the canals would change the quality of the conversation, and it has become one of Amsterdam's more distinctive recurring formats. Small enough that you actually talk to everyone aboard. Five euro ticket.

The 11th AI Native Netherlands meetup gathers engineers and technical leaders for an evening on doing real production engineering with AI agents — beyond demos and theory. Raul Tavares (Senior Solutions Engineer, Cloudflare) presents “From Building to Orchestrating: Engineering with Multi-Agent AI”, covering agentic workflows that cut a website deployment from four hours to four minutes, plus the messier side of agent orchestration — managing code you didn’t write and correcting hallucinated API integrations. Michiel van der Ros (Staff Engineer, TomTom) follows with “Rerouting: From Tech Debt to a Codebase Agents Can Actually Navigate”, on introducing agents into an existing production frontend and making legacy repositories agent-ready. Expect practical takes on multi-agent orchestration, validating AI-generated changes in production, and turning postponed refactors into agent-ready tasks. Amsterdam’s most technical AI-in-production community — for platform, ML-infra and software engineers shipping real systems.

Drinks and conversation at Café de Muurbloem in the Jordaan, with a talk from Thijs Cadier, co-founder of AppSignal and a Hackers & Founders regular since the meetup's early days. H&F is one of the longest-running technical founder communities in Amsterdam and keeps an active Slack alongside the in-person events, including a jobs channel. Informal, pub-based, and reliably populated by people who have actually shipped and sold software.

CryptoCanal's two-day gathering at De Hallen on decentralised infrastructure and the sovereignty questions around it. Committed crypto-native audience; narrower than the general Amsterdam tech crowd.

The Dutch C++ Group returns to JetBrains' Terrace Tower office in Zuid with two speakers from Think-Cell and JetBrains. Doors, networking and pizza from 18:00, talks from 19:00 — a type erasure case study and a session on the constexpr debugger. Deep systems-level content aimed at working C++ engineers rather than newcomers, and one of the few consistently technical low-level programming communities in the Netherlands.

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.

Second meetup of the QAIST Amsterdam group, covering quality assurance and testing practice including AI-assisted test generation. Young group, small turnout so far.