Birmingham tech events this week: five rooms, taken one at a time
Birmingham tech events 18-24 Sep: five rooms, three free.
We ended last week's Birmingham post by saying this week was stronger. It is not, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. There are five tech events in Birmingham on our city page between Friday and Thursday, three of them free, and the first one does not open its doors until Tuesday breakfast. Friday, the weekend and Monday are empty again.
So this is a breather week: one room worth clearing the diary for, a couple of solid regulars, and enough space around them to go properly through all five rather than stretch them into a list that pretends to be ten.
Last week, briefly
GRIIT Connect launched at Aston and the Bincom hackathon kicked off on Edgbaston Park Road, as billed. One correction: we said nothing happened before Wednesday. In fact Flutter Birmingham ran at Unity on the Tuesday and a rooftop founders-and-investors night ran above Exchange Square the same evening at £7.45, both reaching our board after we filed. That rooftop was the only room in a fortnight built for people raising money, and it has no sequel this week.
All five, in the order we would take them
1. ProductTank Birmingham, Wednesday 23 September
ProductTank Birmingham: Managing Your Career Like a Product runs 18:30 at x+why Foundry, 6 Brindley Place, and it is free.
The premise is better than it sounds on a listing page. Product people spend their working lives deciding what to build next, what to cut and which users to stop serving, then apply none of it to themselves. Turning that discipline on your own career lands hard in a city where plenty of product careers sit one rung below the London equivalent. ProductTank Birmingham is also one of the better-attended product nights in the Midlands, which matters more than the topic in a week this thin: it is the one room where the people you want to meet will actually be.
2. DevOps Society Workshop, Thursday 24 September
DevOps Society Workshop is free, 18:00, inside Lloyds Banking Group at 125 Colmore Row. Hands-on rather than presentational, with a regular turnout. A workshop format means you leave having done the thing rather than having watched a slide about it - and it is hosted inside a bank most Birmingham engineers only see from the pavement. An employer that opens its floor to a practitioner group on a Thursday is telling you something about how it hires.
3. AI and Linguistic Analysis, Thursday 24 September
AI and Linguistic Analysis: Forensic and Safeguarding Perspectives is at John Cadbury House, Aston University, 16:00, £4, from The Forensic Linguistics Lab. This is the most specific AI session Birmingham has listed all month, and specificity is the whole point. Language models applied to forensic linguistics and safeguarding is a real working problem with real consequences for getting it wrong, which puts it several streets away from the generic adoption webinar. Four pounds, an early finish, and it hands you straight to the DevOps workshop at 18:00 if you want both.
4. Life Sciences Innovation & Pitch Forum, Tuesday 22 September
#CreativeDisruption Presents: The Life Sciences Innovation & Pitch Forum runs from 09:00 at No.1 Birmingham Health Innovation Campus, Aston Webb Boulevard in Selly Oak, and it is free.
A full day bringing biological and digital health companies together with investors for pitching and panel discussion. It sits fourth here only because it asks for a whole working day, not because it is the weakest room. If you build anything in health tech it is first by a distance, and it is the single place this week where investors are in the building on purpose.
5. Cybersecurity & Tech Breakfast, Tuesday 22 September
Cybersecurity & Tech Breakfast opens the week at 08:00, 3 Snow Hill Queensway, £12.50, from The Business Growth Network with BT Local Business. Practical cyber security for growing businesses: the threats small and mid-sized companies actually meet rather than the ones that make the news. The most commercial room on the board, and the only one carrying a real price - though £12.50 with breakfast is not a decision to agonise over.
Who should go where
Builders. Thursday, and you can have both: the £4 Aston session at 16:00, then the DevOps workshop at 18:00 on Colmore Row. If you would rather travel than choose, Manchester runs an AWS Cloud Women meetup the same day, and everyone who attends gets a free ticket to the AWS Community Summit on 1 October, normally £75.
Product and design people. Wednesday, no competition, no ticket price. If you only have one evening this week, that is the one.
Founders. Health tech, Tuesday at Selly Oak, all day. Everyone else: this is not your week. There is no pitch night and no mixer worth the trip, and we would rather tell you to keep the evening than send you somewhere thin.
Investors. One room, Tuesday, and it is free.
Worth knowing
- The week is three days long, and starts at breakfast. Nothing on Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday. Four consecutive open evenings in a city this size is an opportunity if you organise here.
- Some of this quiet is ours, not Birmingham's. Three scheduled sourcing runs for this city did not fire - 30 August, 6 September and 13 September. We caught up on 14 September, but a board this short is partly a gap in our coverage and we would rather name it than dress it up.
- We have nothing listed for the week of 26 October. Not a thin week, a blank one. If you run something then, that is the most useful thing you could send us today.
- Everything shows as available. That is a listing state, not a door count - and at Aston and Lloyds you are a guest in somebody's building, so register.
Five rooms, three free, one of them genuinely good. The full board is on the Birmingham listings page. Quiet weeks are where a scene gets built rather than reported, so if you run the user group or the monthly that has never appeared on anyone's calendar, send it over.