Birmingham tech events this week: .NET, IoT and hedgehogs on Wednesday

Most weeks the Birmingham pick is a room full of people with drinks. This week it's a Microsoft MVP explaining how he wired up C#, .NET and a cluster of IoT sensors to film hedgehogs in his garden and auto-curate the footage. It's the most genuinely technical evening on the calendar, it's free, and if you write code for a living it beats another name-badge night hands down.

The Big One: .NET, IoT and Hedgehogs

The headline is the Birmingham .NET & MAUI User Group's ".NET, IoT and Hedgehogs!" on Wednesday 12 August, 7:30pm at Bluetel Solutions. It's free, and Microsoft MVP Mike Irving is presenting.

Don't let the hedgehogs fool you into thinking it's a novelty slot. The talk walks through an experimental build that spans devices, edge capture, .NET on the back end and the messy real-world problem of turning hours of raw wildlife footage into something watchable automatically. That's a genuine engineering story — sensors, event triggers, storage, processing, the lot — dressed up in the friendliest possible packaging. If you build in the Microsoft stack, or you're just curious how someone stitches IoT and .NET into a working end-to-end system, this is the room where you'll learn something concrete rather than nod along to a keynote.

It also earns the top slot because Birmingham's technical meetups are thinner on the ground in deep summer than its business-networking ones. A properly hands-on user group evening, free, with an MVP presenting, is exactly the kind of event that's easy to take for granted and hard to replace. Builders, hold your Wednesday for this.

The week ahead, split by what you're there for

This is a two-mode week: one evening for people who want to talk code, and a cluster for people who want to talk business. Sort yourself into the right one and it's an easy week to plan.

If you're there for the engineering, the .NET/MAUI evening above is the whole event. There's nothing else technical listed this week, which makes it doubly worth the trip — the next hands-on night won't come around for a while.

If you're there for the room and the contacts, Wednesday 12 August also brings two open networking evenings, both free, both from 8pm, both at The Lost & Found on Bennetts Hill. The Birmingham Network runs its business mixer for professionals, SMEs and entrepreneurs — a broad, drinks-led crowd of founders, consultants, agency owners and digital people. Alongside it, Network One's Small Business Owners & Entrepreneurs edition runs the same night, same venue, aimed at owners of smaller ventures. They're close enough in spirit that you don't need both — read the two blurbs, pick the one whose crowd sounds like your people, and commit to it.

And to open the week, the reliable regular is back: the Birmingham Tech Mixer & Social runs upstairs at The Wellington on Bennetts Hill from 7pm on Friday 7 August. It's £3 on the door — a paid ticket, but about as low-stakes as a night out gets. Developers, data and security folk, product people, students and career-switchers, no agenda, just conversation to close the working week.

Who should go where

Builders — this is unambiguously your week. Wednesday's .NET/IoT evening is aimed straight at you and there's no competing technical event to split your attention. If you only go out once, go out then.

Founders and small-business owners — your night is also Wednesday, but at The Lost & Found rather than Bluetel. Pick one of the two networking rooms and work it properly; doing both just means two half-conversations.

Investors — quiet week. There's no pitch night or demo showcase on the Birmingham calendar this week, so if you're hunting dealflow, the Wednesday founder rooms are your best (informal) bet, or hold your powder for later in the month.

First-timer's note

Never been to a user group like the .NET evening and worried it's cliquey? It isn't. Community meetups like this run on newcomers turning up — you don't need to know anyone, you don't need to be a .NET expert, and nobody's going to quiz you at the door. Arrive a few minutes early, say it's your first one, and you'll be talking to someone before the talk starts. It's a softer landing than a packed bar mixer, because there's a shared thing in the room to talk about.

Worth knowing

This is where we save you a wasted trip:

• The fizzPOP open night is still cancelled. You may still see a fizzPOP Makerspace public open night floating around in listings — ours included, historically. Our latest intel confirms fizzPOP has cancelled its open nights while it relocates premises. Don't turn up on spec; check fizzPOP's own channels before travelling, and we'll relist once the move settles.
• Two networking rooms, one venue, one night. Both Wednesday business-networking evenings are at The Lost & Found from 8pm. That's a choice, not a clash — the crowds overlap, so there's no wrong door, but don't try to work both.
• On the Friday mixer's price: it's listed at £3 on the door. If the ticket page shows anything different when you go to book, trust the page — but £3 is the fixture's usual damage.

Browse the full week and grab your spot on the Birmingham listings page. Running something in the Birmingham scene we should be covering — a user group, a workshop, a meetup that never seems to get listed? Send it our way. Championing the city's rooms is the whole point.