Tech events in Dublin this week: a two-day week (16-22 October 2026)

Fourteen tech events on the Dublin page between Friday 16 and Thursday 22 October, and ten of them sit on two days: five on Friday, five on Tuesday, two on Saturday, two on Thursday, nothing at all on Sunday, Monday or Wednesday. Eight are free, and of the six that are not, four will not tell us what they cost.

It also splits down the middle: half inside somebody's headquarters, half in rooms the community keeps open itself. That is Dublin, so that is how we have sorted the picks.

The rooms with a company name on the door

ESB R&D Showcase - Fri 16 Oct, 09:00, ESB Head Office, free. A utility opening its research pipeline: grid technology, energy data and the engineering behind decarbonisation. The strongest cleantech signal on the page, and free.

Can the Great Reskill Provide the Window to Close Gaps in ICT? - Fri 16 Oct, 11:30, Trinity Business School, free. BlockW on whether retraining at scale can realistically close Europe's ICT skills gap. Useful if you are hiring and tired of the word pipeline.

Dublin STEM Women Graduate Careers Event - Fri 16 Oct, 13:00, The Convention Centre Dublin, free. Students and recent graduates meeting graduate employers. If you hire juniors, it is the cheapest access to a room full of them all year.

Future of Effectiveness Conference - Tue 20 Oct, 08:00, The Round Room at the Mansion House, paid. IAPI's first effectiveness conference. An 08:00 start for a marketing audience tells you how seriously they mean it.

AI Security Simplified. This Is Not A Drill. - Tue 20 Oct, 09:00, Dylan Hotel, paid. A full day on securing AI systems: threat models, controls, practical steps for teams already running models in production.

Shopify Meetup Dublin 2026 - Thu 22 Oct, 18:00, Liberties Suite, Aloft Dublin City, EUR 40. Merchants, agencies and developers on store performance, apps and the commerce stack. The priciest meetup of the week and the only commerce room in it.

Women in STEM Awards - Thu 22 Oct, 18:30, The Round Room, paid. An awards evening, not a networking night: go because somebody you know is shortlisted.

The Big One: responsible AI, free, at Croke Park

Trust in the Loop: Responsible AI Basecamp - Tue 20 Oct, 08:30, Croke Park, free.

A working session on responsible AI as a job rather than a position paper: assurance, human oversight, and the documentation the AI Act will expect. It is built for the people who have to implement this, not the people who get to have opinions about it.

Dublin has no shortage of AI governance panels. What it has little of is a free day, in a serious room, aimed at the engineer who will be asked in six months to produce evidence that a model was supervised. If you work in a regulated multinational here - which, statistically, you might - send somebody.

The rooms the community keeps open

Dublin Demo Day - Fri 16 Oct, 14:00, Dogpatch Labs, free. Superteam Ireland teams pitch their Colosseum Hackathon builds, live, for a 5,000 dollar prize pool. Real projects, real judging, no keynote.

[Hack and Chill [No AI]](https://anopenroom.com/dublin/events/hack-and-chill-no-ai-1016) - Fri 16 Oct, 19:00, Tog Hackerspace, free, open to non-members. Deliberately AI-free: bring a project and work on it near other people.

Fireside Chat: Navigating AI in Design & Career - Sat 17 Oct, 15:00, Baseline, free. DesignBrew on what AI is actually doing to design work and design careers.

The Brave Business Club - Sat 17 Oct, 15:00, Newmarket Yards, paid. Brave & Abroad's afternoon for entrepreneurs: peer support rather than programming. Same hour as the fireside chat, so pick one.

Digital Marketing Meetup Ireland - Tue 20 Oct, 18:00, EUR 20, venue announced to ticket holders. Not a missing listing: the organiser sends the address once you have a ticket.

Tuesday Open House - Tue 20 Oct, 19:00, Tog Hackerspace, free. The weekly tour of the workshop, the tools and whatever is half-built on the benches - the friendliest door in Dublin tech for a stranger.

Last week, briefly

SREcon owned the Convention Centre from Tuesday and left two free socials behind it; the Ladies Who Launch summit at Stripe sold out. Both gone. So this week the biggest room is free rather than USD 1,300, nothing has sold out yet, and the pub-shaped conference fringe has left with its conference. Tog is down from four rooms to two.

Who should go where

Marketing and commerce, this is your week and it costs money. Tuesday 08:00 at the Mansion House, Thursday 18:00 at Aloft for EUR 40 of Shopify, Tuesday 18:00 for the EUR 20 marketers' meetup. Three priced rooms and no free equivalent, which is unusual here.

Founders. Friday 14:00 at Dogpatch to watch teams get judged - the cheapest pitch practice there is. Saturday 15:00 at Newmarket Yards if you want peers more than programming.

Builders. Tuesday forks: free governance at Croke Park, or a paid day on AI security at the Dylan. Otherwise Friday 19:00 at Tog, free, AI banned on purpose.

Investors, your week is one afternoon. Dublin Demo Day is the only room with projects pitching for money in it. The rest is practitioners and employers.

Across the network

If SREcon left you wanting more: Edinburgh runs Kubernetes Community Days UK from Monday 19 October, two days, community-run, paid. Same crowd, different airport.

Worth knowing

Four of the six paid rooms publish no price. The Future of Effectiveness Conference, AI Security Simplified, The Brave Business Club and the Women in STEM Awards all read paid with no figure, and we will not invent one. Only Shopify (EUR 40) and the marketers' meetup (EUR 20) say up front.
The Round Room appears twice under two names. Tuesday's conference reads "The Round Room at the Mansion House", Thursday's awards just "The Round Room". Same room, two bookings, two spellings on our page.
A rename from last week, if you are matching a ticket. The CHAT assistive-technology session on 12 October was renamed by its organiser while the Eventbrite URL kept the old name - which is why no crawler caught it, and why our row read differently from the link it points at.
One venue is deliberately blank. The marketers' meetup gives its address to ticket holders only. Day and price are solid.

Before you go

Two days carry this week: Friday morning for a utility's R&D, Friday afternoon for a demo day, Tuesday for whichever Tuesday you are.

Then look at next Friday. Dublin Accessibility Talks, 23 October, 16:00-19:00, Anantara The Marker on Grand Canal Square: accessibility leads from Meta (Maxine Williams), Microsoft (Eoin Mulligan), Amazon (Shadi Abou-Zahra) and Google (Rachel Bleakley), moderated by Catherine Naughton of the European Disability Forum. In person only, places described as extremely limited. Four big-tech accessibility leads in one Dublin room does not happen twice a year - sort that ticket this week, not next.

The rest of the month is on the Dublin listings page. If we missed something you run, send it over - and if you charge, tell us the number.