Edinburgh tech events this week: Turing Fest, ScotSoft and 20 free places that expire on Thursday (18-24 Sep 2026)

Twenty free places for ScotSoft are sitting unclaimed at ScotlandIS, and they expire on Thursday 24 September, which is the morning the conference opens. They normally cost £125. That is the single most useful sentence we can give you this week, so it goes first.

It also sits inside the busiest run of tech events in Edinburgh we have published all autumn: 22 events on our city board between Friday 18 and Thursday 24 September, 19 of them free, and the city's two flagship fixtures landing in the same seven days.

The Big One: two of them, three days apart

Turing Fest 2026 opens Tuesday 22 September at 09:00 and runs into Wednesday. It is paid — our listing carries no figure, so check the organiser before you budget. The shape is the selling point: 200+ founders, 50+ investors and 50+ speakers in a room built around who is in it rather than how many. If you have one day of your week to spend on people rather than product, this is where the density is.

Then ScotSoft 2026, Thursday 24 September from 09:00, £125, run by ScotlandIS. Scotland's longest-running software conference has added an AI Scotland stream aligned to the Scottish Government's AI strategy, alongside the usual technical and leadership sessions. Emma Logan, Deputy President of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, is on the bill.

And back to those twenty places. ScotlandIS is holding 20 free ScotSoft tickets that have gone unclaimed for over a week, and the window shuts on the day. Free conference seats do not normally survive nine days of silence. Ask ScotlandIS directly; the worst answer is no.

Badged, paid and worth the day

Three events this week carry a price tag, and all three earn their place differently. Turing Fest and ScotSoft are above. The third is The Digital Exchange: Mastering Paid Social, Wednesday 23 September, 09:30, The Place Hotel on York Place, £17 — a working paid-social session from Clean Digital, and the cheapest training you will find in the city this week.

Free but conference-scale: SDinGov 2026 at the John McIntyre Conference Centre, Wednesday 23 September from 08:30, Software Acumen's service design in government gathering. And FUEL Edinburgh, Thursday 24 September, 09:00 at Scottish Gas Murrayfield Stadium, free, which puts lenders, grant bodies and equity investors in one room for owners who need capital and do not know which door to knock on.

The daytime rooms

AI for Brain Health runs Monday 21 September from 09:00 at the John McIntyre Conference Centre, free, from the University of Edinburgh's Generative AI Laboratory.

Neuroscience plus machine learning is one of the few areas where Edinburgh is genuinely a first-rank city rather than a good regional one, and this is the free way to see it up close.

Also in daylight: Founders Hub — by Bayes and ScotlandIS opens the week Friday 18 September at 09:30 at The Bayes Centre, free, with the asks-and-offers round table that makes it more than a room with wifi. Digital Women Local: Scotland follows at 11:00 at Tigerlily on George Street, free. And the Edinburgh Industry Roundtable, presented by Postcode Lottery sits at UBC Edinburgh, Wednesday 23 September, 09:00, free, from the Ada Scotland Festival.

After six

EdinburghJS: Software Security in the Age of AI is Tuesday 22 September, 18:30, at Perk on Ponton Street, free — new failure modes in AI-assisted development, and what code review has to catch now.

The rest of the evening calendar, all free: Blockchain Scotland at the Bayes Centre on Monday 17:00, with a solicitor walking through FCA cryptoasset authorisation — dull-sounding, commercially decisive. BCS at Skyscanner on Wednesday 18:30 for Trust Me, I'm an Algorithm. PostgreSQL Edinburgh at Paterson's Land, Thursday 18:00. ProductTank Edinburgh drops the talks entirely for a social at The Beehive Inn, Thursday 17:30. And Venture Café's Thursday Gathering builds its seven sessions around scaling female-led businesses at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, Thursday 17:00.

Organiser spotlight: ScotlandIS is having a week

ScotlandIS co-hosts Friday's Founders Hub, runs the Cyber Cluster fireside chat at The Royal Scots Club on Tuesday 22 September at 17:00 (free), and puts on ScotSoft on Thursday. Three rooms, three registers — founders, security leads, the whole industry — inside one seven-day window. If you want one relationship in Scottish tech that pays off repeatedly, that is the trade body to have.

By the numbers

22 events. 19 free. Zero on Saturday or Sunday. Thursday 24 September carries seven of them, three starting within half an hour of each other at teatime. Monday four, Tuesday five, Wednesday four, Friday two. You cannot do this week properly by turning up to whatever is nearest.

Who should go where

Founders: if you can only buy one thing, buy Turing Fest — 50+ investors in a curated room beats any mixer in the city. If you cannot, Thursday's FUEL roadshow at Murrayfield is free and is specifically about getting money into a business.

Investors: Turing Fest, then Thursday's Five Slides Only from The Data Lab at the Bayes Centre, 17:30, free — rapid-fire fintech innovation talks with no padding.

Builders: EdinburghJS on Tuesday, Postgres on Thursday. If you want the bigger stage, ScotSoft's AI Scotland stream — and see the free-places note above before you pay.

Sales and marketing: skip the general mixers this week, the calendar is too good. £17 for Wednesday's paid-social workshop is the better call.

Worth knowing

• Those 20 ScotSoft places expire Thursday 24 September. ScotlandIS is holding them; they have gone unclaimed for more than nine days. Worth £125 each.
• IIBA Edinburgh's registration is a two-step process that closes on 24 September. Our inbox flagged it — if you are signed up for the first step only, you are not registered. Finish it before Thursday.
• Founders Meetup Edinburgh ran on 15 September and expired before we listed it. So did August's. A monthly founder series has now passed us twice; we have said it before and we will keep saying it until we fix the source.
• University events reach us second-hand. The ed.ac.uk calendar fails to load for our crawler, so anything from the university arrives via organisers and humans. If you run something on campus, that is exactly why you should send it to us.

Three of the four items above are deadlines. That is the kind of week this is.

Everything we have for the city sits at anopenroom.com/edinburgh. Running something we have missed — especially anything inside the university — send it over, and we will have it on the board before it expires. Next week's edition lands Friday.