Edinburgh — Week of 2 Nov 2026

A short, self-directed dev jam built around Jev, TypeSafe's new decision model. It does not write text: you give it messy unstructured input and it returns typed decisions with a confidence score, in well under a second. Think of it as a smart if-statement you can drop into normal code - classify this, route that, pick the right option from a long list. Run by new stacks, the Edinburgh nocode, visual development and AI community, hosted at CodeBase. 16:00 intro and setup, build until 18:00, then a couple of minutes each for show and tell. No prior experience needed; bring a laptop and an idea. You need your own Jev credits. Why go: two and a half hours actually building with a model most people have only read about, in a room small enough to see what everyone else got working. Best for engineers and technical founders who learn by shipping something.

with Sid Kathirvel (Growth advisor, Unlock Growth)

Barclays Eagle Labs Scotland runs a half-day working session at CodeBase on the thing most early-stage founders get wrong: they treat stalled revenue as a sales or marketing problem when it is a customer problem. Sid Kathirvel of Unlock Growth leads it across three stages - why customers actually switch, turning that into positioning and messaging they recognise, and spotting the moment someone is ready to act. Kathirvel has spent 25 years on revenue ceilings and mentors founders through Barclays Eagle Labs, CodeBase Techscaler, Geovation and Edinburgh Innovations. He stays on afterwards for a round table on attendees' own problems. Free and in person, 09:00 to 12:30 at CodeBase, 37a Castle Terrace. You leave with a messaging framework you can use on a website, a pitch and a sales call. Why go: Edinburgh has plenty of founder breakfasts and few sessions that make you rewrite your positioning before lunch. Best for pre-launch and early-revenue founders who cannot say why growth stopped.

A walking networking session for entrepreneurs, starting from the Royal Bank Accelerator on Princes Street.

The Scottish Council on Archives' annual conference, on how archives and records underpin democracy, accountability and community memory — including the digital preservation and access problems that come with all of it. At Tynecastle Park. Free to £45 depending on ticket.

A free day on assistive technology at Edinburgh College — screen readers, speech and literacy tools, AI-assisted note-taking and the accessibility features now shipping in mainstream software. Pitched at educators, workplace assessors and anyone building or buying digital products who needs to understand how disabled users actually work with them.

A free full-day Cyber Essentials training session for organisations preparing for assessment, with assessors on hand to answer questions. Lunch and parking included.

The Scottish Social Services Council's day-long symposium at the COSLA Conference Centre on using AI responsibly in social work, social care and children's services. The SSSC launches its new guidance for workers and employers here, putting into practice the five principles it published earlier this year. Presentations, workshops and a panel across 10:00 to 16:15, covering where AI is already used in social services, how ready an organisation is to adopt it safely, what research says about AI's effect on professional judgement, and a human-rights approach that keeps dignity and choice central. Deliberately interactive — what the room says shapes how the SSSC supports the sector next. Free with lunch, and currently sold out. Why go: this is applied AI where getting it wrong harms people, discussed by the people accountable for it. Best for anyone leading AI adoption in a public-service or care setting.

Creative Edinburgh's monthly Creative Circles meetup, this edition at the National Library of Scotland. Two hours of networking for creative freelancers plus a behind-the-scenes tour of the Library's spaces and a walk through the research resources and support it offers working practitioners. Free for Creative Edinburgh members; non-members can take free membership or pay what they can. Capacity is strictly limited. The Creative Circles series is sponsored by Techscaler.

A half-day at the Usher Institute on the past, present and future of population health sciences, with a guest lecture — health data science, methods and the research agenda.

Asia Scotland Institute and Brodies host a panel on how Gen Z is reshaping politics, geopolitics and the workplace — including what it means for how tech companies hire and hold onto people. Free, in person at Brodies' Morrison Street office.

with Javier Ruiz Diaz (Technology and Human Rights Lead, Amnesty International UK) · tèmítópé lasade-anderson (Executive Director, Glitch) · Haylea Campbell (Senior Associate, Pro Bono Practice, Hogan Lovells Cadwalader) + 2 more

A fireside chat in the Edinburgh Futures Institute's large event space on how AI is reshaping fundamental rights — speech, labour, privacy and freedom of movement — and the politics around them. Chaired by Dr Zeerak Talat of the Centre for Technomoral Futures, the panel is Javier Ruiz Diaz (Technology and Human Rights Lead, Amnesty International UK), tèmítópé lasade-anderson (Executive Director, Glitch), Haylea Campbell (Senior Associate in the pro bono practice at Hogan Lovells Cadwalader) and Professor Michael Veale (Technology Law and Policy, UCL). Part of the Technomoral Conversations series. Free, 18:00 to 19:30, with audience questions. The event is hybrid and live-captioned, with a real room at Lauriston Place. Why go: a human-rights lawyer, a digital-harms organiser, a City pro bono lawyer and a tech-policy professor rarely share a stage, and the questions are the ones AI teams get asked by their own legal departments. Best for people shipping AI in regulated or public-facing products, and for policy and legal staff who have to review it.

with Javier Ruiz Diaz (Technology and Human Rights Lead, Amnesty International UK) · tèmítópé lasade-anderson (Executive Director, Glitch) · Haylea Campbell (Senior Associate, Pro Bono Practice, Hogan Lovells Cadwalader) + 2 more

A fireside chat in the Edinburgh Futures Institute's large event space on how AI is reshaping fundamental rights — speech, labour, privacy and freedom of movement — and the politics around them. Chaired by Dr Zeerak Talat of the Centre for Technomoral Futures, the panel is Javier Ruiz Diaz (Technology and Human Rights Lead, Amnesty International UK), tèmítópé lasade-anderson (Executive Director, Glitch), Haylea Campbell (Senior Associate in the pro bono practice at Hogan Lovells Cadwalader) and Professor Michael Veale (Technology Law and Policy, UCL). Part of the Technomoral Conversations series. Free, 18:00 to 19:30, with audience questions. The event is hybrid and live-captioned, with a real room at Lauriston Place. Why go: a human-rights lawyer, a digital-harms organiser, a City pro bono lawyer and a tech-policy professor rarely share a stage, and the questions are the ones AI teams get asked by their own legal departments. Best for people shipping AI in regulated or public-facing products, and for policy and legal staff who have to review it.

A collaborative card-game evening about building a social enterprise, hosted by JCI Edinburgh using Socialudo's SocialDeal game.

CodeBase's monthly drop-in morning at its Castle Terrace building: coffee, a loose agenda, and the Edinburgh tech community in one room on the first Wednesday of the month. Open to everyone, no tech background needed. Two structured bits inside an otherwise unstructured hour and a half. The Community Bell is an open floor for anyone to announce an opportunity or an event in the month ahead. The Spotlight is a five-minute slot to tell the group something — a founder journey, an investor's lessons, an odd career path — with no slides and no pitch. Drop in any time between 08:30 and 10:00. Free, but register, because CodeBase checks people in on the door. Why go: it is the cheapest way into Edinburgh's startup network, and the Community Bell means you leave knowing what else is on. Best if you are new to the city's tech scene, or recruiting for something.

A full-day in-person masterclass from Scottish Enterprise at the COSLA Conference Centre, aimed at SME leaders who have to make decisions about AI investment and governance rather than build models. The day is built around frameworks and peer work, not technology: establishing AI governance, drafting usable policies, and getting from scattered pilots to a strategy with measurable value. You work on your own business through the day and leave with a draft AI strategy, a prioritised list of AI opportunities and an outline governance and policy framework. Aimed at senior decision-makers and functional leads in digital, operations, innovation, technology and HR. Runs 09:30 to 16:30. Free, and currently sold out with a waitlist. Why go: most AI sessions for leaders stop at awareness; this one makes you produce the documents your board will ask for. Best for SME leaders already running AI pilots who need to make them official.

Barclays Eagle Labs Scotland runs a working session at CodeBase on actually understanding the people you are building for — customer research, positioning and the gap between what users say and what they do. Aimed at early-stage founders who have a product and are still guessing at the market. Free.

The second edition of Cyber Connect Edinburgh, an evening for Scotland's security community run by i-confidential: practitioners, CISOs and the vendors and recruiters who work alongside them, in a room built for conversation rather than presentations. A returning event with a defined audience, and one of the few regular security networking fixtures in the city.

with Kuan-Chuan Pao (Co-Founder and Principal Scientist, Outrun Therapeutics) · Elijah Nazarzadeh (Founder & CSO, Nebu-Flow) · Dr Poonam Malik (Investor and Executive Board Chair, Independent)

Bae HQ brings its scaling panel to Edinburgh with HSBC Innovation Banking and CMS equIP, aimed at founders working out how to grow past the early stage. Three speakers. Kuan-Chuan Pao, co-founder and principal scientist at Outrun Therapeutics, a healthtech unlocking the therapeutic potential of protein stabilisation, backed by M Ventures. Elijah Nazarzadeh, founder and CSO of Nebu-Flow, rebuilding nebuliser technology for biologic drugs, backed by Scottish Enterprise and SIS Ventures among others. Dr Poonam Malik, a serial entrepreneur, board chair and investor across biotech, medtech and healthtech. Networking with the speakers and the Bae HQ community follows. Registration is by host approval and the exact address goes to registrants. Bae HQ is the UK ecosystem for Asian-heritage founders and investors. Why go: three people who have actually raised and scaled life-sciences companies, in one room - which Edinburgh gets less often than its research base would suggest. Best for founders raising now or soon, and investors covering healthtech.

Adlib's digital desk training session for churches at Midwich's AV Hub in Edinburgh.

with Marc Burgauer (Speaker, BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT)

Marc Burgauer's talk for BCS, hosted in Skyscanner's Quartermile office, argues that the practices a development team writes down are not the practices it actually uses — and that this is the gap where AI tooling either helps or quietly makes things worse. Billed as "Nobody Knows Where We're Going", the session offers methods for surfacing how delivery really happens inside a team and then deciding where AI belongs in it. Seventy-five minutes, 18:30 to 19:45, free, in person at a working engineering office rather than a hotel suite. The organiser asks attendees to use the Lauriston Place entrance to Quartermile One and to arrive a few minutes early for check-in. Why go: nearly every engineering-management talk this year is either an AI demo or a scepticism piece; this one is about the organisational mechanics underneath, which is the part that decides whether the tools land. Best for engineering managers, tech leads and delivery leads with a team whose process has drifted from its documentation.

A hands-on digital mixing desk training session for church AV teams, covering desk setup, microphone technique and best practice.

with John Owen (CEO, The Investment Association) · Sandra Boss (Senior Managing Director, Chair, BlackRock) · Kirstie MacGillivray (CEO, Aegon) + 4 more

The Investment Association's flagship Scottish conference, at The Exchange in Edinburgh — 20-plus sessions across more than eight hours, for an expected 300-plus asset managers, regulators and policymakers. Technology runs through most of it: a leadership panel with Xavier Meyer (Aberdeen), Kirstie MacGillivray (Aegon) and Sandra Boss (BlackRock); a tokenisation spotlight with Janus Henderson and Baillie Gifford; an operational-resilience fireside with M&G; Lucy Castledine of the FCA on consumer investments; and a Power Pitch from Dr Sonia Schulenburg of Level E Research. Stephen Flynn MSP, Cabinet Secretary for the Economy, is in conversation. Free for IA full members, £49 plus VAT for affiliate members, £199 plus VAT otherwise. Why go: Edinburgh's investment-management industry is one of the UK's largest buyers of financial technology, and this is the one day a year its decision-makers are all in one building. Best for fintech founders selling into asset managers, and anyone working on tokenisation or AI in regulated finance.

Royal Bank Accelerator's Grow Your Sales series: getting something useful out of your sales data.

The weekly Venture Cafe Edinburgh Thursday Gathering at the Edinburgh Futures Institute on Lauriston Place — the thirty-first edition. Free, no ticket and no application. Doors from 17:00, with parallel sessions and an open networking floor running to around 20:00, and you can leave whenever it stops being useful. Each week's specific programme goes up on the Venture Cafe community site a few days beforehand; the shape of the evening does not change. The Venture Cafe network runs the same Thursday pattern in cities across Europe, and in Edinburgh it has become the one weekly fixture founders, students, investors and support organisations all pass through. Why go: it is the most reliable room in the city — on every Thursday, so it is the easiest place to be found and the easiest thing to bring someone along to. Best for founders who want conversations rather than talks, and for anyone new to Edinburgh tech.

Edinburgh's monthly meet-up for LGBTQ+ founders — informal, community-led and free to attend.

An evening at Inspace built around the Mapping the Anthropocene exhibition, with a panel on how data visualisation and design research make climate and environmental change legible. Inspace is the University of Edinburgh's Design Informatics venue, and its lates reliably pull a mixed room of designers, researchers and technologists.

The Friday co-working morning for founders building scalable technology businesses, run by ScotlandIS and hosted at the Bayes Centre. The shape is fixed: 9:30 arrival and networking, 10:00 a round table of asks, offers and ideas, then ad-hoc discussions and co-working until 13:00. The space stays open until 17:00 if you want to keep working or take calls. ScotlandIS covers the refreshments, and guest speakers and office hours are being added to the schedule. The group gathers in the Bayes Lounge, at the large white tables to the left of the main concourse. Free, and experience levels run from pre-launch to scaling. Why go: the round table is what earns the morning. You say what you need and what you can offer in front of a room of other founders, which beats any amount of coffee-chasing. Best for Edinburgh founders building alone who want a standing fixture in the week.

A charity business-networking lunch at Tynecastle Park run by The Empowered Entrepreneur.

with Dr Rupert Nash (Research Fellow, EPCC, University of Edinburgh) · Steph Wright (CEO and Co-Founder, Our AI Collective) · Dr Victoria Plutshack (Coordinator, No Gyle Data Centre campaign, Independent research consultant) + 2 more

A one-hour lunchtime panel arguing that hyperscale AI datacentres are a political choice rather than a foregone conclusion: what they draw in power and water, who carries the cost, and what communities have actually managed to stop. Dr Rupert Nash of EPCC, the UK's national supercomputing centre, sits alongside Steph Wright of Our AI Collective, who worked on Scotland's first national AI strategy, Dr Victoria Plutshack of the No Gyle Data Centre campaign, and Kim Pratt of Friends of the Earth Scotland. Anna Komendantskaya of People & Planet chairs. Part of Edinburgh's Radical Book Fair at Assembly Roxy. Free, with a £5 ticket and a pay-it-forward fund for those who can. Why go: a supercomputing researcher and a datacentre campaigner on one panel is rare, and the Gyle proposal makes it local rather than abstract. Best for anyone working on AI infrastructure, energy or public policy.

Eleanor Drage on her book What If We Got AI Right? (Profile, 2026), as part of the New College Festival of Books and Belief. Marion Thain chairs. Drage's argument is that the real risks of AI sit in the systems, incentives and power structures already deployed rather than in doomsday scenarios, and that feminism, reparative justice and climate politics belong in the debate rather than at its margins. She is an AI ethicist and co-author of The Good Robot. One hour, 17:30 to 18:30, in Martin Hall at New College on Mound Place. Enter through the glass door at the main gated entrance. Supported by Kenneth and Isabel Morrison. Why go: a serious critique of how AI actually gets built and governed, argued without the existential-risk framing that dominates everything else. Best for people working on AI policy, ethics or responsible-AI teams.

Bring Your Own Games: indie developers bring what they are building and play it with other people who make games.

Lloyds Banking Group's Skills Fest at The Mound, aimed at early-careers talent.

She Means Business Edinburgh's November walk-and-talk for entrepreneurs.

Scotland's largest hackathon: around 300 students build technical projects in teams of up to four over 24 hours at the Nucleus Building, 7-8 November, organised by the University of Edinburgh's CompSoc. Sponsors including Hudson River Trading, G-Research, IMC Trading, JetBrains, Bank of Scotland and Wordsmith AI set the challenge tracks, with sponsor-led workshops on the Saturday and demos and judging on the Sunday. Applications have closed; eligibility was limited to current students and people who graduated within the past year.

A Saturday workshop at Inspace using design methods to imagine hopeful climate futures, part of the Mapping the Anthropocene programme.

EdLUG's monthly Edinburgh meeting. It moved venue in late October: now the study space at the Futures Institute, entered through the Canopy Cafe door off Middle Meadow Walk, not Old College. The format is open: people bring laptops and work through whatever is broken, and the group trades notes on distros, shell scripting, desktop customisation, server management and self-hosting. There is a show-and-tell strand too: hardware projects, open-source replacements for everyday software, and which machines run Linux cleanly. Beginners are explicitly welcome — several regulars arrived wanting help moving off Windows or macOS. The group also runs a public mailing list at lists.edlug.org.uk. Free, two hours, no speaker list and no programme. Why go: one of the few Edinburgh rooms where you can turn up with a broken GRUB or a driver problem and leave with it fixed by someone who has seen it before. Best for sysadmins, self-hosters and anyone moving a daily driver to Linux.

Edindies is Edinburgh's indie game development group, and this is its standing Saturday session: three hours of co-working at LEVELS cafe and lounge on Holyrood Road, on the large benches near the entrance. Hosted by Norgg and Fallible. There is no programme. People bring whatever they are building, work alongside each other, hand round builds for playtesting and talk through problems. Experience is not expected and nothing needs to be finished. The series runs every Saturday until 13 December. Free, drop-in, nothing to book beyond the Meetup RSVP. Why go: playtesting is the part that is hard to arrange on your own, and this is a dependable weekly slot where someone will pick up your build and tell you what they actually felt. Best for solo and small-team game developers in Edinburgh who want company and a second pair of eyes on a Saturday.