Tech events in edinburgh

A full-day industry conference on Scotland's solar and battery storage pipeline, covering domestic rooftops and home batteries through commercial and industrial installations to utility-scale projects, with the policy and investment conditions attached to each. Run by Solar Energy UK and hosted by its Solar Energy Scotland arm, 09:00 to 17:00 at the COSLA Conference Centre in Haymarket. The organisers are assembling industry leaders, policymakers, investors and local authorities. The speaker list was not published at the time of writing and ticket prices are not shown on the registration page. Why go: this is where Scottish solar and storage deployment gets negotiated — grid connections, planning, procurement — rather than discussed in the abstract. Best for cleantech founders, energy developers and investors who need the policy side and the buyer side in one day. Less useful if you came for technical depth.

A three-hour pitching workshop at the Royal Bank Accelerator on Princes Street, the sixth session in its 12-week Funding Accelerator programme. You can come to this one alone without signing up for the full series. The agenda covers storytelling principles for a memorable pitch, the ingredients every pitch needs, practical exercises on message and structure, and real founder stories. It ends with a Pitch Club slot where you practise delivery and get feedback. It runs 9:30 to 12:30 and the speaker is still to be confirmed. The listing doesn't show a price. Why go: it's hands-on, not a talk. If you've got a pitch to give in the next few months, you leave having said it out loud to a room and heard what lands. Best for early-stage founders pitching for funding.

with Dmitriy Fedoryshchev (Lead Software Engineer, Independent)

Dmitriy Fedoryshchev, a lead software engineer, on how to tell whether agent-written code is making a codebase safer or riskier. His case study is modernising a 600-table, 21TB legacy core into microservices — the fifth attempt after four that failed — with a squad that went AI-native on a custom multi-agent system under one rule: only merge code you can explain. He also covers turning the rules the agent kept breaking into checks it cannot skip, built into his own open-source tooling. Tenth edition of the TechTalks Edinburgh series, at CodeBase on Castle Terrace. Doors 18:00 with pizza and drinks, opening talk 18:30, main talk 18:40, Q&A 19:30, pub afterwards. Free, 100 places on Meetup. Partners include CodeBase and Scottish Technology Club. Why go: the most concrete Edinburgh talk this autumn on AI-generated code in a real legacy migration rather than a demo repo. Best for engineers and tech leads deciding how far to let agents into production.

GameDevEd's November social for Edinburgh game developers, one of a fortnightly run of informal Tuesday evenings for the city's games community. Ground floor of OX184 on the Cowgate, at the grid of four tables by the western entrance, usually with the group's logo on the table. 18:00 to 21:00, free, no ticket. All stages and disciplines — studio staff, indies, students, artists, audio and community people. Bring a build or a video if you have one and you will get an audience; the hosts are explicit that nobody has to drink, and plenty of the group eat dinner instead. Hosted by Ewan Fisher and Fallible, with a Discord for the wider local gamedev calendar. Why go: games hiring and collaboration in Scotland runs almost entirely on who people know, and this is the most regular room in Edinburgh where that happens. Best for anyone working in or trying to get into games.

Edinburgh Tech Network's monthly evening drinks for people working in tech — engineers, product managers, designers, UX. No talks, no slides, no agenda; the whole format is conversation in a pub. From 19:00 at The Slug and Lettuce on George Street, free, RSVP on Meetup. It runs on a repeating Wednesday pattern, so there is another one along shortly if you miss it. The group is one of the larger general tech networks in the city and the room is mixed by discipline and seniority rather than organised around a stack. Why go: it is the lowest-effort way to meet people in Edinburgh tech — no ticket, no talk to sit through, and you can leave after twenty minutes. Best if you have just moved to the city or are between roles; less useful if you want substance on a specific technical topic.

Founders Coffee Club is a monthly coffee morning for founders at Jamaica Yard, 3 Jamaica St, EH3. No speeches, no presentations, no selling. You turn up, get introduced to someone on arrival and talk. Founders only. Registration goes through Luma and needs host approval. The ticket also covers coworking at Jamaica Yard for the rest of the day, so you can stay and work after the 10:00 start. Why go: a low-pressure hour to meet other Edinburgh founders without a pitch in the way. Best for early-stage founders who work alone and want peers, not for anyone hunting investors or customers.

The weekly Venture Cafe Edinburgh Thursday Gathering at the Edinburgh Futures Institute on Lauriston Place — the thirty-second edition. Free, no ticket and no application needed. Doors from 17:00, Connection Collider and parallel sessions through the evening, open networking floor to around 20:00. The week's programme is published on the Venture Cafe community site closer to the date. Edinburgh's edition has run continuously since April 2026 and draws founders, university researchers, investors and the city's support organisations without anyone needing a particular reason to be there. Why go: a standing weekly slot does more for a network than an occasional good event, because you can come back the following week with the person you were told to meet. Best for founders and operators who want unstructured time with the ecosystem rather than a panel.

with James Buchan (Founder and CEO, ePass) · Tirtho Dasgupta (Founder, Nirmanaa)

UX Edinburgh marks World Usability Day with two founders who have built public-good products, talking about what it actually took. James Buchan, founder and CEO of ePass, traces the route from a CivTech challenge to national government infrastructure: doing discovery when every council works differently, designing for citizens, businesses, licensing officers and policy teams at once, and building one common component that 160+ licence types can configure. Tirtho Dasgupta, founder of Nirmanaa, built an accessibility co-pilot solo in nine weeks and talks about designing for uncertainty rather than certainty. Doors 17:15, talks from 17:45, close 19:30, at CodeBase. Free. Why go: both talks are first-hand delivery stories rather than theory, and the government-services one is material you rarely hear outside closed service-design circles. Best for designers, researchers and product people, and anyone working on public-sector digital in Scotland.

with Max Tatton-Brown (Host, Claude Ambassador, Claude Community)

The first Anthropic-backed Claude meetup in Scotland: an evening for people building with Claude Code and agents, technical or not. CreateFuture, CodeBase and Techscaler are hosting it in Edinburgh. Max Tatton-Brown, one of the first global Claude Ambassadors, runs it. Arrivals and food from 17:30, then a panel Q&A around 18:15 with an Ambassador who gets early access to new features. After that the room splits into zones: an open-mic room where you get five minutes on the HDMI to show what you're building, a helpdesk for people who are stuck or haven't started, and a chat area. Free, but registration shows sold out, so join the waitlist. The exact venue is shared on registration. Why go: it's the first room in Edinburgh built around showing real agent work rather than talking about AI in general. Go if you're shipping with Claude Code or want to see what others are building with it.

OutGeekWomen's Edinburgh evening at The Melting Pot on Calton Road, with short talks and open networking for women working in technology. The group describes itself as built for women in tech and open to anyone who wants in, and runs the same format across several UK cities. The Edinburgh edition is free, starts at 18:00 and runs to about 20:30, with the talks kept short so most of the evening is conversation. The Melting Pot is a co-working space rather than a bar, which keeps the room usable for actually talking. Why go: Edinburgh's technical meetups skew heavily male and this is the city's most consistent counterweight — a room where the networking is the programme rather than an afterthought. Best for women working in engineering, data, product and design, and for anyone recruiting into those teams who wants to meet people outside their referral network.

A six-hour co-working day at CodeBase for people building digital products: a new MVP, UX work, the marketing outreach you keep deferring. Run by new stacks, the Edinburgh nocode, visual development and AI community. There is no programme. No presentations, no sponsored lunch, no pitching. Ambient music and a room of other people working on their own thing, with the implicit deal that you turn up and move something forward. Free, 10:00 to 16:00. The door is locked, so buzz it. Why go: Edinburgh has plenty of evening talks and very few long daytime blocks where founders sit and build alongside each other. If your side project only moves when someone else is in the room, this is the format. Best for solo founders, indie builders and anyone with something half-finished.

The annual in-person gathering of the Trusted Research Environment community, in Edinburgh for three days. TRE Communities brings together the people who build and run the secure data environments behind health and population research — platform engineers, data managers, information governance leads and the researchers who depend on them. Grown from an informal meeting of 30 into a multi-day conference, it is the one time this community meets face to face each year. Currently sold out; a returns list may open closer to the date. Why go: if you build or run secure data platforms for health and population research, this is the one room where the whole community turns up. It's sold out, so join the returns list. Skip it if that isn't your world.

with Valentin Hinov (Founder, ThankBox)

The November edition of Edinburgh's monthly founders meetup, hosted in the offices of Shepherd and Wedderburn at 9 Haymarket Square. The last fireside chat of 2026 is with Valentin Hinov, who bootstrapped ThankBox from a side project into a team-gifting platform used by more than 10,000 companies and sending over $1 million in gifts a month, interviewed by Laura Bernal. 18:00 arrival and open networking. Welcome at 19:00, then community shoutouts where attendees say what they are working on and what they want help with, the fireside 19:20 to 20:00, drinks until 20:30, and the pub afterwards at The Jolly Botanist. The GBP 5 ticket covers drinks. General admission is request-to-join, with a separate ticket for investors and approved partners. Attendee details are passed to the host firm for building security. Why go: a bootstrapper who took on much larger competitors with a small team, in a room of people building companies rather than an audience. Best for early-stage founders, and anyone weighing raising against staying bootstrapped.

EdinburghJS's November meetup pairs developer wellbeing with open-source maintenance: two talks and the usual pizza-and-questions second half. It starts at 18:30 at Perk, 3rd Floor, Nova House, 3 Ponton Street, and it's free. The group is Edinburgh's longest-running JavaScript community and draws engineers from across the city's product teams, not just front-end specialists. Why go: the easiest way to meet working JavaScript engineers in Edinburgh, with talks on topics most conference lineups skip. Best for developers who want peers, not a sales pitch.

She Scales is the Royal Bank Accelerator's monthly morning for women founders, and this edition is a Global Entrepreneurship Week #IAmRemarkable workshop on self-promotion, at the Accelerator, 142-144 Princes Street, Edinburgh. Networking runs from 9:30, the Accelerator welcomes everyone at 10:30, and the workshop runs 10:45 to 12:15. Facilitator Eugenia Pascual Gil (Gold Tier #IAmRemarkable facilitator, ex-Google and PepsiCo HR and recruitment) covers why visibility matters for your business, the limiting beliefs that keep people quiet about their wins, and leaves you with your own statements to reuse. Open to female founders, non-binary founders who feel at home in women's spaces, and allies. Why go: a practical workshop with a clear takeaway, plus an hour of networking with Edinburgh's early-stage founders. Best for founders who undersell themselves in pitches and on LinkedIn.

The Apache CloudStack project's annual community conference, in Edinburgh this year and running three days. Wednesday 18 November is a hackathon for developers, engineers and project committers working on live issues; 19 and 20 November are technical sessions, talks and panel discussions on CloudStack and cloud infrastructure. At the John McIntyre Conference Centre on Holyrood Park Road. Ticket prices are not listed. Project committers and students can request a free ticket by emailing info@cloudstackcollab.org, and those registrations are approved against criteria rather than granted automatically. The speaker programme had not been published at the time of writing. Why go: an upstream open-source project bringing its contributor conference to Edinburgh is rare, and the hackathon day is the part that is genuinely hard to get elsewhere. Best for infrastructure and platform engineers; of little use if you do not run virtualised compute.

with Kirstine Dale (undefined, Met Office) · McKinley Hyden (undefined, Skyscanner) · David Kirk (undefined, Wayve) + 5 more

Scotland's big annual enterprise tech show: a day of keynotes, breakout workshops and a 60-plus-stand exhibition hall at the EICC, covering AI, cloud, cyber security, data and digital leadership. Named speakers include Kirstine Dale (Met Office), McKinley Hyden (Skyscanner), David Kirk (Wayve), Sharon Moore (IBM), Abi Reynolds (Microsoft), Julia Shelley (Multiverse), Jamie Stark (Moody's) and Davie Gow (Arnold Clark). Doors open at 08:30 and the first talks start at 09:15. The organisers expect 1,600-plus delegates. Free to register. Expect plenty of supplier stands alongside the talks, plus 8 hours of CPD credit if you need it. Why go: it's the one day a year most of Scotland's in-house tech leaders are in the same building. Best for founders selling into enterprise and engineers who want a read on what Scottish corporates are actually buying.

Sixth and last workshop in the Royal Bank Accelerator's 12-week Sales Accelerator, 10:00 to 13:00 at 142-144 Princes Street. You build your own sales playbook from the earlier sessions: the DEAL Framework, then exercises that tie customer insight, funnel, metrics and pitch into one repeatable system. Colin Horsburgh leads it. He spent 17 years in commercial roles at Starwood, Fairmont, IHG and Cameron House, and founded the Edinburgh consultancy En Pointe Solutions in 2017. Founders share how a playbook made their own sales more consistent, and a closing Growth Lab covers mindset. You can book single workshops without doing the full programme. Why go: three hands-on hours that end with a written playbook in your hands. Best for founders who sell their own product and have no written process yet.

with Joycelyn Longdon (Climate researcher and founder, ClimateInColour)

Dr Joycelyn Longdon on 'Justice-led Conservation Technology' — designing biodiversity monitoring with forest communities in Ghana, using machine-learning bioacoustics to turn recorded sound into ecological data, and what changes when the people living in the forest shape the tooling rather than receive it. One hour, 16:00 to 17:00, at Inspace on Crichton Street, part of the Design Informatics seminar series run by Edinburgh College of Art. Longdon is an environmental justice researcher, writer and technologist, and the work discussed comes out of her PhD research at the University of Cambridge. No price is listed on the registration page. Why go: a concrete case of applied machine learning where the hard problems are participatory design and data ownership rather than model performance. Best for ML practitioners, designers and anyone building in climate or environmental tech.

with Claudia Cavalluzzo (Director, Venture Café Edinburgh)

Venture Cafe Edinburgh marks a year of Thursday Gatherings at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. The format is the usual one — Connection Collider from 17:00, a welcome from director Claudia Cavalluzzo, then programming and conversation until around 20:00 — but this is the birthday edition, so expect a fuller room and a look back at what the past twelve months built. Free, no ticket needed, open to anyone in or near the city's innovation community. Lauriston Place, as every week. Why go: the anniversary edition is the one Thursday when the people who normally come on alternate weeks all turn up at once, which makes it the highest-density networking evening in Edinburgh this autumn. Best for founders and investors who want breadth in a single evening, and for anyone who has been meaning to try Venture Cafe and wants to see it at full strength.

with Sarah Hale (Host, CTO Craft) · Tobi Tonner (Host, CTO Craft) · Alastair McFarlane (Host, CTO Craft)

CTO Craft brings its Mixers format to Edinburgh: an evening for CTOs and senior engineering leaders built around conversation rather than talks. The Mixers series runs as relaxed evenings of shared stories, peer networking and informal learning among people with comparable jobs. This edition is hosted by Sarah Hale, Tobi Tonner and Alastair McFarlane, with around 15 attendees registered at the time of writing. Registration is free and the exact address is shared on sign-up — the listing confirms a venue in Edinburgh. Why go: Edinburgh has plenty of engineering meetups but very little at the level where the problem is a board conversation, a reorganisation or a platform bet, and this format keeps the group small enough that people say the real version. Best for CTOs, VPs of Engineering and heads of platform; it is explicitly a peer room, not a talk you watch.

with Jimmy Angelakos (Host, postgres.scot)

Edinburgh's PostgreSQL user group meets in Old College for two talks on Postgres, pizza and networking. Open to all levels. Run by postgres.scot, with Jimmy Angelakos, Denys and Jim Gardner hosting, and sponsored by pgEdge. Doors and pizza at 18:00, community announcements at 18:55, then two talk slots at 19:00 and 20:00 (speakers still to be announced). It wraps at 20:45 and moves to the Brass Monkey on Drummond Street. Teaching Room 05, accessed via Law Reception. Anyone who wants to speak can contact the organisers. Why go: this is the room for people who run Postgres in production in Scotland, and one of the few deep-technical database meetups in the city. Worth it for backend engineers, DBAs and founders choosing a data stack.

Weekly Friday morning co-working for founders of scalable tech businesses, run by ScotlandIS and the Bayes Centre at 47 Potterrow. Come in through the atrium, turn left and look for the Bayes Lounge tables and banner. The shape is fixed. 9:30 arrival and networking, 10:00 round table of asks and offers, then ad-hoc discussion and co-working from 11:00 to 13:00. The space stays open until 17:00. Andrew Williams hosts. Guest speakers and office hours are planned but none are named yet. Registration is required. Why go: the round table is the draw. You say what you need and what you can offer to a room of other tech founders, then get a working morning on campus. Best for founders building a scalable product who want a standing weekly fixture.

with Daniel Glazer (Partner, US Expansion and London office lead, Wilson Sonsini)

A dinner for Scotland-based founders and C-suite leaders who are expanding into the United States in the next six to twelve months, or have just done it. The discussion is led by Daniel Glazer, who heads Wilson Sonsini's US Expansion group and its London office: when to incorporate in the US, when to raise from US VCs and whether you need a US entity to do it, where to set up, what it costs, how selling and hiring differ, and what government support exists. Registration is by host approval. Venue is central Edinburgh, confirmed to registrants. Why go: US expansion advice in Scotland is usually second-hand. Glazer runs the practice that does the incorporations and the US rounds, and a dinner table is where founders ask the questions they would not put to a panel. Best for founders with a US move inside the next year.

with Maddy Burgoyne (Host, Traveltech for Scotland) · Joshua Ryan-Saha (Host, Traveltech for Scotland)

November's Traveltech meet-up at the Edinburgh Futures Institute is a show-and-tell: "Show Us What You've Built with AI". The premise is that tools which used to need real budgets, specialist developers and months of work are now within reach of small travel and tourism operators, and the organisers want to see what people have actually shipped — an AI assistant handling hotel guest enquiries, personalised recommendations, local-experience discovery, tour planning, booking automation. Anyone using AI in the sector is invited to bring their build and demo it. Hosted by Maddy Burgoyne and Joshua Ryan-Saha, free, from 16:00. Why go: demos beat slide decks, and this is working software from an industry that does not usually get its own technical room in Scotland. Best for founders and product people in travel, tourism and hospitality tech, and for engineers who want to see what small teams are getting away with.

with Allan Brown (Founder and CEO, Evoke Partners)

The second Edinburgh Growth Clinic from Founders' Growth Club, at CodeBase on Castle Terrace. Founders, builders, marketers and operators work through real growth problems in the room rather than listening to a deck about them. This edition's theme is partnerships. Allan Brown, founder and CEO of Evoke Partners, gives the keynote on what to do and where and how to look for growth partnerships. Free, 17:00 to 19:00, no approval step. The organisers ask you to bring a brief on a product or feature you have just launched or are about to launch, so the room can try it on the spot, give you feedback and help spread the word. This event was moved from 15 October after the host postponed it; the Eventbrite listing still shows the old October date, so book through Luma. Why go: a small working room where you leave with feedback on your own launch rather than notes from a talk. Best for early-stage founders and the growth people around them in Scotland.

The November edition of Tech Meetup Edinburgh, the city's long-running monthly evening for developers, founders and people working anywhere across Scottish tech. Arrival, pizza and networking from 17:30, then community announcements, a tech demo and a keynote from 18:15, and drinks until 20:30, with an optional move to the Fountainbridge Fox afterwards. Free and volunteer-run, presented with UK Startup Events and hosted and sponsored by FanDuel. Registering shares your contact details with FanDuel for building security. The exact address is sent to registrants rather than published. The keynote speaker had not been announced at the time of writing; announcements go up on the Tech Meetup LinkedIn page. Why go: the broadest tech room in Edinburgh, deliberately not tied to one language or discipline, and the demo slot usually surfaces something being built locally. Best for engineers and founders who want range rather than a specialist track.

with Andrew Skotzko (Product leadership coach and author of The Strategy Cycle, )

ProductTank's last Edinburgh meetup of the year is about turning a pile of research, stakeholder opinions and goals into a strategy before you build the 2027 roadmap. Andrew Skotzko, product leadership coach and author of The Strategy Cycle, talks from 18:00. He has advised product leaders at Google, Databricks, GitHub, Ramp and HubSpot, and will share a framework for putting strategic choices on one page and spotting decisions a team is avoiding. He's giving away five copies of the book. From 19:00 the group reviews its year and takes requests for 2027 topics and speakers. Food and drinks from 17:30. Free, at People's Postcode Trust on Charlotte Square. Why go: a practical strategy session timed for planning season, from someone who has done this across startups and Fortune 100s. Best for product managers and founders who own a roadmap.

with Tim Leslie (Engineering Manager & AI Learning Lead, Skyscanner)

If AI lets teams ship working features in days or hours, does a fortnightly refinement meeting still make sense? That's the question for TechTalks #11. Tim Leslie, Engineering Manager and AI Learning Lead at Skyscanner, gives the main talk. He leads AI learning for Skyscanner's 950 engineers and has 12 years running teams of up to 40. He'll look at how ways of working should change when agents and software factories do more of the building. Doors, pizza and drinks at 18:00, opening talk 18:30, main talk 18:40, Q&A 19:30, then networking and a pub afterparty from 20:00. Free, at CodeBase. Why go: you get the view from someone rolling AI out across a large engineering org, not a vendor. Good for engineering managers, delivery leads and engineers rethinking how their team plans work.

with Laura Eadie (Finance Director, Heriot-Watt University) · Dag Lee (CEO, Nile) · Andy Patton (Senior Relationship Manager, Royal Bank of Scotland)

A breakfast panel at Royal Bank of Scotland's Princes Street office on where AI actually helps in financial modelling and forecasting, and where boards, auditors and lenders will not accept it. Hosted by TAISK, an Edinburgh-built financial modelling platform; sponsored by RBS. On the panel: Laura Eadie, Finance Director at Heriot-Watt University; Dag Lee, CEO of Nile; Andy Patton, Senior Relationship Manager at Royal Bank of Scotland; and a partner from Azets. The session covers traceability of AI-generated figures, the forecast red flags lenders look for, and where finance teams can safely start. TAISK then builds a lender-ready 13-week cash forecast live from a real ledger. Why go: most AI-in-finance panels stay abstract; this one has the person who reviews the forecasts sitting next to the people who write them. Best for finance directors, fractional CFOs and founders who have to get numbers past a bank.

with Andrew Brown (Keynote speaker, Scottish Testing Group) · Jamie Gagnon (Speaker, Scottish Testing Group) · Bryan Jones (Speaker, Scottish Testing Group) + 1 more

A four-hour afternoon of quality-engineering talks at CodeBase, the Scottish Testing Group's autumn meet-up. The line-up is Dr Andrew Brown, Jamie Gagnon, Bryan Jones and Douglas MacIntyre. Brown's keynote, "Lies, Damned Lies, and Software Projects", is about the fictions that circulate around delivery — the bid with the impossible deadline, the status report greener than the evidence, the term sheet that glosses over dilution — and argues testers and founders see the gap between claim and reality earlier than anyone. In person, 13:00 to 17:00, free, with time for networking between sessions. Why go: testing communities are where delivery problems get discussed without the marketing layer, and a free half-day with four speakers is a lot of signal for an afternoon. Best for QA and test engineers, SDETs, and engineering leads who own release quality.

with Glen Stocco (Exited founder and strategic adviser, Plane & Simple)

Geovation Scotland's Lunch and Learn at its Meadowbank House hub, an hour of fireside chat and lunch for people working in land, property and location data. November's guest is Glen Stocco, who co-founded Plane & Simple — an online marketplace for independent builders' merchants — and took it from concept through national expansion to an exit. He now advises founder-led businesses on growth, team structure and financial clarity, and has a commercial property development background. Expect the exit story and the advising view rather than a geospatial technical session. Free, 13:00 to 14:00, open to all. Meadowbank House is a Scottish Government building, so attendees are booked in as visitors. Why go: an exited founder talking through what actually happened, in a small room, over lunch. Best for early-stage founders in proptech or geospatial, and anyone weighing a marketplace model.

with Suleman Imdad (Speaker, ) · Jon Minton (Speaker, )

Edinburgh's data science community meetup runs an agentic AI special, hosted and sponsored by FreeAgent at its Fountainbridge office. Two talks. Suleman Imdad on why a model can pass its evaluation and still fail in reality, including an 8B open model that changes behaviour when it senses a safety test, and a checklist for catching a flattering evaluation before production does. Dr Jon Minton on getting agents to know what you know, arguing the durable skill is graph thinking, drawing on months of running a small consultancy with agents. Networking with pizza and drinks from 17:15, talks 18:30 to 19:45, then more networking. Free; a handful of places left. Why go: two research-grounded talks on evaluation and agent context rather than tool demos. Best for data scientists, ML engineers and anyone putting agents into production.

boom saloon and Architecture and Design Scotland host an evening on whether accessible design is ever genuinely achievable, or whether it stays an aspiration bolted on at the end. It runs at the Edinburgh Futures Institute on Lauriston Place from 18:00 to 21:00, free, with registration on Eventbrite. boom saloon is the Scottish creative social-impact publisher behind the boom saloon calling series; A&DS is the national design agency. Why go: accessibility is where product, service and physical design arguments actually overlap, and this is one of the few Edinburgh rooms where people from all three sit together. Best for designers, product people and researchers who keep hitting accessibility as a late-stage problem.

A 90-minute breakfast networking morning at CodeBase on Castle Terrace, run by Barclays Eagle Labs Scotland for Edinburgh founders and the local professionals who work with them. There are no talks. The organisers run a short structured activity to get you talking to the people in the room who are relevant to you, rather than leaving it to chance. Breakfast sandwiches and coffee are on Eagle Labs. 09:00 to 10:30, register on Eventbrite, and bring plenty of business cards. Why go: a quick, early way to meet advisers and other founders before the working day starts, in Edinburgh's main startup building. Best for early-stage founders still building their bench of lawyers, accountants and advisers.

with James McVeigh (, Festivals Edinburgh) · Tomas Vancisin (, Edinburgh Futures Institute)

A data visualization meetup on how to make the eleven Edinburgh festivals' data readable: ticket sales, venues, programmes, audiences and community reach. James McVeigh of Festivals Edinburgh explains how the festivals are organised and how they've changed. Tomas Vancisin of Edinburgh Futures Institute talks about using visualization to connect them. Students from October's Edinburgh Festivals Hackathon show their work. The format mixes short talks with discussion and sketching, and touches on the Culture and Community Mapping Project and apps built on the Festivals Listings API. No prior experience needed. 90 minutes in Room 0.7 at EFI. Why go: a real public dataset, the people who own it, and the people visualising it in one room. Good for data designers, civic-tech builders and anyone working with the Festivals API.

This week's Venture Café Thursday Gathering, "Powering Tomorrow: Energy, Gaming and Unlikely Connections", asks what game design can do for problems outside gaming. Brian Baglow, founder of the Scottish Games Network and author of Level Up Scotland, hosts a 20-minute session at 18:35 with speakers from financial services, defence, edtech and the creative industries. Hilary Young of Forumm and Adam Barnard of ASPBelong follow with a short innovator spotlight. Director Claudia Cavalluzzo opens at 18:00, and open networking runs 17:00 to 20:00 at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Free, but you register to confirm a place and see the full agenda. ARIA backs the series. Why go: the weekly room where Edinburgh founders, researchers and investors actually mix, and this week Baglow brings the games crowd into it. Good for founders in fintech, defence or edtech weighing up whether playful design is worth building in.

with Gary Hunter (Speaker, Cyber Scotland Connect) · Rory McCune (Speaker, Cyber Scotland Connect) · Caleb Eghan (Speaker, Cyber Scotland Connect)

Cyber Scotland Connect's Edinburgh meetup at CodeBase, sponsored by RiverSafe, with four talks that are unusually practical for a free evening. Gary Hunter on running an agentic SOC for real - infrastructure as code, human-in-the-loop automation, agent constraints and AI error budgets, from an eight-person team covering a FTSE 350 SaaS platform across AWS and GCP. Joshua A. on malware that reads its config off the blockchain, and why next.config.js and .vscode/tasks.json deserve the scrutiny application code gets. Rory McCune on a year of testing nearly 50 models and which ones hold up. Caleb Eghan walking a one-pound payment through a deliberately vulnerable banking API until it turns into exposed customer data. Doors 17:30, close 20:30. Free, capped at 80, so update your RSVP if you drop out. Why go: four substantial talks and no vendor keynote. Best for security engineers, platform teams and developers who have started shipping agents.

Three talks on engineering leadership at Skyscanner's Edinburgh HQ in Quartermile. Tim Leslie, who leads AI training for Skyscanner's engineers, opens with "Software factories". Engineer and leadership coach Tobi Tonner follows on building healthy leadership habits. Tadhg Davey, principal engineer at NHS Scotland, closes with "Distributed system citizenship", drawn from the platform behind services such as mycare.scot. Arrival, food and networking from 18:00, talks from 18:45, close at 20:45. O'Reilly is giving away four books. Free, but spaces are limited and you have to RSVP on Meetup. Why go: a practical evening for tech leads and engineering managers, with one talk on how a big Edinburgh employer trains engineers on AI and one from someone running national-scale health infrastructure. Best for senior engineers stepping into leadership.

with Johan Englund (Curriculum Leader, School of Music and Sound Production, Edinburgh College) · David Oxley (Creative technologist, )

opera.agency's monthly music-sync showcase and networking evening, at Edinburgh Napier's Bright Red Triangle startup studio. The format connects independent composers, producers and sound designers with studios, music supervisors, agencies, multimedia producers and games teams looking for new music. November's theme is 'Hearing Net Zero'. Johan Englund, Curriculum Leader for Music and Sound Production at Edinburgh College, gives a short talk and Q&A on a collaboration with Changeworks Scotland in which audio students are building sound projects about net zero. Creative technologist David Oxley also shows new work and visual environments. Free, informal, 18:00 to 20:30. Why go: games studios and agencies in Edinburgh hire sound people, and this is the only regular room in the city where those two sides are in the same place. Best for composers and sound designers looking for commercial work, and for producers who need to find them.