Manchester — Week of 24 Aug 2026

Ladies That UX Manchester returns with 'Design for Good' — an evening exploring how UX and product design can create positive impact for people and society. Now in its tenth year with meetups in 50+ cities, Ladies That UX is a welcoming, inclusive community for women, non-binary people and allies working in UX and product. Expect short talks, honest conversation and friendly networking with designers, researchers and product people from across Greater Manchester. You don't need 'UX' in your job title — just curiosity and an interest in making things better for users.

Silicon Mingle returns for its August edition — and moves to the second floor of BrewDog on Peter Street. No panels, no pitches, no presentations: just good old-fashioned networking, easy conversations, and a room full of founders, investors, entrepreneurs and tech professionals. Whether you're bringing a colleague, a co-founder, or flying solo, come make the kind of connections that don't happen over Zoom. Runs on the last Wednesday of the month.

Aware Digital teams up with European payments platform Mollie to bring Manchester's ecommerce community together for an evening of conversations, fresh ideas and new connections. Whether you're writing code, running an ecommerce business, designing digital experiences, or simply curious about what's happening in the industry, expect a mix of technical and non-technical topics across platforms like Adobe Commerce, Magento, Hyvä and Shopify — plus plenty of time to meet like-minded people over drinks and bites at Clockwise Linley House.

The launch event for AI + The Future of Work, aimed squarely at everyone who has been told to "figure out AI" at work without much further guidance. Rather than talks, the group solves a real problem with AI collectively, over food and drinks, at Accenture's Circle Square offices. Free and open to all, and deliberately pitched at people whose job is changing around AI rather than people building models. Already running a waitlist.

The Fabric & Power BI Manchester User Group turns its August meetup into an interactive murder mystery built entirely on Microsoft Fabric. Across a live investigation, attendees explore reports, analyse streaming clues, interact with a grounded Data Agent and vote on the culprit — before the end-to-end Fabric architecture behind the experience is revealed, showing how batch and real-time data, Direct Lake semantic modelling, Power BI and AI combine into a single solution applicable to IoT, operational monitoring and support analytics. Doors 5:30pm, talk from 6pm, with drinks and pizza courtesy of hosts Slalom and sponsor Robert Walters.

PyData Manchester's August talks at Krakenflex's Circle Square offices. Josh Hayes opens with The Meaning of Lift — on the gap between the question a stakeholder asks and the question they actually mean, and why data science work fails more often on interpretation than on modelling. PyData MCR is one of the longest-running and best-attended data communities in the North West, with a practitioner audience of data scientists, analysts and ML engineers. Free.

Rust Manchester's August meetup brings the North West's Rust community together for an evening of technical talks and conversation at Bridge5Mill in Ancoats. Whether you're shipping Rust in production, tinkering on side projects or just curious about the language, it's a relaxed, knowledgeable crowd of systems and application developers. Talks are followed by informal networking — a good chance to compare notes on tooling, performance and where Rust is heading.