Tech Events at John McIntyre Conference Centre, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh

The Scottish Microscopy Society's annual symposium — imaging instrumentation, sample preparation and image analysis across life and materials science.

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.

Two days in Edinburgh for the national gathering of the UK artificial intelligence research community, hosted by the APRIL AI Hub at the University of Edinburgh with UKRI, RAI UK, the national AI hubs and the CDT centres. Cross-disciplinary: researchers, funders and industry stakeholders in one room rather than a single-topic technical track.

Europe's longest-running practitioner-led lean and agile conference, now in its thirteenth year, over two days at the John McIntyre Conference Centre at Pollock Halls. The programme is keynotes, workshops, case studies and lean coffees, with around 250 software engineers, engineering managers, product managers, delivery leads and agile coaches attending. Software Acumen runs it on an explicit no-vendor-pitch rule: practitioners teaching practitioners. Tickets start at 280 pounds plus VAT and the listing currently shows 368 pounds. Why go: the one Scottish conference where delivery and engineering-leadership practice is argued out by the people doing it rather than sold by consultancies, and two days is long enough to change how a team actually works. Best for engineering managers, delivery leads and product people with a team to run.

with Adrian Mouat (Organiser, Chainguard) · Paula Kennedy (Organiser, Syntasso) · Chris Kranz (Organiser, Bank of England)

Kubernetes Community Days UK returns to Edinburgh for a second year: two days of cloud native talks, project demos and panels at the John McIntyre Conference Centre. KCD events are volunteer-run under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and this one's organising team spans Chainguard, Meta, the Bank of England, Nscale, Syntasso and Cloud Native Wales. The programme mixes practitioner deep-dives with open source maintainer sessions, so the people presenting are generally the people who wrote or operate the thing. Tickets are paid; the price band is set per ticket type on the CNCF event page. Why go: this is the only cloud native conference of its size in Scotland, and the maintainer track means you can ask the awkward question directly rather than filing an issue. Best for platform and SRE teams, Kubernetes operators, and engineers whose production environment is someone else's abstraction.

SDinGov 2026, Software Acumen's service design in government conference, at the John McIntyre Conference Centre. Two days of practitioners working on public services that people can actually use.

A day at the John McIntyre Conference Centre on applying AI to neuroscience and brain health research — a genuine strength of the Edinburgh research base.