Tech Events at Matillion, Manchester

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.

mcr.engineering returns for September at Matillion's offices, a venue the community keeps going back to. One of the largest engineering communities in the North West, it draws senior software engineers, architects and engineering leaders from across Greater Manchester. Free, with talks followed by extended networking — and given the size of the group, one of the better rooms in the city for hiring conversations or finding people who have already solved the problem you are on.

with Esly Lescano (Speaker, Refurb AI) · Charles Oduk (Speaker, ) · Abdullah Ola Mudathir (Speaker, ) + 1 more

One of Practically AI's most popular formats returns: an evening of short, practical talks from engineers building with AI. Esly Lescano shares the journey of taking Refurb AI from an LLM call to a trusted, production-ready multimodal product; Charles Oduk demonstrates a WhatsApp fact-checking bot built to fight misinformation; Abdullah Ola Mudathir makes the case for measuring, not trusting, AI code reviewers; and Robin Roy asks who's really doing the thinking as AI embeds into our workflows. Doors, pizza and networking from 18:30. Aimed at software engineers, engineering managers and anyone applying AI in real software development.

Manchester QA and testing community at Matillion New Bailey for two talks: Adam Davis on testing integrations and Nicola Furniss on accessibility testing.