Tech Events at Old College, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh

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.

EdLUG's monthly Saturday meeting, back at Old College for December. This one has a theme: a round-table on using Linux in robotics research, alongside the usual open format where people bring laptops and work through whatever is broken. Hosted by Douglas Ian Scott. Expect talk on distros, shell scripting, desktop customisation, server management and self-hosting, plus show-and-tell on hardware projects and open-source replacements for everyday software. Beginners moving off Windows or macOS are explicitly welcome. Teaching Room 10, second floor (three floors up from ground). Take the first entrance on the right as you enter the quad, the Edinburgh Law School door. Free, two hours. Why go: a themed robotics round-table on top of the usual fix-it table, where you can turn up with a broken GRUB and leave with it sorted. Best for robotics researchers, sysadmins and self-hosters.

EKLIPs runs a round-table discussion on project failure in Teaching Room 10 of the University of Edinburgh Law School, Old College. The premise is that the profession talks about successes constantly and about failures almost never, and that the second set is where the transferable lessons are. Attendees are invited to bring examples: work that went unexpectedly wrong, which responses helped recovery and which made things worse, how a similar failure could be avoided, and projects that went right and why. The format is informal, arriving late is fine, and nobody is required to speak. Open to librarians, knowledge managers, archivists and anyone working in or around the information professions. Free, 75 minutes. No refreshments on site, so bring your own.