Edinburgh’s tech scene has been expanding rapidly over the past decade. Numerous flourishing startups have chosen to make their home in this cobbled capital city.

These growing tech companies include spin-outs from local universities as well as home-grown innovation. The city has caught onto this trend and now offers a wide variety of local events, or “meetups,” to encourage the sharing of knowledge and experience. Local companies such as Skyscanner and TechCube boast especially impressive efforts towards encouraging and sponsoring these sorts of activities.

Several NN4M staff members actively seek out and attend these events, whether to build their own networks or to research emerging technology on behalf of the company. Two of the local events I will draw attention to are edPug and Tech Meetup, having attended both recently.

Tech Meetup is the largest of the two, with events in five cities: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness and Dundee. The guests meet for some casual discussion and refreshments followed by up to two talks to entertain the guests. The speakers themselves come from various backgrounds and specialities, including developers behind Homebrew and Skyscanner. The conversation covers topics that are both useful and appealing to programmers of various disciplines. Subjects have included Git version control, testing, sustainability and more.

edPug is an example of one of many more specialised local groups, focusing on subjects related to PHP, the most recent being an example of the use of PHP in the Open Tech Calendar site and open source development in general. The site itself is also worth mentioning as a good resource for local tech events.

Both groups pride themselves on being friendly towards first-time attendees through their welcoming atmosphere, social events outside of the talks themselves and plenty of open discussion between members.

I’ve found it really helpful to make an effort outside of work to explore opportunities such as these. There is the obvious benefit of social interaction with like-minded developers, but the events also offer the unique chance to share your knowledge and receive feedback while learning new information and best practises from local developers.