Conversations in the online space are very much about AI and it was interesting to see that continue offline with professionals and students at Developers Up North Hull Social. A small meetup in Hull City Center, it was billed as a taster of the content expected at the Developers Up North conference. Both the meetup and the conference are at Jubilee Central, an event space I haven’t been to before, so I was interested in getting a look at the space well as meeting others and hearing some of the short talks.
The attendees were a mix of professionals and students, leaning heavily towards students. Attendence was light, possibly hampered by a clash with PyData Hull, which started a little earlier in the evening up at the University. I was greeted enthusatically by the organisers when I arrived and it is clear that they are really trying to make the event work for Hull. The conference seems to have a good list of speakers, although it is very front-end oriented.
On the evening there were two speakers, Lee Jackson, a former collegue and exacting front-end dev who has now transtioned into AI consultancy, bringing his full stack knowledge to bear at River AI and Maryam Muritadha, Software Engineer at Morphologic.
Lee talked through some of the challenges of implementing AI in businesses. In particular the challenge of buisneses being ready to implement AI. His talk understandably prompted a lot of questions and was overall quite interesting.
Maryam talked about the challenges of finding the sweet spot in development with AI. About understanding what AI has done and the impact on developers overall.
I was pleased to meet a few new people at the event and like the talks, the conversation mostly focused on AIs. From use of differing models to production safety and data managment concerns. Separation of AI from production data remains a key safeguard and implementation of failover for models that are in production shows that general engineering best practice remains needed when leveraging the third party services like Claude and Gemini. It was also great to talk about developer networking and the opportunities in Hull. While it was clear that Hull has a long way to go to compete with cultural powerhouses like Brighton, it was good to see that Hull and the people of Hull try hard to improve the opportunities for everyone in the area.
I might not be attending the conference, but I would consider going to another meetup with the same group.