Yesterday I was lucky enough to get to speak at BelTech, giving what I like to think of as a light-hearted rant entitled “10 Stupid Reasons You’re Not Using Free Software”. It’s based on various arguments I’ve heard throughout my career about why companies shouldn’t use or contribute to Free Software, and, as I’m sure you can guess, I think they’re mostly bad arguments. I only had a 20 minute slot for it, which was probably about right, and it seemed to go down fairly well. Normally the conferences I would pitch talks to would end up with me preaching to the converted, but I felt this one provided an audience who were probably already using Free software but hadn’t thought about it that much.

And that got me to thinking “Isn’t it fantastic that we have this range of events and tech groups in Belfast?”. I remember the days when the only game in town was the Belfast LUG (now on something like its 5th revival and still going strong), but these days you could spend every night of the month at a different tech event covering anything from IoT to Women Who Code to DevOps to FinTech. There’s a good tech community that’s built up, with plenty of cross over between the different groups.

An indicator of that is the number of conferences happening in the city, with many of them now regular fixtures in the annual calendar. In addition to BelTech I’ve already attended BelFOSS and Women Techmakers this year. Product Camp Belfast is happening today. NIDevConf is just over a month away (I’ll miss this year due to another commitment, but thoroughly enjoyed last year). WordCamp Belfast isn’t the sort of thing I’d normally notice, but the opportunity to see Heather Burns speak on the GDPR is really tempting. Asking around about what else is happening turned up B-Sides, Big Data Belfast and DigitalDNA.

How did we end up with such a vibrant mix of events (and no doubt many more I haven’t noticed)? They might not be major conferences that pull in an international audience, but in some ways I find that more heartening - there’s enough activity in the local tech scene to make this number of events make sense. And I think that’s pretty cool.