Testing, AI, Thinking

Wednesday, 22nd July 2026

18:00 - 21:00

Booking Link: RSVP on Luma

Additional Links: Meetup

Join us for our summer Macclesfield Tech Community event, hosted at Blue Beck.

A chance to meet, network and share ideas, with complimentary refreshments provided.

Presentations:

Testing What You Can't Control - Adam Davis

Adam is bringing a live, demo-led session where you (and your phone) become part of the system.

Using his side project, pixelmesh, Adam will turn the room into a distributed real-time display powered by the audience's devices. What starts as a simple interactive demo quickly becomes a lesson in what happens when software leaves controlled environments and collides with real-world conditions.

Lighting changes. Networks fluctuate. Devices behave differently. Timing drifts. People move unpredictably.

Together, we'll explore how systems behave and misbehave when you can't fully control the environment around them, and why testing in perfect conditions only tells part of the story.

Part engineering deep dive, part live experiment, this session is hands-on, a little chaotic, and designed to show what real-world testing actually looks like when the audience becomes part of the system.

Local AI at the End of the Tunnel - Mike Irving

In this session we'll combine Local AI, .NET and Dev Tunnels!

To begin we'll look at how easy it is to install Ollama, and download a suitable model to run locally, on our own computers.

Turning to code, we'll then discover how quick it is to connect to Ollama via our own C# Code, using the Microsoft.Extensions.AI library. Initially interacting via our own Console App.

Sidestepping, we'll look at an often overlooked feature: Visual Studio Dev Tunnels. We'll look at the benefits for Web Applications and Web API.

Bringing everything together, we'll take our (minimal) Console App code, bake it into a Blazor Web Application, and expose this via a Web Tunnel. Creating a route through to our Local AI installation from any web modern browser.

Who is doing the thinking? - Robin Roy

A talk about how AI is changing the way we work and whether its slowly replacing our cognition.

Our hosts Blue Beck will be providing complimentary refreshments and catering.

Gallery: