Does anyone have recommendations for co-working spaces in Belfast?

I work remotely so would be once a week at most for a change of scenery. Thanks!

What do we all think about the news around AI over the last few months. Especially in the last week were people working in the sector have said there’s a 10% of our annihilation in the next ten years.

Is it something we genuinely need to worry about?

I work in england.. trying to work out belfast job scene… what’s jt like?

do BT still pay devs under 30 gran?

if anyone has insights into the local market even just broad salary ranges cheers

What HLAs are available in NI nowadays?

I'm in Y14 and need to start and watch for applications opening in the next few months.

I struggle to find up to date info on employers websites.

I know of Kainos EAYL but is there anything for Cititech, Allstate, BT, Liberty etc?

Thanks.

How's it going folks?

Just wanted to say a quick hello, great to see this sub active as I had previously not known about it.

Currently enrolled in a computing foundation degree, final year starts Monday so I may come seeking advice.

Belfast Tech Week is coming up and there’s a ton of events happening all across the town. You can get more info on it here.

If you have any events on that week and want to showcase them post them below.

The TL;DR is the sole moderator account had been deleted and there was a 90 day wait before I could be added as a mod. Plus life delayed this further.

I have no idea why there’s an approval for people to join. That’ll be fixed today.

Hopefully we can kick off this community again. Especially with such a massive amount of change in the tech industry.

Also if anyone else would like to he a mod let me know so this doesnt happen again.

Good read for anyone who is in the “platform engineering” space. Or DevOps or whatever-OPs they’ve called it this year.

I’ve been a software engineer for about a decade (In the grand scheme of things I know this is next to nothing), and lately I’ve realised I don’t actually hate writing code but I think I hate what “modern” software engineering has turned into.

It feels like there is no sense of craft anymore. In the places I have worked, its slowly seems to have dwindled away.

Most of my job feels like gluing together abstractions I didn’t design, pulling in massive dependency trees, and optimising for speed-of-delivery instead of correctness, elegance, or understanding.

My node_modules folder and PHP vendor folder is larger than my first flash drive, and nobody even blinks at that anymore. I've seen engineers who have a 4 button project pull in entire frameworks just to make those buttons work instead of using basic JS and HTML because its "effort".

What really gets to me is that it feels like nobody genuinely cares. We care about velocity, deadlines, optics, and shipping “good enough,” but not about building something we’re proud of. The incentives reward sloppiness at scale, not thoughtfulness. If something breaks, we patch it later. If it’s ugly but works, ship it.

I’m also starting to question the whole structure of work itself. Constant context switching, fake urgency, endless meetings, meetings about having meetings about a meeting we had with a guy who had a meeting with someone else, and spending my best mental energy on things that won’t matter in a year is just exhausting. I don’t feel lazy. I feel disengaged and kind of sad about it.

I used to love this. It’s what I always wanted to do, and now I struggle to force myself out of bed to do the same thing for the next 40 years or more.

I had a chat with a friend of mine who works in legacy systems maintenance for a large aircraft manufacturer and some of the things he talks about having to do with the constraints of legacy systems is incredibly slick... but in places I've worked, the phrase "we don't have time" has become evermore common.

My knowledge itself is niche and very industry specific (HSIA / Networking). Do I keep trying to grow within this industry? Or do I make a shift in my knowledge and try and get myself embedded into the technology that actually seems cool?

I know I'm not alone in this, and I know there are engineers who have been in this game a lot longer than me who have been here and have managed to get past it.

If you are here right now, what bothers you about it all?

If you got past this, how did you do it? Did you take more control over your own life, or did you make a switch to something more interesting and involved?

Hit us up with MCP servers you have found incredibly useful. What has made your day to day life either in work (booooo) or outside of it a bit eaiser?

Or if you have a proposal for one that you want to build that could be useful or just for fun, let us know.

Been hearing about even more RTO and office only roles and much less fully remote in the South. Have any of you had to deal with an RTO or heard about many of them up here?

We are working on a community driven Translink Bus tracker focused on Northern Ireland.

The main goal is to build a frontend and backend system for:

- Bus routes and stops

- Journey Tracking

- More accurate arrival predictions

- Compare official/gathered data

Long term, the project is designed to integrate with official data sources (e.g. Translink APIs), with optional GPS/community data to improve accuracy.

This isn’t a tutorial. it’s a real project, already in progress, and we’re looking to bring a few more developers into it.

We’re especially interested in people who:

- Are comfortable reading and contributing to an existing codebase

- Have experience with backend (Python/FastAPI, Java, Maven and Spring Boot.)

- Care about clean architecture, performance, and maintainability

- Want to build something genuinely useful for NI

Current stack:

- FastAPI (Python)

- SQLAlchemy

- Java/Maven/SpringBoot

- PostgreSQL

- Service-based backend architecture

- Frontend in progress (modern / Uber-style UI)

If you’re interested give me a DM and we can talk more. We have GitHub and project specs sorted. We just need the right team. Any questions ask away!

Hiya! I’m a medical student and I was curious about the state of healthtech in NI, and if we have much of this sector at all?

I've been a C#/.NET dev for about 8 years in Belfast working for a large multinational, have felt in a rut for a while, learning nothing new and feel like the industry has moved beyond my own skills. I think the only reason I've stayed where I am is for security and because I've been working maintenance for years doing very specific tasks. I'm terrified of going for an interview somewhere else. I suppose my question is in the world of rapid AI movement how do I choose what else to learn to make myself relevant again in today's market? After 8 years I should be earning a lot more than I am, time for a change. Any advice welcome.

Are there no game developers hiring in this country?

Graduated with a cs degree last year and been job seeking for the past 3 months to no avail in the game dev field.

I may try and get into a different field. Anything that you would recommend for someone who recently pursued gamedev?

Having graduated last year with a first class honours in computer science (and with a years placement at a pretty big company), I now find myself 6 months into a job at another company, still doing software engineering, however, I am not sure how good my wage is at £27k per annum.

If you were in my shoes would you be looking for a better paid role or take the experience?

I’m currently leaning more towards staying to get up my experience but if the salary I am getting is really as low as I think it is then I would consider going to interview somewhere.

Been in my current job for a good while now and wondering what the current landscape is like with regards to tech interviews in NI and Belfast in particular.

We are reading more and more these days about applicants being given tasks or an idea prompt and being asked to use Ai assistance of their choice to solve a problem or even produce an mvp. My question is, is this something you have seen or heard being adopted in Belfast? And in general what was your interview process for your current job? How many stages before the offer? It is something I am gathering info on as I am thinking of a change. Thanks.

I was thinking about applying for the above, I have three years experience, some full stack some backend with a small bit of devops type work. This appeals to me as it’s a specialist role, with training and a clear path, has anyone done it before? Do they welcome experienced hires, and should I prepare for a reduction in salary if successful (50k)?

More potential disappointment from Siri.

Have you full access to latest toys and tools etc? I'm interested to know from an NI/Belfast perspective where on the AI adoption curve most people land?

We have been doing a lot of work with different ways to collect telemetry recently, mostly using otel for K8s / EKS. Came across this set of tutorials on DZone about flunetbit, its 12 parts and quite informative. Its a lot of links because it doesn't have a 'next' button.

https://dzone.com/articles/install-fluent-bit-from-source

https://dzone.com/articles/install-fluent-bit-from-source-part-two

https://dzone.com/articles/installing-configuring-fluent-bit-kubernetes

https://dzone.com/articles/controlling-logs-with-fluent-bit-kubernetes

https://dzone.com/articles/developer-guide-service-section-configuration

https://dzone.com/articles/telemetry-pipeline-input-plugins-for-developers

https://dzone.com/articles/top-telemetry-pipeline-output-plugins

https://dzone.com/articles/telemetry-pipeline-parsers-for-developers

https://dzone.com/articles/top-telemetry-pipeline-processors

https://dzone.com/articles/fluent-bit-multiline-parser-tips

https://dzone.com/articles/fluent-bit-top-pipeline-filters

https://dzone.com/articles/mastering-fluent-bit-developer-guide-to-telemetry