Belfast Tech Week#

Last week was Belfast Tech Week, an annual event in Belfast consisting of numerous technology meetups, demonstrations and technical briefings covering both current and emerging technologies.

There were, of course, also plenty of business networking events. These proved particularly useful for getting a better understanding of the current needs of small businesses and considering how I can make my own services more approachable and less intimidating to people who may have a problem to solve without necessarily knowing what technology they need to solve it.

Unsurprisingly, AI was the main theme running through many of the technical sessions.

Several briefings covered the growing need to secure AI-to-API and AI-to-AI communications, particularly as autonomous agents become capable of interacting directly with systems and with one another.

There was also discussion around the double-edged nature of AI in cybersecurity. AI has become a significant accelerator for some less admirable activities, such as discovering vulnerabilities and compromising systems, while at the same time providing the inverse capability: detecting problems, responding to incidents and potentially taking corrective action automatically.

Other demonstrations showed how AI can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines to identify and fix configuration problems before they reach production, along with examples of multiple AI agents being used together to develop software, review code and check one another’s work.

It was difficult to come away with any conclusion other than that AI, in its many forms, is now firmly part of the technology landscape.

I will also be attending a few events over the coming weeks covering the security of embedded systems, along with a slight side quest into learning how AI is being used within the local film and television industry here in Belfast.

It’s been a busy week, but it was encouraging to see just how active the Belfast tech scene currently is.