After the success of last year’s Home Assistant Community Day, we are back for a Smart Home themed meetup on Wednesday May 20th in PorterShed a Do, Market Street, Galway from 6:30pm - 8:30pm.
Details and signup links to follow.
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After the success of last year’s Home Assistant Community Day, we are back for a Smart Home themed meetup on Wednesday May 20th in PorterShed a Do, Market Street, Galway from 6:30pm - 8:30pm.
Details and signup links to follow.
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We are back with the Galway Repair Cafe on Saturday, April 25th from 12:30-3:00pm, this time at the Galway Rowing Club in Woodquay.
The Galway Repair Cafe is a community group who repair clothes for people, and teach how to DIY the repairs too.
While this seems a little left field for a tech meetup, the concept of Repair Cafes transcends textiles and expands to everything from furniture to electronics.
With the End of Life of Windows 10 last October world wide - and the end of free Extended Support in Europe this October - there are a lot of perfectly functional computers which are about to be out of date and insecure. To that extent we are helping people update their computers & laptops to Linux Mint. Linux Mint is an excellent beginner Linux distribution with a familiar user experience to Windows and a good set of default drivers and applications. Between web browsers and Libre Office Suite it provides a very similar experience. For gaming, Steam is well supported on Linux as the Steam Desk runs on an Arch Linux variant resulting in many new games being compatible too.
If you are interested in installing Linux Mint on your hardware, have a look at our linux preparation guide and send us an email to hello@galwayit.org to find out when we will be at another Repair Cafe. Or if you feel up to the challenge, create your own Live USB by following the instructions.
Thank you to the Repair Cafe for hosting us, and providing delicious treats from Cafe Link to volunteers and attendees alike. We are looking forward to the next one!
Thank you to the Free Software Foundation for sending on their event resource pack to provide posters, leaflets and stickers to educate and spread the word on the importance of free software, repairability and ownership.
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On Wednesday 15th April we hosted talks on the topic of Self Hosting in PorterShed a Do, Market Street, Galway from 6:30pm - 8:30pm.
Self-hosting is all about taking back control of your data and your services. Why pay a monthly subscription for something you can run yourself? From replacing Google Docs with Nextcloud, to ditching Dropbox for your own file storage, upgrading from Google Photos to Immich, or streaming your own media library with Jellyfin instead of Netflix and Spotify — there’s a self-hosted alternative for just about everything, and this community has probably tried most of them.
Let us introduce our speakers!
From Pi to PC: My Self-Hosting Journey – Martin Klačer Martin is chatting about how he got started self-hosting with the humble Raspberry Pi, and how that’s grown into a full blown homelab with a recycled PC. He’s also going to be chatting about some of the tools essential to his set-up, such as Docker and Cloudflare.
How Securing Services Made Life Easier – Aisling Krewer We’ve got our very own Aisling Krewer chatting about how security with Authentik actually made server admin easier and more accessible for her non-techie friends and family and how it compares to the lightweight alternative Pocket-ID. (Hint: She loves both.)
Here are the presentations from the meetup. In them you will find links to various references, demo repositories and google code labs. If anythings missing, please get in touch.
Sponsored by our wonderful hosts The PorterShed, thank you as always!
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For a change of pace from our usual talk based events, we opted for a relaxed evening of working and sharing projects we are working on.
Whether it’s hardware or software; games, AI or smart home - this is a good place to share, show-off or ask for help on whatever you’re working on. I know I have too many projects in progress which never really end, so having an evening to dedicate to such items and work on them together should spur you on to finish your work.
Sponsored by our wonderful hosts The PorterShed, thank you as always!
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In February we joined forces with the Google Developer Group Galway to host 3 quick talks on getting started with software development at GIT 3.2: Quick Starts with GDG. We had 140 signups for the event and 50 attendees.
The event was sponsored by the Google Developer Group Galway. They are a great community hosting educational and networking events similar to Galway IT, so it was high time for us to co-organise an event together. GDG organizes the anual Dev Fest across Ireland and this year they are planning on hosting it here in Galway! Be sure to join the group and keep an eye out for it.
We hosted three excellent talks by Galway IT regulars:
Thank you to GDG and The PorterShed for sponsoring the event!
Here are the presentations from the meetup. In them you will find links to various references, demo repositories and google code labs. If anythings missing, please get in touch.
If you’d like to give a talk - at this or any future events - give us a shout on hello@galwayit.org.
We’re also looking for sponsors - both for individual events and long term arrangements. Sponsors help us keep attendees fed and hydrated, supporting local businesses like All About Kombucha where we can. If that’s something you or your company are potentially interested in, we’d love to talk to you!
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And now for something completely different… We joined Eimear and the Galway Repair Cafe at the Galway City Museum. The Galway Repair Cafe is a community group who repair clothes for people, and teach how to DIY the repairs too.
While this seems a little left field for a tech meetup, the concept of Repair Cafes transcends textiles and expands to everything from furniture to electronics.
With the End of Life of Windows 10 last October world wide - and the end of free Extended Support in Europe this October - there are a lot of perfectly functional computers which are about to be out of date and insecure. To that extent we are helping people update their computers & laptops to Linux Mint. Linux Mint is an excellent beginner Linux distribution with a familiar user experience to Windows and a good set of default drivers and applications. Between web browsers and Libre Office Suite it provides a very similar experience. For gaming, Steam is well supported on Linux as the Steam Desk runs on an Arch Linux variant resulting in many new games being compatible too.
If you are interested in installing Linux Mint on your hardware, have a look at our linux preparation guide and send us an email to hello@galwayit.org to find out when we will be at another Repair Cafe. Or if you feel up to the challenge, create your own Live USB by following the instructions.
Thank you to the Repair Cafe for hosting us, and providing delicious treats from Cafe Link to volunteers and attendees alike. We are looking forward to the next one!
Thank you to the Free Software Foundation for sending on their event resource pack to provide posters, leaflets and stickers to educate and spread the word on the importance of free software, repairability and ownership.
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Kicking off 2026 to a fantastic start with two excellent Cyber Security talks at GIT 3.1: Cyber Security with Centripetal. We had a record of over 125 signups across Meetup & Eventrbrite and over 70 attendees.
Centripetal specializes in Real Time Threat Prevention and have set up their newest location at Platform94 in Mervue. If you are looking for a Cyber Security Job in Galway, be sure to check out Centripetal’s Careers Page.
We hosted two excellent talks by two returning speakers of GalwayIT:
Thank you to Centripetal and The PorterShed for sponsoring the event!
If you’d like to give a talk - at this or any future events - give us a shout on hello@galwayit.org.
We’re also looking for sponsors - both for individual events and long term arrangements. Sponsors help us keep attendees fed and hydrated, supporting local businesses like All About Kombucha where we can. If that’s something you or your company are potentially interested in, we’d love to talk to you!
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For our October Meetup we’ve done something a little different - we partnered with the Galway Product Management Meetup to host a discussion on Open Source!
The Galway Product Management Meetup is managed by a collective of Galway Professionals under the umbrella of ITAG and they often host meetups similar to our own in the PorterShed!
To bring together our two communities, we decided on a discussion topic important to both Product & Engineering : Open Source. It may seem to a mostly technical topic, but we had an even split between product & engineering in the Q&A session which followed our two talks:
Thank you to the PorterShed for sponsoring the event, and to the Product Management Meetup Galway for the collaboration - we hope to co-organize an event with you again in future!
If you’d like to give a talk - at this or any future events - give us a shout on hello@galwayit.org.
We’re also looking for sponsors - both for individual events and long term arrangements. Sponsors help us keep attendees fed and hydrated, supporting local businesses like All About Kombucha where we can. If that’s something you or your company are potentially interested in, we’d love to talk to you!
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on 25th September for GIT 2.4, we met to discuss Web Analytics and Accessibility. Have you ever been overwhelmed by Google Analytics? Want to make your website reach the right people? Make it easy to use for everyone? This might just be the event for you.
This month we were sponsored by PorterShed native startup MartEye
We hosted the following talks:
If you’d like to give a talk - at this or any future events - give us a shout on hello@galwayit.org.
We’re also looking for sponsors - both for individual events and long term arrangements. Sponsors help us keep attendees fed and hydrated, supporting local businesses like All About Kombucha where we can. If that’s something you or your company are potentially interested in, we’d love to talk to you!
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We held a meetup on Self Hosting and Home Servers on Thursday, 31st of July @ 6:30 for our Self Hosted Meetup at PorterShed a Do, Market Street, Galway/
Our last talk on Home Assistant got us thinking about the other amazing self-hosted tools in our lives, and so we’ve decided to center our next talk on self hosting!
This time we talked a little about the services and tools we self-host and use every day, and what we love and have learned in the process.
We focussed on a more social aspect this time around, with an introductory talk by Aisling Krewer followed by a Q&A session and break out into individual discussions. We heard a lot of great examples of self hosting services and inspired some new comers to try it out for themselves.
Thank you all for attending.
Self Hosting 101 - Aisling Krewer
