Kent Tech Meetup: June 2026 Recap

July's meetup was the first one running under the new name. Kent Tech Meetup has become The Tech Meet; the old name did the job but it always sounded a bit like a committee meeting, and this one says what it actually is.

It also has a proper home now at thetechmeet.com rather than leaning entirely on the Meetup page. Meetup still handles sign-ups, but everything else lives on the site.

Same pub, same format, more people. If you missed it, you can catch up on June's recap here.

Here's what came up on the night.

Fable 5 is back

June's session spent a good chunk of the evening on Fable 5 and Mythos being pulled after the export control directive. A few weeks later access came back, so naturally it got picked up again. Good excuse for everyone to revisit what they said last month and see who called it right.

Catch ups and the job market

A fair bit of the evening was just people catching up properly. Job searching came up more than once; it's a strange market at the moment and it helps to hear from people going through the same thing rather than reading another LinkedIn post about it.

What people have been building

The usual round of "so what have you been working on". Side projects, client work, half-finished things nobody has touched in six months. This is usually the bit that runs longest.

SEO and AI Overviews

Probably the biggest topic of the night. How do you actually show up in AI Overviews now? The rough consensus in the room was that it comes back to the same things it always did, only more so: genuinely human content and EEAT. The shortcuts that used to move the needle don't survive contact with a summarisation layer. If your content is thin, it gets skipped.

Getting back into tech after time out

Someone raised the question of how you get back in if you haven't touched code in a while, and it turned into one of the better conversations of the evening. The take in the room was that you still need curiosity; that part hasn't changed since the old days. What has changed is the barrier. You can point AI at a legacy codebase and actually understand it, or spin up a small side project on a Tuesday evening and learn more in two hours than you would have in a weekend. Being curious has never been cheaper.

Devigo Studio demo

We ran a live demo of Devigo Studio's import from URL feature, which uses AI to pull an existing site into the CMS. Nice to show it to a room that will happily tell you when something looks off. Studio is releasing soon; more on that shortly.

New faces

Plenty of people nobody had met before this month, which is always the best sign. If you turn up, you're welcome; that's genuinely the whole entry requirement.

There's a WhatsApp group now

If you want to keep the conversation going between sessions, join the group here.

The Tech Meet runs on the fourth Wednesday of every month at The Muggleton Inn in Maidstone, and it's free. Devigo organises it and sponsors it; sign up at thetechmeet.com/next-meetup.