We have a great developer community scene in Turku

This year looks better than in a long time for software developers in Turku who want to spend time together and meet other like-minded developers. There are almost a dozen great communities active right now.

Let’s take a look at what’s happening in Turku.

Turku ❤️ Frontend

Turku ❤️ Frontend is a community for people interested in frontend web development. We welcome everyone who’s interested in the topic: whether you’re a student, hobbyist, junior or senior developer, we are happy to have you join our events. We organize monthly meetups on the last Wednesday of the month and occasionally other types of events like Code in teh Dark events, hack days or other events to bring the community together.

Turku WordPress meetup

Turku WordPress meetup brings together developers and users of WordPress to learn more about the platform, developing on it and has historically had a wide variety of style in events and topics over the years. It’s a great community to find likeminded people who are working on the same technology as you.

TurkuSec

Next on the list is TurkuSec for all the information security enthusiasts in the area. Deep tech, interesting stories and a very welcoming community make TurkuSec a fantastic choice of a community to join. They also stream their events in Twitch if you can’t make it to the event in person. They are also part of a larger CitySec movement in the Nordics and Baltics.

IGDA Finland Turku Hub

Game developers find their home in the local IGDA group. The Turku game scene has for the longest time been a really nice community which is really helpful for any developers looking to start and continue their game development journeys. Peer support for game developers, opportunities to get people to test your game and lots of great presentations to learn more about the industry.

Aurajoki Overflow

Aurajoki Overflow has monthly meetups around different topics in software development: from accessibility to programming languages and data to software testing. You’ll always find something interesting to learn from their events. Each month is dedicated to a different topic with a couple of speakers and after the meetups the discussions often continue to the night in a local pub in relaxed company.

Twig the Code

Twig the Code is a group of women in tech who come together to learn from each other and work on projects together. They organize meetups, workshops, company visits and other events to encourage more women to the software industry.

CNFC & Kubernetes Turku

Interested in cloud and Kubernets? Kubernetes Turku is a community for you. Join their meetup.com group and you’ll get the info for new events to join when they are organized.

Turku.ai

The artificial intelligence and machine learning people gather together at Turku.ai’s activities. Their events cover both academic cutting edge research and practical industry implementations with great speakers and a nice community of likeminded people.

Archipylago

One of the new communities in the area is archipylago (run by me and my mate Dan) that gathers together Python developers from all walks of the industry. With Python being used for in many ways to solve different types of problems, there’s a never-ending stream of new opportunities to learn. On alternating months, we organize meetups with a couple of talks and good discussions and on the other months, we organize hands-on sprints where we get together to write code.

TurkuMobile

Another newcomer to the scene is TurkuMobile which, as the name implies, is a community for mobile developers. I’m excited to see the mobile dev scene get their own community and look forward to their first events in the spring.

Google Developer Student Club TUAS

The students of Turku University of Applied Sciences have an opportunity to be part of the GDSC TUAS that organizes tech meetups and offers opportunities for the students to learn new tech and network. They are currently in the early phases of their operations with the first event organized in January.

Turku Dev Lunch

In addition to all the more formal and organized program, we also eat lunches together. Usually once a month in a more scheduled manner and more often than that in ad-hoc way. We usually agree on the lunches in the TurkuDev Discord and publish some of them in Turku Dev Lunch Mobilizon.