PEI Tech Week 2026

PEI Tech Week - BBQ

The PEI IT Alliance BBQ is back for a second year! 🔥 Let's gather the island's tech community outside on a Sunday afternoon, with food off the grill, folks you've been meaning to catch up with, and the kind of conversations that don't happen in a conference room. This year your host is Dustin Sparks, founder of PEI Devs and co-founder of The Assembly, who has been getting Island techies in the same room since 2012, and he's opening up his own place for the BBQ this year! We're all meeting at The Foundry first, and transportation out to Dustin's is arranged from there. Bring your family, bring the kids, bring the coworker who's new to the Island and doesn't know anyone yet. Whether you write code, run a company, are still in school, or just work somewhere tech-adjacent and are curious who's around, you're welcome here. Sunday, August 9 · 12:00–3:00 pm Gather at The Foundry, 163 Great George Street, Charlottetown (transportation provided to and from Dustin's place). Free, food included, all ages welcome.

Tech Week: CEO Breakfast

PEI Tech Week - Opening Ceremony

PEI Tech Week kicks off from here! Join the Island's tech community for the official Opening Ceremony, a chance to celebrate the sector, mark the start of a full week of talks, meetups, and workshops, and hear what's ahead. Come for the energy, stay for the people. Everyone's welcome.

PEI Tech Week - Spark Tank 4.0

Watch PEI Startups Take the Stage! Join us for Spark Tank 4.0, an in-person pitch competition where PEI’s brightest innovators showcase their apps, games, and tech ventures in front of expert judges and the local community. The participants will compete for a grand prize of $500 and a three-month Foundry Solo Membership. This event is perfect for investors, tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and anyone who wants to support local innovation. Come for the pitches, stay to cheer, network, and celebrate the future of PEI tech!

PEI Tech Week - Women in Tech

Women across PEI's tech industry come together for an honest panel conversation about building careers in the field, the paths that got them here, the obstacles along the way, and what they wish they'd known starting out. Expect real talk on breaking in, process on finding mentors and sponsors, and making space for the next wave coming up behind them. Co-hosted by the PEI IT Alliance and the PEI BioAlliance, this panel brings two of the Island's strongest sectors into one room. Whether you're a student weighing your options, already working in tech or bioscience, or supporting the women who are, come for a candid discussion and the chance to connect.

PEI Tech Week - Own Your Stack: How One Entrepreneur Replaced Thousands in Monthly Subscriptions

Coltin Handrahan spent 14 years running Stay Golden Custom as a non-technical founder, paying monthly for software that never quite fit and working around systems he couldn't change. In December he started building his own tools, and has since cut thousands in recurring subscriptions and rebuilt the workflows slowing down his sales and production teams. He'll cover what he built, what he stopped paying for, what broke along the way, and where hiring someone still beats building it yourself!

PEI Tech Week - The Night Shift (Tuesday Edition)

Build your dream after hours! Join The Night Shift, a popular after-hours coworking session happening weekly at The Foundry. This event is curated for side-hustlers, early-stage creators, builders and workers who are looking to break the mould and work after hours. If you’re pushing a side project forward or just craving productive energy, come to the Night Shift, bring your laptop and make progress on your project along with fellow builders! Learn more at https://peiitalliance.com/the-night-shift

PEI Tech Week - Nailing Going To A Conference

Most people go to a conference, collect a lanyard, and come home with a stack of business cards and nothing else. Ryan Filsinger runs Iron Fox Games out of Charlottetown, a bootstrapped studio that has built games for Disney, Star Wars, and The Simpsons franchises, and that finds much of its work at conferences he can't afford to attend the expensive way. In this session he'll share the playbook: how to line up 50 to 100 meetings before you ever board the plane, how to work the room when your budget won't cover the host hotel, and how to follow up so the trip actually pays for itself.

AI Together

AI Together is a weekly room where PEI learns to build with AI, side by side, no developer background required. Each 90-minute session runs the same way: someone shares a win from the week, then three short talks pitched at different levels (a plain-language on-ramp, a step up for regular users, and a peek at the more powerful stuff), followed by 30 minutes to actually try things with help from the room. Free, every Wednesday from 3:00–4:30 PM at The Foundry, bring the real problem you're working on, and name one next step before you leave.

PEI Tech Week - Founders, Friends & Fintech Lounge

Let’s take a break from panels and pitch decks and just hang out. The Founders, Friends & Fintech Lounge is a casual, high-energy social for founders, operators, investors, and supporters from PEI’s tech and startup scene. Think of it as the “in-between moments” of Tech Week, turned into an event: the kind of conversations you’d have in the hallway or over coffee, but with a whole room full of the right people. What’s happening Founders & Friends: Meet the people building, funding, and supporting tech on PEI. Founders, fintech folks, operators, investors, and ecosystem partners - everyone’s welcome. “I Wish I Knew” Hat: When you arrive, grab a slip of paper and write one thing you wish you’d known when you started (fundraising, hiring, partnerships, product, regulation, etc.). We’ll toss them in a hat and read a bunch out loud during the evening. It’s part advice, part reality check, and usually pretty funny. Zero pressure, all connection: No long speeches, no formal agenda. Just two hours to connect, swap stories, and maybe grab a drink or two. If you’ve ever thought, “I wish someone had told me this earlier,” or “I’d love to know how others are handling X,” this is your night. Come as you are, bring your real questions, and leave with new people to text after Tech Week. Brought to you by Atlantic Fintech and PEI IT Alliance.

PEI Tech Week - Founders Dinner

A private dinner for a small group of founders. No agenda, no pitches, no audience. Chatham House Rule applies, so what gets said at the table stays at the table.

PEI Tech Week - Selling my own startup

In April 2025, James O'Halloran launched a daily puzzle game called Kinda Hard Golf. In the early days he hand-placed every tile by hand, every single day, no auto-tiling until day 100. A year and 400+ daily levels later, with players around the world hooked and streamers like Northernlion picking it up, he sold it to a team of daily-game veterans. In this talk, the Mighty Pebble Games founder walks through the whole arc: building a game solo, growing it into a real daily habit, turning a scrappy pipeline into something polished enough to hand off, and knowing when it's time to sell. If you've ever wondered what it actually takes to build something on your own and then let it go, this is a rare look from someone who just did it.

PEI Tech Week - Your Laptop Is A Data Centre

The most powerful computer in the world is whichever one is on the desk in front of you. In this session, Kyle McCullough — local-first technologist and fractional CTO, shows how to run modern AI where nothing leaves the room: images, music, speech, video, 3D models, and chat, all on a laptop with the Wi-Fi turned off. He'll dig into what's made this possible (unified memory, open model weights, quantization) and what it means for privacy, cost, and building products without the usual constraints. If the space shuttle taught us anything, it's that today's most powerful frontier models will be running on your wristwatch tomorrow.

PEI Tech Week - The AI ROI Trap

Most SMBs either overspend chasing AI hype or avoid it out of fear, both cost money. CPA and fractional CFO Ryan Dunn shares the four-part framework he uses to evaluate any AI investment, runs it through three real cases, and sends you home with a scorecard you can use immediately after the event!

PEI Tech Week - The Night Shift (Thursday Edition)

You asked for another coworking session, and we delivered! Come down to The Foundry for a relaxed evening of heads-down hustle, friendly motivation, and light snacks. The Night Shift is a popular after-hours coworking session happening weekly at The Foundry, curated specially for side-hustlers and early-stage creators. Whether you’re writing, coding, designing, or brainstorming, this is your space to make progress on your work alongside fellow creators. Learn more at https://peiitalliance.com/the-night-shift

PEI Tech Week - Developing Software at Breakneck Speed in the Agentic Age

AI has changed how software gets built, and Brian Dunphy has a rare vantage point on it. He co-founded Radian6 (acquired by Salesforce for $326M) and OneLobby (acquired by Cvent), and today leads Cvent's Canadian operations and a team of more than 200 as Senior Director of Product Development. In this session, he'll share what shipping software at breakneck speed actually looks like in the agentic age, what his teams have changed, what holds up under real production pressure, and what it means for developers and technical leaders in PEI.

PEI Tech Week - Hackathon with UPEI

The PEI IT Alliance and the UPEI School of Mathematics and Computational Science Society are hosting a 24-hour hackathon as part of PEI Tech Week 2026. Doors at The Foundry open at 11am on Aug 14 - we kick off at noon. You have until noon the next day to build something and demo what you made. Everyone is welcome. Students, recent grads, people working full time, career changers, retirees, hobbyists. Technical and non-technical both. Teams need designers, writers, marketers, researchers, and people who have never written a line of code, alongside the developers. If you're wondering whether you might be a fit: you are. We would love to have you join.