MTL_code is hosted at the Botpress office every third Thursday of the month. Expect pizza, drinks, networking, and a talk or two from guest speakers on all things software development, programming and the latest in tech.
When
Thursday, Feb 19
6:00 PM
Where
Botpress Office

Montreal, QC

Upcoming Event

The Developer’s Toolkit

Thursday,
• 6:00 PM
Register now
6:00 PM
Doors open
6:00-7:00 PM
Meet the Botpress team and fellow attendees; enjoy pizza and drinks
7:00-8:00 PM
Talks from our guest speaker(s)
8:00 PM and onward
Networking and conversation
In this event

Christophe Sirois — Design Is Not Vibes: How Engineers Can Talk About Design Without Guessing.

For many engineers, design discussions feel uncomfortable. The feedback sounds vague: “make it cleaner,” “this feels off,” “the UX isn’t great.” Compared to code reviews, design conversations can feel subjective and hard to reason about. But good design isn’t magic and engineers can learn to discuss it pragmatically.

Mikaël Francoeur — SQLite: more powerful than you think.

Did you know that SQLite can do much more than just CRUD? Join me as we explore SQLite's extensibility and advanced features. We'll see how to perform vector search, interact with REST APIs, synchronize databases with each other, and even edit zip files — all in SQL!

Speakers
Christophe Sirois
Full Stack Developer @ Botpress
Mikaël Francoeur
Software Engineer @ Turso

Past events

Discover highlights from our past events, and if you’d like to join us on stage, you can apply to be a speaker.

Join as a Speaker
Feb 19, 2026
Engineering in the Age of AI

François Levasseur shared how building AI systems with user-written integrations exposed a tricky challenge: How do you enforce contracts and detect breaking changes when users generate the code? Existing tools fell short — so he built Jex, a TypeScript library that type-checks JSON Schemas. He walked us through the type theory behind it, key TypeScript nuances, and the design decisions that shaped the library.

Frédéric Harper took a step back from the AI hype cycle and focused on what really matters for senior developers and leadership. Beyond vibe coding and flashy demos, he explored the practical wins, the risks, the blind spots — and how to responsibly lead teams in an AI-driven landscape.

François Levasseur
Software developer @ Botpress
Frédéric Harper
Senior developer relations manager @ TinyMCE
Jan 15, 2026
Designing Developer Experiences That Scale

Chris Grass delivered the talk Beautiful Types: Designing TypeScript Libraries That Feel Handcrafted. ​

He showed what “handcrafted” TypeScript types look like in practice: readable hover tooltips, autocomplete that surfaces the right options, and absurdly helpful error messages. The talk looked at libraries that nail this—including Zod, Prisma, and Effect—to show how their public types shape the developer experience. Attendees left with a practical checklist and a few ways to sanity-check a library’s type surface before publishing.

David Desmarais-Michaud delivered Yoke: Code-based Kubernetes resource management and the journey from client to server-side package management. ​

This talk explored the current state of Kubernetes IaC and package management, tracing the shift from older client-side approaches toward emerging server-side and orchestration patterns. It also examined the idea of defining infrastructure with actual code, reflecting a software engineer’s path into DevOps and platform engineering and the effort to bridge those two worlds.

The session included reflections on how software engineering and platform engineering diverged over time, along with the gradual return of software development practices into platform engineering. It concluded with demos of code-first Kubernetes package management and server-side package management.

Chris Grass
Senior Software Developer at Botpress
David Desmarais-Michaud
Senior Platform Engineer at Nesto
Nov 20, 2025
Building Smoother, Smarter Developer Workflows

Michael Masson, CTO at Botpress, delivered the talk Kubernetes the Right Way: A Platform Engineering Approach to K8s. He acknowledged Kubernetes’ power and complexity, and showed how platform engineering provided a smoother, more manageable path for teams to benefit from K8s without forcing everyone to master it.

Mark Savic, Cursor Ambassador for Montreal and CTO at Bucky AI, walked us through Mastering Vibes: Best Practices for Pair Programming. He addressed the gap between AI coding tool promises and the real frustrations developers faced, sharing proven patterns from the community to reduce friction, improve flow, and make AI-assisted development feel effortless. The session offered practical tools for all skill levels.

Fred Lavoie, Founder and President at Deck, discussed Making Impossible Integrations… Possible. He demonstrated how authentication agents and a unified API made it feasible to integrate with any data source—even those without APIs—while ensuring secure, scalable, and reliable access to credentialed data.

Michael Masson
CTO at Botpress
Mark Savic
Cursor Ambassador for Montreal & CTO at Bucky AI
Fred Lavoie
Founder & President at Deck
Oct 16, 2025
Founders face to face

Sylvain Perron, CEO and Co-Founder of Botpress delivered a talk titled llmz: The TypeScript AI Engine, where we learned how to use AI reliably—making LLMs perform complex actions safely and predictably. He explored llmz, an AI execution engine that wrote, ran, and reasoned in TypeScript to power LLM-native apps and features.

Alexandre Bouchard, CEO and Co-Founder of Hookdeck, presented Webhooks at Scale: Best Practices, Lessons Learned. Drawing on Hookdeck’s experience processing over 100 billion webhooks, he highlighted key architecture patterns, considerations for event-driven applications, and the future of webhooks with event destinations and gateways.

Sylvain Perron
CEO & Co-Founder of Botpress
Alexandre Bouchard
CEO & Co-Founder of Hookdeck
come
hang
out
with
us
{
learn
about
ai
}
{
swap
ideas
}
and
{
grab
food
&
drinks
}
People chatting in the Botpress MTL_code event
400 Boulevard
de Maisonneuve Ouest
Montreal, QC
People sharing ideas in the Botpress MTL_code event
every { third Thursday }
of the month
Build
better
with
Botpress