What is Pereira Tech Talks (and why it matters)

A short answer

Pereira Tech Talks is the technology community of Pereira (Risaralda, Colombia). We have been running monthly meetups since February 2014. We host the annual Pereira Tech Day conference. We run a Speaker School. We curate a bilingual library of talks, recaps, and slides that any AI agent can read without intermediaries. Everything is free. Everything is open. We are entering our twelfth year.

That is the short answer.

The long one starts in a UTP classroom.

February 2014: eight people in a room

The first meetup was called PereiraJS. Eight people showed up. Daniel Aristizabal welcomed the group. Jhonber Jimenez and Manuel Pineda gave a talk on the history and applications of JavaScript. There was no recording. There was no sponsor. There was no slide template. There was the simplest possible bet a community can make: show up, share what you know, see who else cares.

Twelve years and 84 meetups later, that same bet is what keeps Pereira Tech Talks alive. The format changed. The brand changed. The technology stack changed. The bet has not.

The four programs we run today

Pereira Tech Talks is not “a meetup group.” It is four programs running in parallel, designed to serve the community at different levels of engagement.

1. Monthly Meetups

Every month, on the third week, the community gathers — physically in Pereira and online via Luma for those joining remotely. The format is consistent: two technical talks of 25 to 45 minutes each, an open mic for lightning talks, food and conversation. We have run this cadence — with COVID-era virtual interruptions — since 2014. It is the heart of everything else.

Recent meetup topics: continuous testing and observability, generative AI for drug discovery, the CNCF cloud-native landscape, vibe coding, Rust fundamentals, Python in 2025, mobile development trade-offs, edge computing.

The full archive: /en/meetups.

2. Pereira Tech Day

The flagship annual conference. Ten editions and counting (2017–2024 plus 2026). One full day at UTP. Four to six keynotes, lightning talks, networking, sponsors, swag, food, sometimes prizes. The 2024 edition packed the Auditorio Jorge Roa Martínez with hundreds of attendees.

The full archive: /en/pereira-tech-days.

3. Speaker School

The bet that anchors this program: Pereira has world-class engineering talent. Some of it just needs a path to the stage. Speaker School is that path. Biweekly mentorship sessions, four core modules (body language, narrative arc, Q&A handling, AV preparation), 5-minute practice presentations, mentor and peer feedback. Free. Cohort-based.

Alumni go on to keynote in Bogotá, Medellín, Mexico City, and at YC-backed startups. The full curriculum: /en/verticals/speaker-school.

4. La Biblioteca del Mañana

The bilingual reading club. One book per month — applied AI, philosophy of technology, science fiction, leadership, climate, society. A 90-minute conversation. Reading guide published a week ahead. Discussion in Spanish, notes published bilingually.

Most of the tech industry reads tweet threads. We read books. The full picture: /en/verticals/library-of-tomorrow.

Bonus track: AI & Agents Channel

The newest vertical. An async channel plus quarterly deep-dive meetups, focused on what is actually working in production with LLMs, agents, RAG, evaluations, and the agentic web. The rule: bring code or a demo, not opinions. Details: /en/verticals/ai-channel.

Why we publish everything bilingually

The default failure mode of a Latin American tech community is to publish only in Spanish (limiting reach) or to publish auto-translated content (looking unprofessional). We do neither.

Every meetup recap, every slide deck, every blog post, every speaker bio exists in real Spanish and real English. Spanish is our primary language because we live here. English is first-class because half of what we teach and learn happens at the intersection with global engineering culture, and because alumni who move to international roles can keep contributing back.

We also publish Markdown-for-Agents endpoints — every public page has a .md twin that AI agents can read directly without rendering JavaScript. This is a design choice, not an afterthought. We want the community to be discoverable by both humans and the agents humans will increasingly use.

Why it matters (the part that is hard to say without bragging)

Three things happened in the last twelve years that I think are worth naming honestly:

One. PTT was named an outstanding community by the UTP Alumni Association in 2018. That mattered locally because it bridged the volunteer community and the academic establishment.

Two. Alumni of this community have gone on to engineering roles at YC startups, GitHub-sponsored projects, Latin American technical conferences, and international engineering teams. The community did not place them there — they earned it. But many of them found their first stage here.

Three. Other tech communities in the region — PereiraJS, JointDev, GDG Pereira, Python Pereira, QAConf — have worked with us, co-hosted with us, or merged into us. PereiraJS itself merged into PTT in 2024. This is not because PTT is dominant. It is because a small city benefits from concentration over fragmentation.

We are one of the most consistent tech communities in the Colombian coffee region. We are not the loudest one. We are not the largest one. We are the one that has shown up monthly, for twelve years, with the same belief: share what you learn, raise the next person up, do it in public.

How to join

• Show up. The next meetup is on Luma. Free, public, no application required.
• Speak. Apply through the Call for Speakers form. First-time speakers are welcome — that is what the Speaker School is for.
• Sponsor. See Sponsor us for the pitch.
• Contribute. Read Contributing for paths from speaking to editing the open-source site.

If you are reading this because you are deciding whether to be part of something, the answer is yes. Come once, see how it feels. The door has been open since February 2014.