Albanians In IT

[May] London in-person meetup

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Expertus One

Conversations that stick.

On May 17, Albanians in IT (AiT) hosted its first 2025 in-person meetup in London. It was a curated afternoon of conversations that stuck with you long after you left the room.

Hosted at the Notting Hill Arts Club, this gathering brought together Albanian professionals from across London mainly to explore three timely themes.

Agenda highlights

Welcome & Opening Note
Nensi Ahmetbeja opened the floor by framing the day around the AiT community’s current momentum and three pillars we’re navigating as a network:

  1. Tech career transitions
  2. Applied AI in our work and world
  3. Startups with cross-border ambition

Session I – Career transitions in tech

  • Urim Haxhiaj shared his personal and professional journey as a Technical Lead at Capita full of practical takeaways and candid insights. His story was rooted in discipline.
  • Ledio Berdellima reflected with an open heart lessons from his early-career up to leading product and engineering teams at scale, including at Meta. He had gone through intentional pivots, that were not always easy. It wasn’t a how-to talk. It was more honest than that.

Building a meaningful career doesn’t always need a loud voice, just a steady one.

Session II – AI agents & applied intelligence

  • Uljad Berdica Uljad Berdica, currently a PhD researcher at Oxford and Rhodes Scholar, dropped us into the frontier. He challenged us to go beyond beautiful UIs and feature lists, and instead think about how AI agents might interact with software in more universal, low-friction ways. His message to builders, especially those in Albania: don’t just replicate, rethink. Push the edges of how things are deployed and experienced.
  • Fatos Ismali zoomed out with clarity. He introduced concepts like MCP (Model Context Protocol) as a call for interoperability in the agent-driven AI era. His message was clear: the tools are evolving fast, but unless we think critically about reliability, interaction patterns, and shared standards, we risk building fragile systems that can’t scale.

“When we evaluate, we take a tradeoff approach: cost, efficiency, speed, and price, along with all the responsible AI aspects around it.”

Session III – Startups across borders

  • Shefqet Avdullau (online) offered a framework-based view from the investor side: what makes a startup truly cross-border?
  • Jona Doda shared her founder story with Bliss.al — from vision to traction, with an emphasis on local relevance and diaspora reach.

“A British therapist might not understand my urge to call my Albanian mom every evening, instead could alert for boundaries to be put to place.”

Final part

The final part of the day focused on 1-minute intros, ALBAN Global partnership shoutout by Ermelinda Hajdari (CEO and co-founder), and informal chats over drinks.

What’s next?

This meetup reminded us of the power of community when it’s curated, intentional, and honest.

If you’re an Albanian professional in tech, with 5+ years of experience and a desire to contribute, learn, and build together: this is your circle.

Until next time,
Let’s keep the conversations that matter (and stick) going.

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