MINSK, Belarus — On Friday nights, Zybitskaya street — or simply Zyba, as locals call it — turns into a vast party scene, filled with hipsters in bright shirts, tight dark jeans and black-rimmed glasses, showing how they can be carefree in a country that has been labeled the last dictatorship of Europe.

Over the past few years, Zyba has turned into an island in the middle of Minsk, the Belarusian capital — still mostly a sterile, utterly unfashionable city with long lines of dominating Soviet buildings and people hurrying past, seemingly terrified of making any form of contact. On Zyba, a crowd of convivial youngsters migrates from one little bar to another, drinking Jack and Coke, smoking endlessly.

Many of those carousing belong to Belarus’s sprouting technology industry — young, savvy and forward-looking designers, bookish and shy engineers, and many others who aspire to belong. More than 30,000 tech specialists now work in Minsk, a city of about two million, many of them creating mobile apps that are used by more than a billion people in 193 countries, according to the local government.