Laurent Doguin: Building AI Agents with Shell Scripts

Wednesday November 13th, 2024

Thrive Workplace, Centennial (9200 E Mineral Ave, Englewood, CO 80112)

Details

5:30-6:00: Food, Soda, Beer and Networking

6:00-6:15: Announcements

6:15-7:45: Building AI Agents with Shell Scripts

When considering an AI agent in its simplest form, it can be understood as a system with one or more inputs that takes action(s) based on those inputs, produces outputs for other actions, and continues this process iteratively. For developers, there are various approaches to building such systems, including workflow engines, no-code solutions, or simply coding. However, one of the most familiar concepts for devs is shell scripting, where CLI output is piped to other CLI tools using the “|” character. A powerful feature for one-liner, but devs can always do more thanks to flow control and variables supported in most shell.

Over time, numerous shells have evolved, with new ones still being created from scratch,because devs still spend time in the terminal. For example, shells like zsh and fish have become increasingly popular, and Nushell is one of the latest additions, offering a native way to manage tabular data—ideal for handling structured inputs and outputs. This talk will explore AI agents from the perspective of a generalist developer, demonstrating how to build AI agents using Nushell and Couchbase as vector database.

About Laurent Doguin

Laurent is a nerdy metal head who lives in Paris. He mostly writes code in Java and structured text in AsciiDoc, and often talks about data, reactive programming and other buzzwordy stuff. He is also a former Developer Advocate for Clever Cloud and Nuxeo where he devoted his time and expertise to helping those communities grow bigger and stronger. He now runs Developer Relations at Couchbase.

You can find Laurent on LinkedIn.

7:45: Door prizes

Thanks to our sponsors!

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Orchestrate the Chaos: Process Automation in Modern Architectures

Wednesday, October 9th 2024

Details

5:30-6:00: Food, Soda, Beer and Networking. Sponsored by Teksystems

6:00-6:15: Announcements

6:15-7:45: Orchestrate the Chaos: Process Automation in Modern Architectures

A recent (2022) poll by Kong placed the average number of microservices for a single enterprise at 184! Modern architecture patterns are great at optimizing resource usage, but what happens when you need to make a critical change to one process that spans multiple shared services? Complex business processes can be difficult to manage and automate. How do you quickly implement changes while maintaining uptime? How do you introduce a new service to an existing process? In this talk, we will discuss how to use Business Process Modeling (BPM) to orchestrate and execute complex business processes in your application. Don’t let the name fool you: this is not your father’s Visio diagram. Everyone should leave this talk with a new approach to solving their orchestration complexities!

About Samantha Holstine

Samantha is a Developer Advocate at Camunda. She has a background in software development and is passionate about learning. She loves all things tech and is enthusiastic about trying new things. Outside of work, she teaches dance fitness and studio rowing, loves to hike and be outdoors with her dog and partner, travels, and dabbles in photography.

You can find Samantha on LinkedIn.

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Eric Honsey: A Tour of JVM Languages

Wednesday, September 11 2024

5:30-6:00: Food, Soda, Beer and Networking

6:00-6:15: Announcements

6:15-7:45: A Tour of JVM Languages

And then there was bytecode…

Tired of the same old Java program? Join us for a tour of Java Virtual Machine (JVM) languages, their unique features, and the advantages they offer to developers.

In a world where software development is constantly evolving, the JVM ecosystem provides a platform for experimentation and innovation. From Kotlin to Scala, Groovy to Clojure, the JVM offers a diverse range of tools and frameworks that cater to different programming styles and application requirements.

In this talk, we’ll explore the evolution of the JVM, the rise of alternative languages, and the impact they have on modern software development. Whether you’re a seasoned Java developer or a curious tech enthusiast, this session will open your eyes to the rich and vibrant world of JVM languages.

About Eric Honsey

Eric Honsey is a seasoned software professional with a diverse background spanning finance and technology. His early years as a financial analyst led to a love for technical problem-solving and his first role as a software developer. He has honed his skills in several languages, functional programming, big data technologies, infrastructure, software architecture, and Domain-Driven Design (DDD).

Eric has leveraged his unique blend of business acumen and technical expertise throughout his career to deliver innovative solutions. He frequently gets obsessed with smoothing out the kinks in software systems and pushing the team beyond the status quo. His passion for superb software is matched only by his dedication to continuous learning.

When he is not jamming on the keyboard, Eric is likely strumming a guitar or hitting the ice for a game of hockey.

You can find Eric on LinkedIn.

7:45: Door prizes

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Venkat Subramaniam: Design Trade offs in Modern Architectures

NOTE: This event is on Monday August 12th, and at Thrive in Centennial(9200 E Mineral Ave, Centennial, CO 80112)

5:30-6:00: Food, Soda, Beer and Networking

6:00-6:15: Announcements

6:15-7:45: Design Trade offs in Modern Architectures

Over the years we have learned and applied several software design principles. Many of these principles have been very useful and have served as guiding principles and, at times, as guard rails to develop better software. However, the principles do not work in isolation. They interplay with each other and sometimes even against each other. In this presentation we will look at the trade offs in applying well known design principles within the confines of the architectures that applications may be based on.

About Venkat Subramaniam

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., an instructional professor at the University of Houston, and the creator of the dev2next conference.

He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with sustainable agile practices on their software projects.

Venkat is a (co)author of multiple technical books, including the 2007 Jolt Productivity award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer. You can find a list of his books at https://www.agiledeveloper.com. You can reach him by email at venkats@agiledeveloper.com or on Twitter at @venkat_s.

7:45: Door prizes

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Pratik Patel: Cloud Cost Optimization for Java Developers

Wednesday July 10, 2024

Details

5:30-6:00: Food, Soda, Beer and Networking

6:00-6:15: Announcements

6:15-7:45: Cloud Cost Optimization for Java Developers

Cloud usage has been soaring over the last few years, and now developers are starting to get pressure to reduce cloud spend. In this session, we’ll discuss how to optimize your cloud utilization, and hence how much your team spends, on cloud infrastructure. We’ll discuss these topics with a specific focus on Java applications:

  • Architecture of your application
  • PaaS, CaaS, Cloud Functions or Kube?
  • JVM ramp-up & optimization time
  • Headroom for variable load
  • Over provision or elastic compute?
  • Database and caching techniques

About Pratik Patel

Pratik Patel is a Java Champion and lead developer advocate at Azul Systems. He wrote the first book on ‘enterprise Java’ in 1996, “Java Database Programming with JDBC” and “Developing Open Cloud Native Microservices”. An all around software and hardware enthusiast with experience in the travel, healthcare, telecom, financial services, and startup sectors. Helps to organize the Atlanta Java User Group, frequent speaker at tech events, and master builder of nachos.

You can find Pratik on Twitter @prpatel.

7:45: Door prizes

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Andrus Adamchik: DataFrame – a Swiss Army Knife of Java Data Processing

Wednesday, June 12

Details
5:30-6:00: Food, Soda, Beer and Networking

6:00-6:15: Announcements

6:15-7:45: DataFrame – a Swiss Army Knife of Java Data Processing

As Java developers, we do a lot of data processing. If you have terabytes pumped through your system daily, maybe you would reach for Spark, Flink or some other “big data” solution. But there are also many everyday tasks that do not warrant the complexity of traditional data pipelines. Some examples are analysis of app logs, cleaning up and persisting Excel files, simple ETL copying tables between different databases, etc. So, how can you use “big data” techniques without big data infrastructure?

This talk will focus on “DataFrame” – an in-memory table-like data structure with operations including column / row filtering and transformations, joins, aggregations, etc. I will use an open source DFLib library (https://dflib.org) and Jupyter notebook to demonstrate how to do data processing in any Java app without much fuss.

About Andrus Adamchik

Andrus is a passionate open-source developer and a member of the Apache Software Foundation. He started programming in Java back in 1998, and founded a number of open-source projects: Apache Cayenne – a developer-friendly ORM, Bootique.io – a lightweight Java app platform, Agrest.io – a framework for dynamic REST services, and DFLib – DataFrame for Java. In his day job, Andrus is an IT entrepreneur, running a software company called ObjectStyle.

You can find Andrus on Twitter @andrus_a.

7:45: Door prizes

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Craig Walls: Introducing Spring AI

Wednesday May 8, 2024

NOTE: This meetup is at the Thrive location in DTC! We know that AI is a hot topic and might draw a crowd, so we’re moving to a location with a larger capacity.

5:30-6:00: Food, Soda, Beer and Networking

6:00-6:15: Announcements

6:15-7:45: Introducing Spring AI

By now, you’ve no doubt noticed that Generative AI is making waves across many industries. In between all of the hype and doubt, there are several use cases for Generative AI in many software projects. Whether it be as simple as building a live chat to help your users or using AI to analyze data and provide recommendations, Generative AI is becoming a key piece of software architecture.

So how can you implement Generative AI in your projects? Let me introduce you to Spring AI.

For over two decades, the Spring Framework and its immense portfolio of projects has been making complex problems easy for Java developers. And now with the new Spring AI project, adding Generative AI to your Spring Boot projects couldn’t be easier! Spring AI brings an AI client and templated prompting that handles all of the ceremony necessary to communicate with common AI APIs (such as OpenAI and Azure OpenAI). And with Spring Boot auto-configuration, you’ll be able to get straight to the point of asking questions and getting answers your application needs.

In this session, we’ll consider a handful of use cases for Generative AI and see how to implement them with Spring AI. We’ll start simple, then build up to some more advanced uses of Spring AI that employ your application’s own data when generating answers.

About Craig Walls

Craig Walls is an engineer with VMware, Java Champion, Alexa Champion, and the author of Spring in Action, Spring Boot in Action, and Build Talking Apps. He’s a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring. When he’s not slinging code, Craig is planning his next trip to Disney World or Disneyland and spending as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 1 bird and 2 dogs.

You can find Craig on Twitter @habuma.

7:45: Door prizes

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Nicolas Frankel: Evolving your APIs, a pragmatic approach

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Details

5:30-6:00: Food, Soda, Beer and Networking sponsored by Teksytems

6:00-6:15: Announcements

6:15-7:45: Evolving your APIs, a pragmatic approach

When you publish your first HTTP API, you’re more focused on short-term issues than planning for the future. However, chances are you’ll be successful, and you’ll “hit the wall”. How do you evolve your API without breaking the contract with your existing users?

In this talk, I’ll first show you some tips and tricks to achieve that: moving your endpoints, deprecating them, monitoring who’s using them, and letting users know about the new endpoints. The talk is demo-based, and I’ll use the Apache APISIX project for it.

About Nicolas Frankel

Developer Advocate with 15+ years experience consulting for many different customers, in a wide range of contexts (such as telecoms, banking, insurances, large retail and public sector). Usually working on Java/Java EE and Spring technologies, but with focused interests like Rich Internet Applications, Testing, CI/CD and DevOps. Also double as a trainer and triples as a book author.

You can find Nicolas on Twitter @nicolas_frankel.

7:45: Door prizes sponsored by Jetbrains

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Scott Davis: Digital Modernization Through Accessibility

Wednesday, February 14th 2024

Details

5:30-6:00: Food, Soda, Beer and Networking sponsored by Teksystems

6:00-6:15: Announcements

6:15-7:45: Digital Modernization Through Accessibility

Did you know that half of the US uses their voice, daily, for web searches? Did you know that 3 out of 4 Gen Zers (people 27 years old or younger) watch videos with closed captions on all the time? These accessibility features, long associated with people with disabilities, have broken through to mainstream success and are used by nearly everybody. Are you prepared to support these features in your app or website today?

In this talk, Scott Davis (author and digital accessibility advocate) shows you how to incorporate accessibility into your software development practices by “shifting accessibility left” in the process. We’ll explore accessibility trends and demonstrate simple techniques and free tools that you can start using immediately.

About Scott Davis

Scott Davis is a Web Architect and Digital Accessibility Advocate, focusing on the multisensory aspects of web development. In a world where half of all Google searches are done by voice, and 80% of all social media videos are watched with the sound off and closed captions on, accessibility is a springboard for innovation.

You can learn more about Scott at https://thirstyhead.com.

7:45: Door prizes sponsored by JetBrains

8:00: Post-meetup networking sponsored by Okta.

 

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Daniel Hinojosa: Machine Learning Data Pipelines with Kafka and Tensorflow

Wednesday January 10, 2024

Location : Thrive Workplace – Cherry Creek
201 Milwaukee St Unit 200 · Denver, CO 80206

5:30-6:00: Food, Soda, Beer and Networking sponsored by TekSystems

6:00-6:15: Announcements

6:15-7:45: Machine Learning Data Pipelines with Kafka and TensorFlow

An intense presentation designed to operationalize machine learning. This talk focuses on dividing specializations; data engineer and data scientist.

The data engineer ensures that data is delivered, manipulated, and harnessed. The data engineer does this to be useful for the data scientist. The data engineer is also versant in Java and Scala and will be knowledgeable in pub-subs like Kafka.

The data scientist uses that data, does their cleaning, and investigates possible patterns designing a machine learning model that we can use to either find regressions or classifications for our data. The data scientists use Python, Jupyter Notebooks, Tensorflow, and Matplotlib as their tools of choice for constructing a machine-learning model to make decisions about the data.

This presentation answers the question. How do we take that model and tie it to everything else? This workshop will use a wide array of technologies. It will set you on the path to running Machine Learning Pipelines in Kubernetes using Kafka and Tensorflow, so you can start immediately when you return to work.

About Daniel Hinojosa

Daniel Hinojosa is a programmer, consultant, instructor, speaker, and author. With over 20 years of experience, he does work for private, educational, and government institutions. Daniel loves JVM languages like Java, Groovy, and Scala; but also works with non-JVM languages like Haskell, Ruby, Python, LISP, C, and C++. He is an avid Pomodoro Technique Practitioner and makes every attempt to learn a new programming language every year. Daniel is the author of Testing in Scala and the video Beginning Scala Programming Video Series for O’Reilly Publishing. For downtime, he enjoys reading, swimming, Legos, football, and cooking.

You can learn more about Daniel at https://www.evolutionnext.com.

7:45: Door prizes sponsored by JetBrains

8:00: Post-meetup networking sponsored by Okta.

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