Discover Generative AI and Platform Engineering

Date: February 21, 2024
Time: 17:30 - 20:30
Location: Microsoft Technology Center, 200 E. Randolph St., Suite 200 Chicago, IL 60601

Agenda

17:30 - Doors open
—>Raffles - GOTO complimentary ticket(s), JetBrains licenses<—
18:00 - Mary Grygleski: Enter the Brave New World of GenAI
18:30 - John Burns: What is Platform Engineering?
19:00 - David Giard: Generative AI Tools in Microsoft Azure
19:30 - Networking and interactive discussion over food and drinks
—>Raffles - GOTO complimentary ticket(s), JetBrains licenses<—
20:30 - Thank you for today!

Abstracts

Mary Grygleski: With ChatGPT taking center stage since the beginning of 2023, developers who have not had a chance to work with any forms of Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning systems may find themselves either intrigued by the “maze” of new terminologies, or some may be eager to learn more, while perhaps a smaller group may not actually want to get themselves into a territory that’s unknown to them. The truth is that, whether we like it or not, we have all been “thrust” into this new era of computing. Instead of procrastinating, let’s start by learning about Generative AI specifically with this presentation. We'll go over several terminologies in this space: NLP, LLM, ChatGPT, Vector DB, Similarity Search, etc, and also point out a few popular frameworks that developers can start working with.

John Burns: Platform Engineering has been getting a lot of buzz lately, but it has already been around for over a decade. In this talk, we will review what problems prompted the creation of a new discipline in a post DevOps world. Then we will look at how it has continued to mature while expanding its scope to incorporate Developer Experience practices as well.

David Giard: Generative AI refers to a class of artificial intelligence systems that can create new content, such as images, text, or music, by learning and mimicking patterns from existing data. In partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft recently released and enhanced many products and services that take incorporate or facilitate Generative AI. These tools allow you analyze text and images, to enhance search capabilities, and to work more efficiently. In this session, we will show some of the more useful tools and how you can use them to be more productive.

About the speakers

Mary Grygleski Mary is a Java Champion and a passionate Senior Developer Advocate at DataStax. Previously she was a senior advocate at IBM, focusing on Java, Open Source, Cloud, and Distributed Systems. She started as an engineer in Unix/C, then transitioned to Java around 2000 and has never looked back since then. She is an active tech community builder outside of her day job, and currently the President of the Chicago Java Users Group (CJUG), as well as the Chicago Chapter Co-Lead for AICamp.

John Burns John is a staff platform engineer at GrubHub where he leads development on JVM ecosystem shared tooling. He is also a co-organizer of the Chicago Kotlin User Group and maintainer of the ktlint-gradle project.

David Giard David Giard is a former accountant and a former biochemist, who has been developing solutions using Microsoft technologies for over three decades. Currently, David helps people design and build solutions in his role as a Partner Solution Architect at Microsoft. David has been very active in the developer community, speaking at numerous major conferences, code camps, and user groups around the world; helping to lead user groups; and helping to organize conferences and other geek events. He is the host and producer of the mildly popular online TV shows Technology and Friends and GCast. He is the co-author of the Wrox book Real World .NET, C#, and Silverlight. You can read his latest thoughts at DavidGiard.com. His hobbies include video, photography, sports, and embarrassing his sons.