Code Conversations

The roles of programmers and designers are evolving. The convergence of design and code signals a narrowing gap, prompting us to question the future landscape of design. As we enter the age of AI, will this lead us to chart a new course, or will it see us walking down familiar paths? Drawing from her experience leading Design at GitHub, she’ll delve into her journey starting out as a designer who...

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) provides large language models with up to date information and helps them hallucinate less. But how does it all work beneath the covers? In this live coding session we'll build the components of a RAG system from scratch. (Aside from the LLM, there probably isn't time for that!) By building our own, we'll understand vectorisation, similarity search,...

AI is transforming the way Security Operations Centers (SOCs) work, and as a SOC engineer, your role is evolving fast. Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaZbsbKnOho&list=PL03Lrmd9CiGey6VY_mGu_N8uI10FrTtXZ&index=47

Cybersecurity is rapidly evolving, shaped by artificial intelligence (AI) and the emergent potential of Quantum Computing. AI enhances security through automated detection and analysis, swiftly processing vast amounts of data to spot and predict threats, and Quantum Computing holds the promise to revolutionize various industries by offering unparalleled computational speed and efficiency, enabling...

With GenAI, developers are shifting from traditional code reuse to generating new code snippets by prompting GenAI, leading to a significant change in the ways software gets developed. Several academic studies show that AI generated code based on LLM's that are trained on vulnerable OSS implementations lead to vulnerable generated code. Another study showed that developers tend to trust GenAI crea...

In the past year, ChatGPT and the OpenAI API have gone from 0 to 100 faster than a Tesla. No one wants to be left behind. Businesses are automating tasks and having content written instantly. Some companies are suddenly ✅ 10x more productive, and some companies ❌ struggle. SSW consultants have been leveraging AI to improve client’s products…. And solving problems inside SSW too. Let’s take a loo...

Web developers: you have a fantastic opportunity to make your web UIs more intelligent and productive than before. But don’t just throw on a chat pane and call it done, as people may not even use or like it. Let's explore how language models can integrate into your existing web UIs, anticipating your users' needs and completing their tasks faster. This is a technical, demo-centric talk wit...

In this session, we will explore what this model can do, and rather than just showing a perfect polished final demo, I will walk you through my entire journey of trying to use the model to solve Wordle puzzles, starting with "Hello World". Along the way, you will gain a good understanding of the model's capabilities, along with learning some prompt engineering techniques that drove p...

The focus upon AI continues to be the predominant technology subject of the day; it’s the must-have feature of any new product or service; it’s at the forefront of many discussions about ethics, attribution and indeed our own future employment prospects. But increasingly, the term “AI” has become synonymous with only one flavour of artificial intelligence - that being “machine learning” (ML) - e.g...

AI CoPilots are all the rage - but none quite offer that personalised butler service SciFi told us we might one day have. To understand what it takes to train a CoPilot, we will see how training a model works under-the-hood; discuss the importance of quality training data to craft a truly powerful and personalised experience, and safety or security concerns to consider when training a model on a p...

As we enter the age of AI, the roles of programmers and designers are evolving. The convergence of design and code signals a narrowing gap, prompting us to question the future landscape of design. Will AI-driven innovation lead us to chart a new course, or will it see us walking down familiar paths? Drawing from my experience leading Design at GitHub, I’ll delve into my journey starting out as a d...

It’s 1998. It’s the year of Britney Spears, The Spice Girls, the first Google Doodle, and the year Titanic dominated the box office. It’s also the year Hasbro gifted us with the Furby, the first successful attempt at an interactive robot pet. It divided the playground, created a generation of spooky sleepover stories and sparked the xmas riots of 99’.Two decades on, creatives and engineers have st...

It's time you meet your AI pair programmer. Do you find yourself stuck on a chunk of code? Unsure of how best to center a div? GitHub Copilot can help. Get unstuck by seeing suggested lines or code, whole functions, and learn more about your development journey through having code explained, and even translate your code into other languages. Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlviuph9QX4&amp...

Natural language processing using generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) algorithms is a rapidly evolving field that offers many opportunities and challenges for application developers. But what is a generative pre-trained transformer, and how does it work? How can you leverage the latest advances in GPT algorithms to create engaging and useful applications? Can my business benefit from creatin...

AI is due to revolutionize the life of a developer, with Microsoft leading the way, combining the public code base of GitHub.com with ChatGPT to product Copilot to speed code generation and increase developer productivity. However, this is just the latest in a set of tools and frameworks that have all had the goal of improving productivity. But have we lost something along the way? As soon as we s...

Web developers: you have a fantastic opportunity to make your web UIs more intelligent and productive than before. But don’t just throw on a chat pane and call it done, as people may not even use or like it. Let's explore how language models can integrate into your existing web UIs, anticipating your users' needs and completing their tasks faster. This is a technical, demo-centric talk wit...

The journey into AI integration shows that every single person's job—from developers to non-developers—has been impacted by this technology . Adoption starts with the basics: most users overlook critical steps like setting up Custom Instructions in ChatGPT to ensure clear, concise, and direct responses while avoiding unnecessary niceties and garbage. Furthermore, the rise of custom GPTs, built...

My talk, "I Connected My Farm To The Internet. Now What?", uses the Llama cam hobby project to explore product development under real-world constraints like a 100 gigabytes of internet data per month limit and zero budget . We integrated Home Assistant and custom AI for llama detection to provide value and continuously iterate. Key takeaways: Listen to your community feedback and remembe...

Microsoft Security Copilot leverages generative AI to help overwhelmed security teams by summarizing complex incidents and generating crucial KQL queries using natural language prompts. This first-of-its-kind security AI operates at machine speed, leveraging Microsoft’s comprehensive global threat intelligence to make defenders more efficient and effective against the rapidly scaling challenges of...

Struggling to make an impact or overcome networking anxiety? LinkedIn is a powerful, free tool that can help you shortcut your time to becoming a "Minimum Visible Person" (MVP) . By establishing credibility from a distance and influencing by volume, you can use LinkedIn to access all areas, from the factory floor all the way up to the boardroom, positioning yourself for the career that y...

Deploying Generative AI applications at production scale demands careful attention to architecture and security, starting with the realization that large language models are entirely stateless and state must be constructed and passed through (e.g., via a database) to avoid losing conversation context and enable proper scaling. To achieve production readiness and control costs, developers should im...

HTML is not just the foundation we build on, its vital in making our websites accessible usable and performant. We'll explore how we can make the most of our HTML elements and attributes to improve the performance and accessibility of our website and applications as well as boosting the efficiency of our development process. All by using a technology we are already use day to day, but just usi...

Everyone has at some point wished they could clone themselves – to do the dishes, or work more efficiently. With advancements and improved accessibility of AI, this becomes more of a reality...This session will explore how to use Azure Custom Neural Voice to create a synthesised version of our own voice for use in a range of fun and practical applications – telephony, voice overs, or even attendin...

This session covers the ethical use of AI, detailing how to identify, understand, and proactively counter potential risks while sharing examples of impactful solutions built for the nonprofit and humanitarian sectors. The discussion emphasizes the necessity of implementing responsible AI principles , utilizing mitigation strategies like prompt engineering and grounding, and acknowledging that AI w...

Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT, operate at their simplest level by attempting to produce a reasonable continuation of the text they are given, basing their predictions on patterns observed across a massive corpus of information like billions of web pages. Prompt engineering is an iterative process that employs various techniques—such as role prompting, few-shot learning, and Chain of...