About us
We champion the pursuit of Business Agility—not by "Sprinting" faster but by adopting the Serverless Mindset, advances in AI, modern Data practices, and SaaS services. This community thrives on fostering collaboration and continuous learning, bridging the gap between IT capabilities and business outcomes. We offer free Cloud learning events for Engineers and provide complimentary Cloud Architecture, AI & Data Engineering advice for Executives worldwide. Additionally, we actively connect members seeking work with exciting opportunities in the ever-evolving Cloud landscape.
IT'S ALL ABOUT PASSION
Sometimes we're good at things we don't really care for, but it's that passion that will drive us to succeed. Steve Jobs once said, "Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle."
So, if you found your passion (related to IT), please tell us about it. If you're still searching, check us out. You may find it here – because we cover a variety of forward-looking IT topics.
FOR IT PROFESSIONALS
WANT TO PARTICIPATE?
- Click on the "Join this group" button to get monthly updates about upcoming meetups (we will NOT spam you)
- Suggest a meetup topic or Request to present using this form forms.gle/RfLVjaB3JVpJ15oC9
LOOKING FOR WORK?
- We may be able to help you, so tell us about it...
- To start the conversation and networking, join us on Slack slack.ServerlessToronto.org
FOR BUSINESSES
GET TO KNOW US
Serverless Toronto is a member of the family of Community-driven Serverless User Groups worldwide focused on fostering a community around serverless technologies for good. Each Serverless User Group is unique, organized by locals, and run according to the following principles:
- Local – Run by local community organizers
- Accessible – Financially and physically accessible to the community
- Representative – Be representative of the broader society within which it exists.
Check out hot Cloud Computing topics from our past Meetups:
- Browse all slide decks slideshare.ServerlessToronto.org
- Watch recorded events youtube.ServerlessToronto.org
NEED A QUICK CLOUD OR DATA ENGINEERING ADVICE?
As true believers in Community networking and experience sharing, we offer Free Online Consultations. If your Company needs a little help:
- Send us a message about your projects, dilemmas, doubts or fears, and if there's a match, your team will receive a complimentary (and confidential) 45-minute consultation.
- It will give you a fresh and unbiased perspective about "the thing" you're trying to build in the Cloud.
NEED A SECOND OPINION ON APPLICATION/DATA ARCHITECTURE MODERNIZATION?
If you are an Executive in need of "Emergency Advice," here is WHY & HOW we can help you:
- Thanks to our vast IT experience fed by Passion, Curiosity and the Serverless Mindset, we know that
- Technology is not the point. The reason that we're doing this – any of this, is in service of some business goal.
- The Customer value that your organization is trying to create is the point!
- That's why we focus on creating tangible values for our clients (like ROI, efficiencies, risk reduction and cost savings) – not work for work's sake.
TRY US OUT:
- We'll uncover hidden opportunities to improve your business results (because we can see your options Further than traditional IT Architects).
- It's simply impossible to get a reliable Second Opinion from the same person who gave you the First one.
- Even if the Second Opinion confirms what you already know, it's beneficial to get confidence that you have done everything you can to ensure your project's success.
- Second Opinion engagement will deliver results quickly!
- Serverless Toronto "Second Opinion" engagements are confidential, can be arranged on a flat-fee or hourly basis (your call), and require NO long-term commitment to us.
NEED LONGER-TERM HELP ADOPTING CLOUD?
We're here to connect you with our Serverless and Data experts seeking new opportunities. Feel free to message (DM) us directly: https://www.meetup.com/serverless-toronto/members/?op=leaders
LET'S GET STARTED:
Message us on Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/serverless-toronto/shared_invite/enQtNDc1NTM2OTQyMDE4LWQ0N2Q4MjFjODFjODc3ZmRkYWYyYTI3MmNmZmYwNWFhOGU0MmFlOTg5NDY4MzdlYTk5ZGViOWRjMmU4OWMyMmU
Upcoming events
1
Beyond Prompt Engineering: Evals-First LLM Apps with DSPy
·OnlineOnlineYour prompt worked in testing. Then the model got updated, or a user phrased something differently, and it quietly stopped working. Nobody noticed until a customer did. Most teams treat evals as something they will get to later. This session is the argument for doing it first, and a look at the tool that makes "first" practical.
Serj Smorodinsky (DSPy contributor) and Brett Kennedy, authors of the Manning book "Building LLM Applications with DSPy", will show how to stop hand-tuning prompts and start measuring them: build a baseline, define what a correct answer looks like, and let an optimizer beat you.What you'll learn:
- Why hand-tuned prompts degrade, and why the feeling that we are good at prompting may be an illusion created by small test sets
- The three-stage loop - baseline, evaluate, optimize - and why evaluation has to come before optimization
- How to define a metric for tasks with a right answer (classification) and for tasks without one (summarization, RAG)
- How to swap models in one line and choose on measured accuracy, cost, privacy and context window - including when a cheap or local model can do the job you are paying a frontier model for
- What to do when the model changes under you: rerun the loop instead of reopening a 200-line prompt
- Where DSPy is worth adopting, and where a plain API call is still the right answer
Why this matters if you build or buy AI: everyone can demo a prompt. Few can show what it scored, on what data, before release - and fewer still can show it is scoring the same way six months later. That evidence trail is the difference between a pilot and a production approval, and it is what your risk and compliance teams will ask for.
Bring your hard questions for the Q&A, especially on the part no book fully solves yet: how to keep monitoring a live LLM system after release.Friday, September 18 | 12:00-1:30 PM ET | Virtual (Zoom)
Lunch-and-learn format: 10 minutes on why, 40 minutes hands-on, then Q&A held to the end.About the book: "Building LLM Applications with DSPy: Replacing manual prompts with systematic optimization" is in Manning Early Access, with print publication expected Fall 2026. It builds a classifier, a summarizer, and an agentic RAG chatbot end to end, with evaluation and optimization at every step and no prompt written by hand. https://www.manning.com/books/building-llm-applications-with-dspy
Ebook coupons will be raffled at the event. 45% off any Manning digital product with code TORONTO24.About the speakers:
Serj Smorodinsky is a DSPy contributor, data scientist, and AI engineer with over ten years of combined experience in software development and data science. His work spans conversational AI for customer service, agentic workflow automation, and LLM evaluation, and he has led teams building chatbots and retrieval-augmented systems for enterprise clients. He teaches agentic systems and data science in production at Nebius Academy.
Brett Kennedy is a data scientist with over thirty years of software development experience and more than ten in data science. He is a regular open source contributor, publishes on Medium and Towards Data Science, and is the author of "Outlier Detection in Python" (Manning).Serverless Toronto has been bridging the gap between IT and business needs since 2018. 6,000+ members. Past sessions: youtube.serverlesstoronto.org
6 attendees
Past events
86
