Christmas Christmas in June (AI Engineering Event)

It’s the most wonderful time of the year again! Join Modern Web Atlanta, Atlanta JavaScript, React ATL, and VueJS ATL as we celebrate Christmas in July with an evening of sweet treats, community connections, and festive fun!

What to Expect:
- Cookie Exchange: Bake (or buy, we won’t judge!) a batch of your favorite cookies to swap with fellow attendees.
- Holiday Spirit Contest: Don your best “summer Santa,” beachy elf, or ugly holiday attire for a chance to win prizes. Bonus points for creativity!
- Tech Talks: Hear from local community leaders sharing insightful talks across frameworks, tools, and trends.

Bring your best holiday cheer and we’ll bring the air conditioning!

We'll also have talks from:

Brandon Mathis - Engineering Lead at This Dot Labs
"Exploring Pi Coding Agent"
Description: I have been a Claude Code user for over a year but recently found myself asking questions about how my coding harness worked and if I could customize it like I have my text editor. This led me down a journey of exploring several different open source agents and eventually going with Pi. I have been using Pi with GPT-5.5 for several weeks now and in this talk I will explain why this is my preferred coding agent, how I customize it, what customizations I have made and how you can get started yourself.

Kiah Tolliver - Senior Developer Advocate at LocalStack
"WTH is Chaos Engineering?! A Quick Look at Breaking Things on Purpose"
Why would anyone intentionally break their own systems? Welcome to chaos engineering.

In this talk, we’ll demystify the what and why behind chaos engineering, no Netflix sized infrastructure required. You’ll learn how small experiments in failure can help you uncover blind spots, harden your systems, and sleep better at night.

We’ll look at real use cases, tools that make it easy to get started locally, and how to run chaos experiments without blowing up production.

Fireside Chat with Jonathan Fontanez, AI Engineering Lead at This Dot Labs and Rob Ocel, VP of Innovation at This Dot Labs