The Austin Python Meetup
Details
This is a Hybrid event both in-person and virtual. The in-person event is hosted at Antler downtown Austin.
Address:
Brazos Place @ 800 Brazos st, the entrance is off of Brazos st.
Talk: Tristan Slominski - Building Sensorimotor Intelligence in Public: From Research Code to Platform
Description: The Thousand Brains Project is a non-profit reverse-engineering the neocortex to build sensorimotor intelligence: systems that learn by moving through the world rather than training on it. Working in public is a key organizational principle, so the code, the research, and the arguments and decisions behind both are all open source.
Over the past two years and dozens of releases, we have been evolving a research codebase toward a production platform. This talk is the engineering side of that journey.
We'll cover why we chose to evolve the code in place rather than rebuild it. How a small team sets priorities with no revenue to guide decisions, only a specific end state to reach. And why deep class inheritance hierarchies are a misunderstanding of object-oriented programming, and what we do instead: composition, protocols, and a hard one-level-of-inheritance rule.
Along the way, we'll share what we got out of Python typing, where performance forces architecture, and how LLMs fit into what we do and where they don't.
If you write Python, you'll find designs and choices to compare and contrast with. If you supervise, you'll find a case study of steering a codebase without revenue feedback.
Bio: Tristan Slominski
Principal Engineer @ Thousand Brains Project
Tristan Slominski is experienced in software and product. He's a veteran, and a former aviator. He worked in multiple small Austin startups, as well as Bazaarvoice and Indeed. Prior to the Thousand Brains Project, he built Mapkeep, an online service for visualizing and managing strategy. These days he works on designing, building, and operating current and future Thousand Brains Systems.
Antler
Antler works with founders through our signature founder residency, adding value immediately, and taking no equity up front. We receive over 160,000 applications each year to build companies with us, and have grown to 18 funds with residencies in 30 cities around the globe. Founders also have the opportunity to pitch our Investment Committee to receive an up to $500K investment, allowing them to build for 12-18 months rather than attempting to raise before they have real traction.