About us
Volunteer organizing of hybrid virtual and in-person meetups on topics of interest around important and trending technology tools, Amazon Web Services, cloud computing, network connectivity, AI, or whatever learning topic piques our collective interest. We want to highlight projects built locally and raise awareness of technologies available to our region, while encouraging interruptions in the form of deep dive questions.
Feel welcome to ask random questions like "how does the cloud relate to my current technology skills? what can I learn from cloud professionals that I might not have heard in school? how does Alexa work? what skills will help me land a job? how can aws change my business? I've heard of Amazon, what is AWS?"
We host advocates and learners of all levels to talk about how we #BuildOn 200+ Amazon Web Services (AWS), including integrations and considerations into workstations, IoT networks, on-prem data centers, other clouds (Azure, Oracle, GCP), as well as other emerging technology tools and trends. We encourage those new to technology or cloud to check us out, and we encourage builders of all levels to bring 5-15 minute demos along.
Started at Arrowhead Research Park at New Mexico State University in 2021 to further the community learning, business awareness, student engagement, career opportunities, and general entrepreneurial-garage-hobbyist spirit. We aim to learn from, serve, educate, and entertain the diverse people of the The Borderplex, New Mexico, and surrounding rural areas.
Upcoming events
1
Strands Agents Workshop
·OnlineOnlineCasually paced supported workshop. We'll go as fast as our slowest progress & cross the finish line together, thus a 3 hour time-block. Run AI development on AWS - do this on your own account to leave the workshop with an agentic harness you control. Learn how to deploy open-weight models (Qwen3) & namebrands including Amazon Nova & Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5
Strands Agents is an open source SDK that takes a code-first approach to building and running AI agents in just a few lines of code. Strands connects two core pieces of the agent together: the model and the tools, simplifying the development of AI agents
important note- this will NOT be a sandboxed workshop - $25 credits will be available to cover anything we tackle in the workshop on your own account - account signup in advance required. We hope participants leave the workshop with a framework they can continue building on
This workshop was created by AWS but will be lead by local community members. Based on past experience, we expect it will look something like this:
#### Strands Agent Basics
Learn the fundamentals of creating and using Strands agents:
*Basic agent initialization and usage
- System prompt customization
*HTTP tool integration
#### Model Providers
Explore different model providers and configuration options
Note: Some portions of this lab require a pre-existing AWS account for the 'generate_image' tool.
#### AWS Service Integration
Learn to integrate AWS services with your Strands agents:
- Using the `use_aws` tool
*Examples with Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB
Note: The code in this lab requires a pre-existing AWS account to properly utilize the 'use_aws' tool. An example Amazon DynamoDB Table is used to generate results when querying a table.
#### Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Deep dive into the Model Context Protocol:
- MCP server creation
*Tool definition and usage - Calculator and Weather agents examples
*Interactive Jupyter notebook tutorial
#### Agent-to-Agent Communication
Build multi-agent systems with inter-agent communication:
- A2A communication patterns
*Employee/HR agent system example - MCP server for data sharing
*REST API integration
#### Observability & Evaluation
Monitor and evaluate agent performance:
- Restaurant recommendation agent example
*LangFuse integration for observability - RAGAS evaluation framework
*Performance metrics and tracing
1 attendee- System prompt customization
Past events
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