AWS User Group UK Meetup #61

Welcome to our August meetup!

We have two fantastic speakers joining us for this session - Matt Carey, Serverless Developer at Aleios, and AWS Community Builder; and Octavian Tuchila, former Software Engineer at Google and Amazon.

A big thank you to our sponsors - Deloitte and The Scale Factory - and to our welcoming hosts, Devoteam.

Programme:
18:00: Arrival, registration
18:30: Talks start
20:00: Networking with food and a drink provided by the generosity of our sponsors.

Talk 1:
Building a Viral Open Source AI Chatbot: A Journey from Concept to Reality - with Matt Carey
Learn how we built Quivr - the open-source virtual brain. In 2.5 months we achieved 8k active users of the demo app and a whopping 18k stars on GitHub. We were number 1 on the GitHub trending page for multiple days in a row.
This is the story of how Quivr went viral and how our tiny dev team struggled to build all the features our user base wanted. We will talk about the challenges we faced scaling a generative AI-powered app without it costing the earth on ECS Fargate, and the extra tooling we had to build along the way.
We will cover how we solved the problems of keeping the project open source and super easy to both use and contribute whilst leveraging AWS services in a different way to most.

Talk 2:
Via negativa: using the bare minimum of AWS to solve your problems - with Octavian Tuchila
As part of my work with AWS, I’ve seen many people get overwhelmed by the many possible options for solving simple problems (both a large number of services and a large number of features/ways to use a given service).
The complexity problem is compounded by the incentives in a cloud provider like Amazon: people are promoted if they improve a metric. Therefore, there is a bias towards creating a new service and generally adding things, which improves revenue or some other KPI.
I like the simpler approach: knowing as little as possible to solve your problems. I will use a few simple examples to explain the principles of solving difficult problems while knowing as little as possible and spending as little as possible.

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Please note: this event will not be streamed and is in-person only. We're looking forward to seeing you!

If you are interested in speaking at one of our events please check out our call for papers here.

We are advocates for greater inclusion & diversity in UK Tech and are especially keen to receive talk submissions from people in underrepresented groups. If you are interested in speaking at a future meetup but would like to discuss what to expect or need assistance please contact our Inclusion & Diversity Lead Natalie Gray at graynataliej@gmail.com or DM her @natjgray

Remember to follow us @AWSUserGroupUK and on LinkedIn for the latest updates and you can find videos of our past meetups on YouTube. If you would like to chat with other members you can join our Community Discord Server.