Building healthy teams in the AI era and also running Local AI models

Accso is in Suite 302 in the Clock Tower building. Nearest parking is in the Clock Tower parking.

This event is 17:30 for 18:00. The session content will start promptly at 18:05 PM. Attendees are welcome to arrive earlier for networking and snacks!

Welcome to the first CPTMSDUG Event of 2026!!!

Agenda
18:00 - Community Intro and Welcoming

18:05 - AI Engineering Roles: Building healthy teams in the AI era

Drawing on OfferZen's 2025 developer survey data and real-world experience leading lean, AI-augmented teams, Jason explores the roles that together enable sustainable velocity, coherent codebases, and a thriving talent pipeline: Multipliers, Builders, Artisans, Explorers, and Apprentices. AI adoption is nearly universal, but most engineering teams are still figuring out what "great" actually looks like.This talk tackles an important question: What does a healthy engineering team look like when no one writes code by hand anymore? If you're trying to build a team that ships well and develops the next generation of engineers, this one's for you.

Speaker: Jason Tame

Jason Tame is a Tech Lead at OfferZen, South Africa's largest tech talent marketplace. With 8+ years of full-stack experience, he now focuses on integrating AI tools into real developer workflows - helping teams ship higher quality work, faster. A former educator, Jason brings the same instinct for mentoring and making complex ideas accessible to everything he does.

19:00 - Local is lekker

The AI revolution doesn't have to live in the cloud. With smaller, more efficient models and ever-improving tooling, running AI locally is becoming increasingly accessible to developers of all skill levels. In this talk, we explore how to run AI models locally on your own machine — giving you greater privacy, lower latency, offline capability, and zero API costs.
We'll walk through some tools and options like LM Studio, Ollama, and Local Foundry. Whether you prefer a polished UI or a command-line workflow, there's an option that fits.
From there, we'll see how local models integrate into your development workflow with GitHub Copilot, enabling AI-assisted coding without sending your code to the cloud. Finally, we'll dive into building intelligent .NET applications using Microsoft.Extensions.AI, showing how the same abstractions that work with cloud-hosted models plug directly into locally running ones.
Walk away with the knowledge and confidence to bring AI into your projects, entirely on your own terms.

Speaker: Allan Pead

Allan Pead is a CTO, architect and software developer with more than 20 years commercial experience. The love for programming started with writing that first BASIC program on a ZX Spectrum as a child.

What excites him is any project that involves mobile and / or
IoT devices. He is very happy to be in a position where his passion and hobby is also his day job.

Allan is also a Xamarin MVP, Microsoft Internet of Things MVP, Microsoft Development Technologies MVP and a Microsoft Azure MVP based in Cape Town South Africa. He is also sometimes a university lecturer inbetween his day job, lecturing on .NET and .NET mobile and also organizes local community user groups and events.

20:30 - Closing and SWAGS exchange