Portland AI Engineers November Meeting

This month we will have in depth technical presentations from AI builders looking for feedback and diverse perspectives our amazing community can always be counted on for.

Schedule:

• 5:00 - 5:30: Snacks and networking
• 5:30 - 6:30: Presentations
• 6:30 - 7:00: Wrap up and networking

====== Presenters =======

Elena Korotkina: Building agentic workflows without AI frameworks.
Summary: Agentic AI frameworks promise batteries-included orchestration, with tools, memory, routing, and retries. These can be great for many use cases, but they also introduce a real learning curve and black-box execution paths. In this session we'll talk about building agentic workflows from scratch in Node.js using OpenAI functions API. We'll see how this lightweight, transparent approach can embed AI decision-making inside your existing codebase, free from framework opacity, and easy to debug and maintain.
Bio: Elena is a senior full-stack developer with experience ranging from startups to large enterprises. She is the founder of SignalMind, one of the first responsive website builder platforms. Recently Elena has focused on AI-driven solutions and mobile app development, combining technical knowledge with a passion for building intuitive, impactful solutions.

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Sam Keen
Summary: The fundamentals of memory in agentic systems. In this presentation, Sam will start with defining the problem memory solves for LLM based agentic systems. We will then look behind the curtain to examine an example of implementing memory in a pragmatic manner. From there we will discover how this enhances the system overall and see how an LLM, with few guardrails, leverages this new capability.
Bio: Author of Clean Architecture with Python. I've spent over 25 years building software. From startups to Nike, Lululemon, and AWS. Now I focus full-time on understanding how AI reshapes our work.

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Daniel Dimik
More details to follow but at a high level expect a presentation regarding the utilization of Small Language models in a Mixture of Expert paradigm.

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