BuildwithAI - GDG Melbourne (Cloud) March Meetup

RSVP on our Meetup event >> https://www.meetup.com/gdg-melbourne/events/306605644

Ready to Build with AI (#BuildwithAI)? Join GDG Melbourne for an exciting in-person meetup! ☁️

💻 What do you need to bring?

• Make sure to bring your laptop (better if fully charged) to do some hands-on training. Also, check the talk descriptions to stay ahead of the game

Join us for an evening of inspiring talks, delicious food, awesome networking, and some surprise swag you won’t want to miss. 🎉

Whether you're a seasoned developer, a cloud enthusiast, or just dipping your toes into the world of AI and tech, this is the place to be. And don’t worry if you can’t make it—all talks will be recorded and shared on YouTube for you to catch up later.

📍 Where?

Mantel Group Office, Level 2/452 Flinders St, Melbourne

Doors open at 5:45 PM—message us on Meetup or Slack if you're arriving after 6:00 PM, as the lifts won’t let you up.

🎤 Agenda:

6:15 PM - Welcome & Intros

6:20 PM - Talks by incredible speakers:

Wonderful World of Open Weights AI - Hands-on Workshop
Bishal Sapkota, AI Lead @Outback Yak
This hands-on workshop will explore how to run locally hosted Open Weight, large language models, particularly when working with sensitive data. We’ll go through a couple of hands-on examples, and then deploy our app to Google Cloud using Cloud Run with GPU support.

To make the session as interactive as possible, it’d be great if participants could prepare by:
•  Installing ollama locally (download from here)
•  Downloading any foundation model between 1B to 3B parameters (roughly 1–3GB in size) (for simplicity, run ollama run gemma3:1b)
Having these ready before will help us dive straight into the fun parts! D

Automating user onboarding with Cloud run functions - Lightning Talk
Yash Shreshta, System Administrator @Crayon
In this lightning talk, hear Yash's journey about leveraging Cloud Run to build a workflow that automates the user onboarding journey.

Build RAG from Scratch - Live Coding Session
Phil Nash, Google Developer Expert, DevRel Engineer @ DataStax 🎤
In this live coding session, we'll build the components of a RAG system from scratch. (Aside from the LLM, there probably isn't time for that!) By building our own, we'll understand vectorisation, similarity search, and the role of embedding models and vector databases. We'll then plug it all together to see our augmented bot in action. You'll get a good grounding in the components of successful chatbots and why they work.

8:10 PM till late - Networking, chats, and optional drinks 🍻

🎁 What’s in it for you?

⚡ Lightning-fast workshops & talks from industry experts

🍕 Cloud-shaped snacks (okay, maybe not literally, but the food will be delicious!)

🤝 Networking that’s as smooth as a well-architected cloud solution

🎁 Surprise swag

💡 NOTES:

This is an in-person-only event, but if you have any accessibility requirements, reach out to us via Meetup or Slack, and we’ll do our best to accommodate you.

Doors open at 5:45 PM at our host the Mantel Group, Level 2/452 Flinders St Melbourne. Message via Meetup or Slack if you are arriving after 6:00 as the lifts won't let you up. 

Don’t miss this epic night of learning, networking, and fun! RSVP now and we’ll see you there! 👋
#gdgMelbourne #BuildwithAI

Agenda

6:20 PM: Networking and Food

6:30 PM: Talks

08:00 PM: Networking, chats & optional drinks

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Speakers

Phil Nash - DataStax (Developer Relations Engineer)

Phil is a developer relations engineer for DataStax and Google Developer Expert living in Melbourne, Australia. He's been working in developer relations for a decade, speaking at conferences since 2012, and writing JavaScript since before jQuery. Away from the keyboard, Phil enjoys travel, live music, and hanging out with his mini sausage dog, Ruby.

Bishal Sapkota - Outback Yak (AI Lead)

Yash Shrestha - Crayon (System Admin)

Hosted By

Katie Barnett, GDE Android / GDG Organiser

Katie is passionate about all things Android. She has taken on a wide variety of challenging projects including in the live event, media and travel space. Her favourite thing is to see someone having a delightful experience using something she has worked on. Katie is very active in the development community, she is a Google Developer Expert for Android, one of the organisers of GDG Melbourne and is a Women Techmakers Ambassador. She frequently runs events, speaks on technical and non-technical topics and enjoys writing blog posts to share her experience with others. Katie is based in Melbourne, Australia but loves to travel the world and outside of tech she enjoys boardgaming and attempting to finish many craft projects.

Suesi Tran, Senior Flutter Developer

Google Developer Expert in Dart & Flutter, Women Techmaker ambassador, GDG Melbourne & Flutter Melbourne co-organiser.
In short: Flutter is love, and mobile is life.

Maksim Lin, Software Engineer

Senior Android Developer, Flutter GDE

Poornima Sivakumar, GDG Organiser

Lovee Jain, GDG Organiser

Lovee is a Software Engineer at Prezzee, a GDG Melbourne Organiser and also a Women Techmakers Ambassador. A tech inquisitive philomath, she loves problem solving and solution design. She has worked at a city council where she developed a lot of useful system integrations and while at Prezzee she develops and works on multiple gift card solutions to cater the B2B2C market.

Zach Jensz, GDG Organiser

Passionate about the web, seamless UX and accessibility. I love attending meetups, find me and come say hi!

Ujjawal Raj, GDG Organiser

Bramley Turner-Jones, GDG Organiser

Yuba Raj (UV) Panta, GDG Cloud Organiser

Kartik Arora, Android Engineer

Google Developer Expert in Android
Android Engineer @ Bilue

Carolyn Ai Chi Wong,

Complete your event RSVP here: https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-melbourne-presents-buildwithai-gdg-melbourne-cloud-march-meetup/.