HK Web Dev

# PechaKucha Night

## Description

PechaKucha is a fast, high-energy presentation format. We have a series of speakers.

1. Si Pham - AI tools from a client perspective
2. Ryan Ashton - Runs AI coding workshops
3. Johnson - Be Shit
4. Adam - Local compute becomes global inference

Short Break
5. Samuel Mann - Synth App
6. Gerry - AI video edits
7. Illian - Recent projects
8. Andy - The Collective

## Talk 1: Your AI feature will be bought by someone like me - Si Pham

Somewhere, someone like me will review your AI feature before it reaches the public. This talk is that review from the buyer's side: why "we trained it on your data" raises a flag, what grounded links and decline thresholds look like as requirements, why headline accuracy is the wrong number, and whose logs your users' conversations end up in. Then the other half: building with AI, and a catalogue of times AI output, including AI checking AI, was confidently wrong. Drawn from real public-sector and professional-services work. Practical, sceptical, no hype.
Si Pham is an AI governance and adoption architect, and co-founder of AIBoK, which builds practical AI training and assurance for organisations adopting tools like Microsoft Copilot and Claude Enterprise. He helps local government adopt AI to improve services such as waste management and building approvals. He writes the "Who checks?" series on LinkedIn and Si-gnal on Substack, and remains a sceptic who uses AI every day.

## Talk 2: The Developer Is Dead. Long Live The Internet - Ryan Ashton

Corporate algorithms turned the once-vibrant and wild internet into a sterile, predictable landscape. Drawing on 30 years as a DJ, music producer, and software engineer, Ryan will share strategies to empower anyone with an idea to unlock their creativity without technical barriers and paint outside the lines. Through an audience-led build-along, we will start the revolution to breathe life back into the internet, with the help of our ever-enthusiastic AI comrades.

## Talk 3: Be Shit - Johnson

Game developers shouldn't chase after that perfect idea in their head, but instead dive low and be shit. By willingly embracing imperfection, does it provide fertile ground for meaningful testing and even explore means of creativity that initial perfect vision could never imagine. In this talk we'll identify the common traps of "perfection", how to navigate around them, and discuss examples that benefitted from this mindset.

## Talk 4: Local compute becomes global inference - Adam

Sam Altman recently said it was "quite terrible" that so much of the world's scarce RAM sits in personal computers, used only a fraction of the time. He has a point: most home hardware is idle most of the day. But moving it all into the cloud isn't the only fix. This talk argues for the opposite: pooling the gaming GPUs, Macs and Linux boxes people already own into a BitTorrent-style network that serves open-weight models to anyone, anywhere. It covers how a model gets split across strangers' machines, why Hong Kong's fibre makes it a good place to start, how contributors earn credits for verifiable work rather than tokens, and what happens when a robot starts paying for its own inference. Data-centre-style utilisation, without handing over your hardware.

## Talk 5: Synth App - Sam Mann

'I love electronic music. I wanted to make my own but found traditional DAWs too complicated, and they did not work on mobile… So I built my own. I’ll go tell you the origin story of "sonotoi", go over some of the product decisions, and explain some AI-assisted processes I used to ship the app in a couple weeks.'

## Talk 6: Gerry - Integrating AI into Professional Video Editing Workflows

Experimenting with native AI features, agents, and custom tools in DaVinci Resolve.
How ready is AI for the day-to-day work of professional editors? How far can we take it, what are its limitations, and what will it take to make it truly production-ready?

## Talk 7: Illian - Putting local AI models into production

In the turmoil of the frontier model companies, we are losing more and more access to the tools that give us an advantage in the current economic climate. Capability and cost is sometimes more important than speed. Iulian will present his work at nuGPU to offer local alternatives to cloud. The why, the how, and the how much.

## Talk 8: Andy Stokes - The Collective co-founder/technical director TC - Me and my agents(?)

Sharing the ridiculous amount of experiments one man and a prompt can make (Web Apps / Android / iOS - tvOS - Vision Pro Apps / UE integration / control with XR devices - phones / Esp32 programming / 3D print housings / Pico XR, quest NDI, DMX winches, TD networks

## Host

About the host Rhys Turner Rhys Turner is a Creative Technologist and Innovation Technologist, specialising in the intersection of technology, design, and luxury experiences. With a background in emerging technologies, AI, and interactive media, he explores innovative ways to enhance digital storytelling and customer engagement. His work focuses on blending creativity with technical innovation, pushing the boundaries of digital craftsmanship in the fashion and beauty industries.

## Sponsors and supporting partner

Tronica - HKWD sponsor
AngelFlow and Garage Society - HKWD supporting partners

## Event notes