Talk: Building Ubuntu for AWS / Building Python Packages from Scratch w/ AI

Welcome Pythonistas.
Bring your dinner and join us at Gigaparts for our monthly talks. This time, we'll hear from Robby Pocase on building Ubuntu for AWS, and Rhet Turnbull on Prompt, Package, Publish! Using AI agents to create and publish a python package from scratch.

Socialization from 5:30-6:00
First talk 6:00-6:30
Second talk 6:30-7:00

Building Ubuntu for AWS by Robby Pocase

Robby will talk about all the tooling and systems in place for building Ubuntu images for AWS. He'll dive into Jenkins, OS image creation, and Python.

Robby Pocase currently works at Canonical where he is the Engineering Manager for the AWS squad of Canonical Public Cloud. His primary focus is: developing trusting and close relationships with partner teams at AWS; developing short and long term roadmaps; building close relationships with direct reports that enable professional career growth for internal and personal goals. Robby also contributes directly to engineering efforts, is active in the hiring process at various levels, and drives CPC wide initiatives.

In the past, Robby has held roles that are primarily focused on DevOps initiatives and direct application development. At ADTRAN he maintained tooling and pipelines for building firmware for network elements; guided best practices on jenkins pipelines, release processes, and specific language idioms; deployed and maintained developer facing services (primarily Jenkins and Artifactory). At DESE, he contributed to several proof of concept applications to provide novel use cases to enable better accountability for software developed in Government Entities.

Prompt, Package, Publish! Using AI agents to create and publish a python package from scratch by Rhet Turnbull

What if you could build, test, document, and publish a Python package without writing the code yourself? In this talk, I’ll show how I used Codex and Claude command line AI agents to do just that—prompting my way from idea to PyPI with AI in the driver’s seat as I built a custom python plugin for Sphinx in just a few hours.

Rhet Turnbull is a Senior Solution Architect at Leidos, where he works on defense and national security solutions. With over 25 years of experience in military operations, aerospace engineering, and program management, Rhet has led key projects in space, ground, and nuclear systems for the U.S. Air Force and Space Force. Now at Leidos, he’s focused on creating innovative solutions to tackle the complex challenges faced by defense and government clients. A self-taught programmer, Rhet started coding on a TRS-80 Model III in Tandy BASIC and later discovered Python, which he now uses to maintain several open-source projects.

As always, we're always looking for more speakers, especially for July. Please indicate if you're interested when you sign up.