LNUG 109 23rd Oct 2024: Escaping the Legacy Code Trap & Performant Architecture

Join us for an evening of high-quality Node.js talks and general JavaScript buzz on Wednesday, 23rd of October

Hosted by Beamery

SCHEDULE:
18:30 - 19:00 Welcome, drinks and food
19:00 - 19:30 First talk
19:30 - 19:45 - 15 min break
19:45 - 20:15 Second talk
20:25 - 21:00 Drinks/Networking

🎤 TALKS

GenAI wrote this talk: custom copilots for an AI-first world
Stephanie Shaw (LinkedIn: @stephieshaw)

In a world rapidly shifting to an AI-first mindset, how can engineers bridge the gap between existing APIs and the GenAI tools used by employees everyday, such as Microsoft Copilot? In this talk Steph will demonstrate how to extend MS Teams Copilot with custom API Plugins, empowering users to chat with your data in the same way they'd chat with any other LLM. The catch? She'll be using her own custom Microsoft Copilot to help her deliver the talk!
Stephanie Shaw is an Engineering Manager at Beamery, where she leads an R&D team exploring the possibilities of generative AI within Beamery's industry-leading Talent Lifecycle Management platform. With almost 15 years of experience in the tech industry, ranging from HR Tech to the UK public sector, she’s passionate about harnessing innovation to drive social good, and advocating for more inclusion and equity within the industry. Steph is a regular speaker on the London tech scene and was a finalist in the Social Good category at the BTA Awards 2024. Outside of work, she's passionate about sustainable travel and is a trustee of a local music charity.

⚡ The Great Escape: Escaping the Legacy Code Trap
Matt Bidewell @MattBidewell

In this talk, the Integrations team at Beamery shares how we tackled and overhauled a complex legacy system comprising 72 serverless functions. By adopting modern technologies, we not only improved performance and scalability but also significantly enhanced the developer experience. We’ll dive into the strategies we used to break down the system, the challenges we faced during the migration, and the innovative solutions that helped us achieve success.
Hey! I'm Matt, a Senior Engineer at Beamery with a passion for building things and exploring new(and old) technologies. You can find me on all the socials @mattbidewell

Performant Architecture for a Fast Gen AI User Experience
Nathaniel Okenwa @chatterboxcoder

More and more developers are being asked to build Generative AI experiences into their web applications everywhere. However, the user's experience with Generative AI can sometimes be slow and frustrating. It’s been years since we would gladly wait over 10 seconds for a response to anything online. As AI processing gets faster, there are new limiting factors that could be negatively affecting your AI user experience.
In this talk, we will cover different ways to minimise laggy experiences in web applications when interacting with third-party Generative AI tools. We’ll be using a practical demonstration to show how you can reduce latency as we build one of my favourite sci fi gadgets, the babel fish.
Nathaniel is a Developer Evangelist at Twilio working to create magical moments for developers with their products. His life goals are to have Batman's brains, Deadpool's humour, T'Challa's fashion sense, Killmonger's Wokeness, and Thanos' determination! He serves the Javascript community in the UK and the rest of Europe

This event's hosts: Beamery 🏢
HYLO Building, 103-105 Bunhill Row, London

Who are Beamery?
Beamery’s Talent Lifecycle Management platform brings together your data on candidates, employees and alumni.
We are an AI-powered platform that powers faster recruiting, successful internal mobility, smarter upskilling and more agile workforce planning so enterprise companies can improve the experience for all talent.
We are a team of creators, problem solvers and engineers. Here from the team directly at Beamery in this video about what life is like in the Engineering, Product & Design Team!
Hear more at [Careers.Beamery.com](https://careers.beamery.com/)

🍕🍻🌮
This event's Catering and Drinks will be provided by Twilio

Twilio is a cloud communications platform for developers. We have many API’s, SDKs and other tools to solve nearly any telecommunications problem you may come across. If you would like to send a SMS, programatically reply to an email, program a phone call, build an AI powered phone secretary or even send Whatsapp messages you can do all of that and more with Twilio. Use the languages you know and love to build the future of communications.

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