RAG in the Wild and Coroutines Under the Hood

This meetup will be hosted by Xebia, in their office at Wibautstraat 200, 1091 TJ Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Note: There are no parking options at Xebia itself, though there are (paid) parking garages available nearby accessible via the Parkbee app.

Agenda

18:00 Doors open and food
18:55 Intro
19:00 Susanne Pieterse presenting “RAG in the Wild: Real-World Lessons from Modernizing Legacy Systems”
19:45 Break
20:00 Kubilay Karpat presenting: "Coroutines Under the Hood: How Suspend Actually Suspends"
20:45 Closing drinks
21:00 End

Information about the talks:

Title: "RAG in the Wild: Real-World Lessons from Modernizing Legacy Systems"

Enterprise and government document systems hold terabytes of valuable unstructured information, yet most still rely on keyword and metadata search with little semantic context. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) promises a breakthrough, but tutorials rarely prepare you for regulated, large-scale environments.

In this talk, I’ll share lessons from building a RAG stack with Spring Boot, Elasticsearch, LangChain4j, Docker, and ActiveMQ, using both Azure OpenAI and Ollama.

Expect concrete insights on document chunking, enforcing access control, and keeping LLMs grounded in facts — practical takeaways for anyone bringing RAG from demo to production.

About Susanne Pieterse. Susanne is an auto-didact full-stack software engineer and iSAQB certified software architect. Passionate about creating innovative solutions and sharing knowledge. Loves tea and a heavy bag boxing workout.

Title: "Coroutines Under the Hood: How Suspend Actually Suspends"

We use suspend functions regularly, but few of us stop to ask how they actually work. In this talk, we’ll follow the evolution from callbacks to reactive programming, and finally to Kotlin coroutines — showing how suspend brings async to the language level.

We’ll peek under the hood to see how suspension really works, how Kotlin compiles suspend functions into state machines, and why this model scales so well.

This talk is for anyone ready to uncover what truly makes Kotlin’s async feel so effortless and powerful.

About Kubilay Karpat. Kubilay is a software consultant at Xebia, where he helps teams build efficient and maintainable backend systems using Kotlin. He’s passionate about software architecture and enjoys looking at problems through the lens of different languages and paradigms, drawing on experience with Go, TypeScript, Python, and Java. He shares his learnings through workshops and community events. Lately, he’s been exploring how Generative AI can support developers across the stack. In his free time, he travels with his wife, though their vacations are so packed they usually come home needing a vacation from the vacation.