Portland AI Engineers [PIng] Inaugural Meeting

AI is transforming how we build software, and Portland engineers are at the forefront of this revolution. Whether you're integrating LLMs into production systems or just starting to explore AI capabilities in your personal projects, PIng is your community.
Our inaugural meeting brings together developers passionate about practical AI applications that solve real-world problems. Come ready to learn, share, and connect with fellow engineers.

Featured presentations

GenAI Model Output Evaluation
Patrick McCuistion, Sr. Platform Engineer at Databricks
From traditional ML metrics to dynamic feedback loops, evaluation approaches have evolved to meet the unique demands of generative AI systems. Drawing from experience building and deploying a production-grade GenAI application that generates cloud infrastructure as code, Patrick will delve into how automatic feedback loops and iterative evaluation cycles can dramatically enhance the accuracy, functionality, and readability of GenAI outputs.
-- Patrick McCuistion is a Sr. Platform Engineer at Databricks. At work, he builds automations between learning platforms, integrates AI into applications, and manages ML resources in Databricks lab environments. At home, he spends time with his wife and 1.5-year-old girl, writes and performs music for his band, The Governors, and renovates his home in Vancouver, WA.

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Introducing Gofannon
Andrew Musselman
Gofannon is a set of tooling for building agents that simplifies pulling functions, LLMs, and frameworks together into working systems. It comes out of the AI Alliance, and was born out of a need to wrangle the explosion of competing and complementary models and tools into harmony in order to get work done without costly rewrites and rework when things need to change. We have a lively community and an easy on-ramp for people to get started and contribute new tools back for re-use. This talk will give an overview of the landscape of LLMs, frameworks, and agents; introduce Gofannon and its tooling; show framework interoperability; and explain ways to get started and get involved.
-- Andrew works on data and analytics, and runs software teams for a living, most recently at Speedchain. He has contributed to open source projects for over a decade, mostly focusing on machine learning and AI, is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and the AI Alliance, and lives in Portland with two kids and two dogs.

Schedule:

• 6:00 - 6:30: Food and networking
• 6:30 - 7:40: Presentations
• 7:40 - 8:00: Wrap up and networking

Details:

• Date: Wednesday, April 30th
• Location: Kiln 1120 SE Madison St, Portland, OR 97214

About PIng:
Portland AI Engineers brings together software developers at all experience levels who are passionate about building with generative AI technologies. We focus on practical applications that solve real-world problems by leveraging existing language models and the surrounding GenAI tools ecosystem.
Learn more

Get involved:

• Present your work: Email us at info@portlandai.engineer to discuss sharing your project or insights
• Provide feedback: Help shape our community by sharing your ideas and suggestions
• Sponsor an event: Contact us to discuss partnership opportunities

For more information and to join our community, visit portlandai.engineer

Thank you to our amazing sponsors
Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE)
Silicon Florist
DevThink.AI