PuPPy & WiDS Python talk night at GitHub

Join us for an exciting talk night at Github's Bellevue office in partnership with Women in Data Science (WiDS)!

Agenda:
5:30-6pm: Doors open/networking
6-6:05pm: Opening remarks
6:05-6:30pm: Talk #1
6:30-6:40pm: Intermission
6:40-7:05pm: Talk #2
7:05-7:15pm: Intermission
7:15-7:40pm: Talk #3
7:40pm-8pm: Networking
After party to follow at Lucky Strike Bellevue (700 Bellevue Way NE Suite #250, Bellevue, WA 98004)

What we'll do:
This event will feature the following presentations:

Talk #1: Making a Match: How Open Source Maintainers and Contributors Can Find Each Other Better.
Speaker: Charlotte Mays
Description: Tips for open source maintainers to make their projects more approachable, and tips for folks interested in contributing to find projects they'll enjoy contributing to

Talk #2: The Human Skills Behind GenAI Impact: A Day in the Life of a Forward-Deployed Engineer / Solutions Architect.
Speaker: Keerthi Sreenivas
Description: Many students and early-career professionals are unfamiliar with the role of a Solutions Architect, recently also called a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE). This role sits at the intersection of business, technology, and people, translating complex AI problems into actionable solutions while guiding teams and stakeholders. While, technical expertise opens doors but in AI and data-driven roles, soft skills define influence.

In this session, I'll share how FDEs/GenAI Solutions Architects combine technical depth with communication, collaboration, and storytelling to deliver real-world impact. Using examples from real life, I'll show how we influence decisions, navigate organizational change, and ensure AI solutions are responsible, scalable, and aligned with business goals.

This talk is designed for students and professionals who want to grow as thoughtful, influential technologists. If you are strong individual contributor, you will benefit from understanding what the business needs from you during this talk.

By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:

1/ Understand the role of a Solutions Architect / Forward Deployed Engineer and how it differs from traditional technical roles
2/ Identify key soft skills to influence AI and data-driven decisions
3/ See how storytelling and communication connect technical solutions to business impact

Talk #3: To Vibe or Not To Vibe: Lessons from Vibe-Coding Small, Imperfect AI Projects
Speaker: Booma S Balasubramani, Jingyi Du, Alisha Gala
Description: Vibe-coding has lowered the barrier to creating applications, tools, and data-driven prototypes. The success stories emphasize speed. Less discussed is, what happens when data professionals rely on vibe coding in self-contained projects where the engineering constraints are intentionally relaxed - revealing strengths, weaknesses, and operational blindspots immediately.

This session offers a practical, experience-driven look at vibe-coding, grounded in a series of small-scale projects ranging from light-weight web apps to creative prototypes, built through AI-assisted iteration, where speed and momentum matter than correctness or long-term maintenance. This is where vibe-coding shines: ideas become artifacts quickly, experimentation inexpensive, and you can move without the cognitive overhead of full systems design.

However, these same projects surface recurring failure modes. AI generated code often works "just enough†while hiding unclear assumptions, duplicated logic, and fragile structure. Debugging becomes unfamiliar because you're reasoning about code you didn't explicitly design. Accumulated imperfections raise questions about ownership, maintainability, and how a project can evolve. Additional friction emerges around git source control with AI generated code and trying to evolve a playful demo into something that behaves reliably in production like scenarios.

Rather than framing vibe-coding as inherently good or bad, this talk presents it as a spectrum of use cases. We discuss when vibe coding is the right tool - early exploration, creative prototyping, rapid iteration and when it requires guardrails, and complementary engineering practices, introducing evaluation criteria beyond speed: clarity of generated code, modifiability, debugging friction, and time to re-understanding after stepping away.

Attendees will gain practical strategies to use vibe-coding intentionally: harnessing its speed while avoiding pitfalls, managing fast-changing AI-generated code in git, and defending "no agent, no vibes†designs when they are the safer, faster, or more maintainable choice.

What to bring:
Since this is a talk format meetup, you don't need a computer. WiDS is providing food for the event.

Building access:
The elevators lock at 6pm. If you arrive after 6pm we unfortunately cannot guarantee you will be able to access the event.

Parking:
There is paid parking in the Skyline garage underneath the building, accessible via 110th Ave NE between 4th and 6th going southbound only

Transit:
GitHub is near the Bellevue Downtown link station and the Bellevue transit center which provide attendees with a number of options for getting to tonight's event.