The San Francisco Java User Group

Tue, Nov 18 · 9:00 AM PST

SF JAVA x AI by the Bay - Production-ready AI Agents Hackathon

Oakland Scottish Rite, 1547 Lakeside Dr, Oakland, CA, US

Join us for a 2-day hackathon dedicated to building production-ready AI Agents that can accomplish something amazing in a business-to-business or business-to-consumer use case.

THE CHALLENGE

You will need to make sure your agent is maintainable, scalable, and observable and also secure by design, i.e., safe from agent-related attack vectors (prompt injection, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, broken access controls, etc).

You will need to illustrate how your agent accomplishes these production-ready tasks while still providing access to business data and processes. Bonus points if you use tools to validate the production readiness of your agent.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

Developers looking to build their next production-ready AI agent project, alongside the best software engineers and legends within the Bay Area and beyond.

​Max team size is 5. Don’t have a team? No worries. We’ll help you team up with others at the event. Not that at least 30% of the team should come in person.
​All attendees must be registered and approved on Luma.
In-person attendees will get complimentary expo passes to the AI By the Bay conference.

We’d be happy to help you make the case to your manager about the value of participating in our hackathon. Just email us at info@bythebay.io, and we’ll send you key points you can share.

AGENDA

Subject to change.
Tue, Nov 18

• ​9:00 am – 10:00 am | Onboarding, registration, coffee
• ​10:00 am – 10:30 am | Kickoff, rules, safety/CoC
• 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm | Lunch
• ​Mentor office hours
• ​2:30 pm | Checkpoint #1 (problem framing & feasibility)
• ​4:30 pm | Checkpoint #2 (reliability/readiness review)
• 3:30 pm - 4:00 pm | Coffee break
• 6:00 pm | Happy Hour​
• 7:00 pm | Doors close

​​Wed, Nov 19

• 8:00 am | Doors open, coffee
• ​Mentor office hours
• ​11:00 am | Submissions due (repo + 3-min demo video)
• ​11:00 am - 1:30 pm | Online Judging
• 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm | Lunch
• 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm | In Person Judging (a team representative has to be at the venue)
• ​3:00 pm – 4:10 pm | Finalist lightning demos - will be recorded and posted on our YouTube channel
• 4:10 pm - 4:40 pm | Coffee Break
• ​4:40 pm – 5:10 pm | Closing panel with judges
• ​5:10 pm – 5:20 pm | Awards + group photo
• ​5:20 pm – 5:40 pm | Closing remarks

CREDITS

- AWS accounts will be provided, allowing you to pick from numerous hosted Amazon Bedrock models and compute environments.

MENTORS & JUDGES

While participants are free to use any frameworks and tools they prefer, we will have an experienced group of mentors and judges on site to provide guidance during office hours.

• James Ward is known for his deep expertise in not only functional programming but also in working with scalable AI solutions in the AWS cloud. [About James]
• Josh Long has long been known as “Mr. Spring Boot.” More recently, he's been experimenting with Spring AI ever since Rod Johnson, the creator of Spring, started exploring that space. [... more about Josh. Bootiful Podcast]
• Vaibhav Gupta leads Boundary (YC w23), he hates ugly code. And as we know, most agent systems out there wouldn't pass a code review. So Viabhav is building BAML for clean, reliable AI infra. [Vaibhav on LI, AI that works podcast]
• Isaac Miller is a long-time core contributor for DSPy, working on typing, fine-tuning, RL infra, and multi-modal support. [Isaac on LI]
• Hugh McKee is a skilled developer advocate with decades of experience building enterprise applications. Hugh is an expert in distributed systems and Akka, and can help connect all the dots!
• Arun Gupta is a globally recognized expert in developer relations and open source strategy. With over 25 years of experience at Intel, Apple, Amazon, and Red Hat, he’s built developer communities of thousands of people.
• More to be announced soon

Mentors are also familiar with MCP which you may want to use for data/process integration.

Please keep in mind that mentoring and technical support are limited to office hours. Your team should have all the skills to troubleshoot any technical issues otherwise.

RUBRIC

Projects will be evaluated on production readiness, innovation, technical complexity, practicality, user experience, and overall quality. Detailed judging rubric will be provided to participants closer to the hackathon date.

AWARDS

Top 5 winners will have an opportunity to demo their projects on the main stage of the AI By the Bay conference.

More info on prizes will be announced soon.

USEFUL RESOURCES TO GET STARTED

1. Spring AI Project, Docs, Short Intro, Samples on GitHub
2. Josh's talks on Spring AI Session with James Session at SFJava
3. Rod Johnson's take Docs, Embabel Agent on GitHub, Blog
4. Amazon Bedrock Docs
5. Langchain4j Docs, Repo of Examples
6. BAML Docs GitHub
7. Vaibhav Gupta and Joe Reis
8. DSPy Docs GitHub
9. DSPy Video
10. RAG in DSPy, Optimizing a program for math reasoning, Building an Agent with DSPy
11. Omar Khattab, DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelines
12. Akka, What is Agentic AI?, Agentic tutorials and AI app samples

SUPPORT US EVEN MORE!

• Register for AI By the Bay conference
• Get the NEWSLETTER
• Follow us on LINKEDIN
• Follow us on YOUTUBE
• Join us as a VOLUNTEER

​Interested in partnering? - Email info@bythebay.io

Thu, Nov 20 · 6:00 PM PST

Multi-Agent Architectures and Simpler Java Build Tools

Location not specified yet

This event is a joint effort between the San Francisco JUG and East Bay JUG. Currently we are still reaching out to hosts. If you want to host us on that day please reach out via this Google form.

On this evening we are happy to be able to host a part from the conference AI By the Bay (https://ai.bythebay.io, happening in Oakland's Scottish Rite center on Nov 17-19, tickets still available starting at 499 USD). Enjoy 2 talks tonight.

CALL FOR SUPPORT

• Subscribe to our videos
• Join our monthly newsletter
• Join our team
• Submit your talk
• Sponsor or host us

SESSIONS

• Harnessing Event-Driven and Multi-Agent Architectures for Complex Workflows in Generative AI System (~30 min + QA) by Mary Grygleski
• Simpler Java Build Tools with Object Oriented Programming (45 min) by Li Haoyi

ABSTRACTS

Harnessing Event-Driven and Multi-Agent Architectures for Complex Workflows in Generative AI System (~ 30 min + QA) by Mary Grygleski

We live in a complicated world and we are beginning to see that today’s generative AI systems are simply not well equipped to handle the increased complexity that is found especially in business workflows and transactions. Event-driven architectures and multi-agent systems offer a promising solution by enabling real-time processing, decentralized decision-making, and enhanced adaptability.
This presentation proposes an in-depth exploration of how event-driven architectures and multi-agent systems can be leveraged to design and implement complex workflows in generative AI. By combining the real-time responsiveness of event-driven systems with the collaborative intelligence of multi-agent architectures, we can create highly adaptive, efficient, and scalable AI systems. This presentation will delve into the theoretical foundations, practical applications, and benefits of integrating these approaches in the context of generative AI.

Simpler Java Build Tools with Object Oriented Programming (45min) by Li Haoyi

The Java language is known to be performant, easy to use, and with great IDE support, but Java build tools like Maven or Gradle do not always live up to that reputation. This talk will explore why build tooling is fundamentally such a difficult domain to work in, and how common concepts from object-oriented programming have the potential to simplify the build tool experience. We will end with a demonstration of an experimental new Java build tool "Mill" that makes use of these ideas, proving out the idea that Java build tooling has the potential to be much faster, safer, and easier than it is today.

https://www.github.com/com-lihaoyi

SPEAKERS

Mary Grygleski

Mary is a Technical Advocate and Java Champion. She has deep hands-on software engineering experiences. She is active in the tech community as the President of the Chicago Java users group, Organizer of the Chicago chapter of GenAI Collective and Co-Lead of the AICamp Chicago.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-grygleski/

Li Haoyi

Li Haoyi is a Software Engineer graduated from MIT, has built infrastructure for high-growth companies like Dropbox and Databricks, and has been a major contributor to the open source community with projects with over 10,000 stars on Github. Haoyi has deep experience in the JVM and has used it professionally to build cloud infrastructure, distributed backend systems, programming languages, high-performance web applications, and much more.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/haoyi-li-3b3291182

Tue, Jan 27 · 6:00 PM PST

Journey into the JVM Jungle - Exploring Distributions and Memory Management

Location not specified yet

The event is a joint effort between the San Francisco JUG and East Bay JUG. Currently we are still reaching out to hosts. If you want to host us on that day please reach out via this Google form.

On this evening, we are excited to hand the mic to Gerrit Grunwald (a.k.a. Han Solo) — a world traveler, Java Champion, Java Rockstar, and Java user group founder/leader from Germany.

We're delighted to welcome another international guest and invite everyone to join us at a pub afterwards for continued discussion and networking!

CALL FOR SUPPORT

• Subscribe to our videos
• Join our monthly newsletter
• Join our team
• Submit your talk
• Sponsor or host us

SCHEDULE

• TBA

SESSIONS

• Welcome to the Jungle - A safari through the JVM landscape (45 min) by Gerrit Grunwald
• Trash Talk - Exploring the JVM memory management (45 min) by Gerrit Grunwald

ABSTRACTS

Welcome to the Jungle - A safari through the JVM landscape (45 min) by Gerrit Grunwald

OpenJDK with it’s Java Virtual Machine is great but there is not only one flavour but many. There is Oracle OpenJDK, Eclipse Temurin, IBM Semeru, Amazon Corretto, Azul Zulu, Alibaba Dragonwell, Huawei Bi Sheng, Tencent Kona and many more. Did you ever ask yourself which one is better, faster, free or something similar? Or do you want to know where the differences are in those distributions, well then this session might bring some answers to your questions. It will give you an idea about what the JVM is and will cover all the available distributions not only of OpenJDK but also of GraalVM and will try to explain the differences and features of the available distributions.

Trash Talk - Exploring the JVM memory management (45 min) by Gerrit Grunwald

In a world where microservices are more and more a standard architecture for Java based applications running in the cloud, the JVM warmup time can become a limitation. Especially when you look at spinning up new instances of an app as response to changes in load, the warmup time can be a problem. Native images are one solution to solve these problems because their statically ahead of time compiled code simply doesn’t have to warmup and so has short startup time. But even with the shorter startup time and smaller footprint it doesn’t come without a drawback. The overall performance might be slower because of the missing JIT optimisations at runtime. There is a new OpenJDK project called CRaC (Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint) which goal it is to address the JVM warmup problem with a different approach. The idea is to take a snapshot of the running JVM, store it in files and restore the JVM at a later point in time (or even on another machine).
This session will give you a short overview of the CRaC project and shows some results from a proof of concept implementation.

Pointers to the OpenJDK Project - CRaC (Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint)

• https://openjdk.org/projects/crac/
• https://wiki.openjdk.org/display/crac

SPEAKERS

Gerrit Grunwald

Gerrit is a software engineer that loves coding for around 40 years already. He is a true believer in open source and he is an active member of the Java community, where he founded and leads the Java User Group Münster (Germany), he is a JavaOne rockstar and a Java Champion. He is a speaker at conferences and user groups internationally and writes for several magazines.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerritgrunwald https://bsky.app/profile/hansolo.eu
https://x.com/hansolo_