Design Best Practices

You can sleep in on the Sesquicentennial (observed), we’re shifting to the following Friday. But join the local UX community for a chat and some biscuits to catch up. If you were in CA for Figma Config, tell us all the lines and you can tell me how I can animate an SVG without coding it by hand, and why I’d even want to. Thanks to the team at Nationwide of supporting the group.

We meet to learn and practice American Sign Language and to grow our familiarity with Deaf culture. Facilitated by hearing folks (with a connection to a professional interpreter) using Deaf-created content. People of all ASL skill levels are welcome! As we learn, we hope to connect more with the Deaf community in Central Ohio. Join us as you're able! Come regularly or just once - whatever you're looking for! Each meetup will explore different topics related to ASL/Deaf culture, and will feature time to practice conversation with one another. Just bring yourself and a willingness to learn!

Most people use LLMs by feel: ask a question, read the answer, decide whether it “seems good,” and move on. That works for casual use. It does not work when you are building software, automating workflows, writing important documents, or relying on AI for anything that needs to be repeatable. In this talk, we’ll look at how to improve and evaluate the inputs and outputs of LLMs using practical measurement techniques. We’ll cover how prompt changes affect results, how to compare outputs, how to build simple evaluation sets, and how math-based methods like similarity scoring can help you move beyond guesswork. This will be beginner-friendly, so even if you don't know anything about AI, you should get something out of it. However, this will be a little more technical than our intro talks. You do not need to be an AI researcher, but programmers and technically curious attendees will get a lot out of it. We’ll cover: * Why “it looks good” is not enough * How to improve prompts by changing the input, context, and constraints * How to compare LLM outputs more systematically * Basic evaluation techniques for accuracy, consistency, and usefulness * How embeddings, cosine similarity, and scoring can help evaluate results * Where automated evaluation works — and where humans still need to stay in the loop By the end, you’ll have a practical mental model for treating LLMs less like magic and more like systems you can test, measure, and improve. LOGISTICS AND PARKING: The talk starts at 7:00 PM. The first half hour is reserved for everyone to get set up and mingle. Free pizza and drinks! The cheapest parking option is to find street parking, which will only cost you a few bucks. Otherwise, park in the nearby veteran's museum lot for $8. It's highly recommended you avoid the nearby $15 garage parking.

Want to be a speaker? submit your talk to our Call for Presenters!!! https://sessionize.com/azure-cbus-2026/

**TBA**

Columbus Code & Coffee is an inclusive, informal co-working session. People of all skill levels attend, and we love it that way. Many people (optionally) bring projects to work on, and many other people (optionally) socialize the entire time. It's entirely up to you! **What to Expect at the Intro Circle** \~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~ Near the beginning of the event (1:30 pm), we do a standup: * Organizer announcements, updates, and logistics Round 1 - (7 secs max): * Your name * What you're working on * What you can help others with Round 2: * Community events you wanna plug. If none, that's cool too. Round 3: * Job opportunities you're hiring for OR announce that you are looking for one. If none, that's cool. After the introduction circle, everything is self-organized! Feel free to work alone, pair up, attend one of our workshops/presentations, or mingle!