Open Source

Join Vienna’s longest-running English stand-up comedy open mic for laughs, live comedy, and English-language performances. Drop by to see experienced comedians work on their new jokes or maybe you will catch somebody trying to be funny on stage for the first time ever! We don't really know what will happen and that's part of the magic! Join Vienna’s longest-running English stand-up comedy open mic for laughs, live comedy, and English-language performances. Drop by to see experienced comedians work on their new jokes or maybe you will catch somebody trying to be funny on stage for the first time ever! We don't really know what will happen and that's part of the magic! **Do you want to perform yourself?** Hit us up on Instagram (@wiener.comedy) or Facebook (Wiener Comedy). Not on social media? Send us an email at wienercomedy5000@gmail.com If you’re waiting on a reply, please also check your spam folder. **Do you just want to watch?** Just come on over before 19:30, wear something comfortable, enjoy a pint and/or a burger, lean back and let us tickle your funny bone! **Tickets:** Seats can fill up fast, so we recommend reserving yours on Eventbrite. This is a *pay what you like* show so it doesn't cost you to reserve your seat. **Need a table for dinner or coming with a larger group?** Write us an email to sort everything out: wienercomedy5000@gmail.com or contact Charlie P's directly Doors Open: 19:00 Show Starts: 19:30 ***We'll hold your reservations until 19:20 at which time we will release the remaining seats to the public*** Age - 16+ Good talk, see you out there! **Do you want to perform yourself?** Hit us up on Instagram (@wiener.comedy) or Facebook (Wiener Comedy). Not on social media? Send us an email at wienercomedy5000@gmail.com If you’re waiting on a reply, please also check your spam folder. **Do you just want to watch?** Just come on over before 19:30, wear something comfortable, enjoy a pint and/or a burger, lean back and let us tickle your funny bone! **Tickets:** Seats can fill up fast, so we recommend reserving yours on Eventbrite. This is a *pay what you like* show so it doesn't cost you to reserve your seat. **Need a table for dinner or coming with a larger group?** Write us an email to sort everything out: wienercomedy5000@gmail.com or contact Charlie P's directly Doors Open: 19:00 Show Starts: 19:30 ***We'll hold your reservations until 19:20 at which time we will release the remaining seats to the public*** Age - 16+ Good talk, see you out there!

We live in a time of constant movement — always connected, always performing, always becoming. And yet, many of us feel increasingly disconnected from ourselves. We chase success, recognition, and the next milestone, hoping they will bring peace, only to discover that what we’re truly seeking can’t be found outside of us. Our Breathwork Circles at **Light House Cape Town** are an invitation to pause, soften, and return inward. Through Conscious Connected Breathwork (CCB), we create a safe and intentional space to peel back layers of conditioning, expectation, and self-performance — and to reconnect with the truth that already lives within you. This practice supports nervous-system regulation, emotional release, and deep self-insight, allowing clarity and inner stability to emerge naturally, without force or pressure. Breathwork is a powerful experiential practice that can create profound shifts in a short amount of time. Participants often experience deep relaxation, emotional release, increased mental clarity, and a renewed sense of energy and focus. The practice can help reduce stress, calm an overactive mind, release stored tension in the body, and unlock insights that feel difficult to access through thinking alone. Many people leave a session feeling lighter, more grounded, emotionally clear, and reconnected to themselves — with a tangible sense of relief, openness, and inner balance that carries into their daily lives. **About us:** These circles are facilitated by Sophie and Bjoern, certified Conscious Connected Breathwork facilitators and co-founders of *onoera*. Coming from high-performance career backgrounds and having experienced burnout and misalignment firsthand, they guide each session with depth, sensitivity, and respect for individual processes. Their work blends science-informed nervous-system awareness with embodied presence, creating a grounded, non-dogmatic space where participants can explore at their own pace. Each circle is intentionally limited in size to ensure personal attention and a contained group experience. No prior breathwork experience is needed — only curiosity and a willingness to meet yourself honestly. **Address:** Light House Holistic Wellbeing 6th Floor, The Barracks, 50 Bree Street, Cape Town, 8000 **Important Booking Information:** You need a ticket for this event. Tickets can be purchased using this link: https://onoera.com/group-circles/breathwork-circle-light-house-holistic-wellbeing

Hi Deep Learners, Our first Deep Learning Meetup in 2026 is taking place on **January 26** at Sky lounge of Raiffeisenbank International in Wien Mitte. Our topics this time are: Agentic RAG and Surprise Estimation in Music. \*\*\* **Agenda:** * 18:30 **Introduction** by the meetup organizers * **Welcome** by the host: Raiffeisenbank International * 18:45 **Talk 1:** **Agentic RAG: Advances in Autonomous Information Retrieval, Quantized Indexing, and Scalable System Design** by Liad Magen *(Raiffeisen Bank International)* * 19:30 **Announcements** * **Networking Break** * 20:00 **Talk 2:** **Surprise Estimation in Music** by Mathias Bjare *(Johannes Kepler University)* * 20:45 **Networking** * \~22:00 **Wrap up & End** \*\*\* **Talk Details:** **Talk 1: Agentic RAG: Advances in Autonomous Information Retrieval, Quantized Indexing, and Scalable System Design** Agentic RAG systems enable AI to plan how to find and utilize information autonomously, moving beyond simple lookup-and-answer patterns. Traditional RAG follows a fixed approach: retrieve documents, then generate an answer. Agentic RAG, on the other hand, utilizes autonomous agents that can reason through problems in multiple steps, reformulate queries intelligently, and adapt their retrieval strategy based on what they discover. This talk examines the architecture and capabilities of agentic RAG, focusing on how retrieval strategies have evolved to support multi-hop reasoning (following chains of related information), tool integration, and agent-driven workflows. Special attention will be paid to recent advances in quantized indexing and vector search, including Matryoshka embeddings. This technique stores information at multiple levels of detail, enabling scalable retrieval with tunable trade-offs between accuracy and storage. **About the Speaker:** Liad Magen is a senior data scientist at Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) and serves as the product owner of the Data Science Academy, an internal school within the RBI to upskill employees in machine learning and data science. In addition, he is teaching selected courses on NLP, computer vision and Information Retrieval as part of Master's degrees in Hochschule Campus Wien (HCW) and the university of applied sciences - IMC Krems. **Talk 2: Surprise Estimation in Music** The presentation will focus on Bjare's work on latent autoregressive diffusion models for computationally estimating experienced "expectedness" and "surprise" (surprisal) in music listening, presented at [Neurips 2025 - AI for Music Workshop](https://openreview.net/forum?id=rXUKO0ysUy&referrer=%5BAuthor%20Console%5D(%2Fgroup%3Fid%3DNeurIPS.cc%2F2025%2FWorkshop%2FAI4Music%2FAuthors%23your-submissions)). We revisit an established connection between music appreciation during listening and the extent to which humans or autoregressive models can predict musical continuations. We visit [Music2Latent](https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06500), an open-source, computationally efficient audio codec used as the audio representation on which surprisal is modeled. We review GPT-style autoregressive diffusion models and show how they are suitable for surprisal estimation. We discuss the prediction of EEG responses to music listening based on our surprise estimates. **About the Speaker:** Mathias Rose Bjare is a fourth year PhD student at the Institute of Computational Perception, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. He builds computational models for the estimation of musical expectancy and surprisal in audio and general symbolic music using modern artificial neural networks. His surprisal estimates enable research into how features of general recorded music correlate with neural responses to music listening We'd like to thank Raiffeisen International for providing the venue, drinks & snacks. ** Please note that the venue has a capacity limit of 120 people and people will be admitted on a first come, first served basis. ** We are very much looking forward to seeing you at our first meetup in 2026! Your VDLM organizers

PCE - "Philosophic Conversation in English" is a discussion event in English language which focuses on psychology, philosophy, self-consciousness and self-realization. The conversation is based on inclusive discussion rules. We will meet at at a restaurant where we will have a private room exclusively reserved for our event. At the beginning we will choose the topic to discuss. Everybody can suggest a topic. Then we will vote what to discuss. The person who suggested the winning topic will then explain his idea of the topic. Afterwards everybody gets his/her chance to make a statement. But you can also decide to remain silent and only listen, if you prefer that. We have a time limit for statements, so that everybody has enough time to speak. It is not allowed to interrupt somebody who is speaking. After a statement everybody can ask a question and the speaker will answer. After the first part there will be a 10 minutes break before we start the second part. Everybody is welcome to our event: We are interested in your thoughts and opinions! It is no problem if you arrive late and you can also leave whenever you want. Please check out last event's topics via this link: [http://pce-topic.project-website.org](http://pce-topic.project-website.org/)

Herzlich Willkommen zu unserem kostenlosen Meditations Kurs! Einstieg ist jederzeit möglich, geeignet für Anfänger als auch Fortgeschrittene. Hier werden dir Grundlagen und Wissen von Sahaja Yoga-Meditation vorgestellt: speziell über Kundalini, Energiezentren, subtile Kanäle in und einfache Techniken, die unterstützend auf unser inneres Wachstum wirken und uns ins Gleichgewicht bringen. Wir lernen wie wir in unserem täglichen Leben in Balance kommen und in einem Zustand der Stille Kraft schöpfen können. Ein zentraler Punkt ist die spürbare Stille in jedem von uns. Sie ist der Moment im Hier und Jetzt, der uns Inspiration, Freude und vieles mehr schenkt. In diesem Zustand zu verweilen bedeutet Meditation - und das ist die Quintessenz für inneres Wachstum und Weiterentwicklung. Wir freuen uns schon auf dich!

**Discover the Power of Public Speaking & Leadership — Join the Blue Danube Leaders!** Are you looking for a new hobby that's not only fun but also helps you grow? Join us at **Blue Danube Leaders**, a Toastmasters club where you can improve your **public speaking**, **leadership**, and **communication** skills - all in a friendly, encouraging environment. Whether you’re just starting out or are already a seasoned speaker, you're welcome as our guest. **THIS PARTICULAR MEETING IS A CONTEST EVENT** Every year Toastmasters International holds the World Championship of Public Speaking, starting at club level for general speeches, evaluation speeches and table topics.This meeting on Jan 26 is our club contest.You are very welcome to join, just be aware that the meeting format on this evening is entirely different to our normal meetings described below. This is the usual meeting format: **What happens at a Meeting?** Our meetings follow a structured, interactive format: * **Welcome and Introduction** The meetings begin with a warm welcome from the Club President and the host (called *Toastmaster of the Evening)*. Then, we do a short introduction round where everyone - guests too - say a few words on the evening's topic. * **Word of the Day** A challenge that builds your language skills and sharpens your attention to word choice. A special word is introduced and everyone is invited to use this word whenever they speak. * **Table Topics** This is an exciting segment! Volunteers - guests too! - are invited to speak for 1-2 minutes on a surprise question or topic. It's a great way to practice thinking on your feet. * ***Short Break of 10 minutes*** * **Prepared Speeches** * Members deliver speeches prepared ahead of time, usually 5-7 minutes in length. Each speech is a step in the Toastmasters learning pathway. * **Evaluations** Every speech will be thoughtfully evaluated by a designated Evaluator. These evaluations focus on strengths, improvement tips, and encouragement. It's a crucial part of the Toastmasters experience. * **Role Reports** Throughout the meeting, members take on supportive roles that ensure the flow of the evening and give everyone a chance to grow. **Be our guest!** This meetup is open to guests. Toastmasters have a separate platform for the member registration. There are always 10+ people in the meeting. Join us at **18:45 CET** for a casual **Meet & Greet**; The program starts **sharp at 19:00 CET.** After the meeting, we often head to a nearby spot for food or drinks - a great way to relax and connect! Learn more: https://bluedanubeleaders.at/ Email: info@bluedanubeleaders.at

Hello Viennovans! Pickwick's is getting quizzical every monday night! You have a chance to win a round of shots, a 40€ bar tab and/or eternal bragging rights 😉 Teams of up to 6 people, reserve your spot today! Start time is 7! FREE SHOT FOR EVERYONE COMING FROM VIENNOVA!

**Leader of the session:** [IICV Calendar](https://www.iicv.at/event-calendar) **What is it ?** An open improv session for all experience levels. Come play, explore, and have fun in a supportive, low-pressure environment. **Want to learn improv?** Check this out: [https://www.iicv.at/improvclass](https://www.iicv.at/improvclass) **Want to practice regularly improv in a small group for an affordable price?** Check this out: [https://www.iicv.at/improv-tuesday](https://www.iicv.at/improv-tuesday) **Already intermediate in improv?** Check this out: [https://www.iicv.at/intermediate-classes](https://www.iicv.at/intermediate-classes) **How to register ?** Meetup registration opens on **Sunday 13:00** for the following Wednesday meetup. Should your plans change, we kindly ask you to **cancel.** For security reason, you cannot join the session if you did not registered. **How much ?** Free for IICV members\* 10 Euros for everybody else. You can pay contactless or cash. \* go to [iicv.at](https://www.iicv.at/) to become a member (13EUR per month until you cancel your membership). **Anything to report?** Please give us an anonymous [feedback](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1oidbMUMs_Zz-rSQ9O4HcR_axPG_zvUb1dc1ssG5IWaw/edit) \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* **Meetup priority**: Please do not enroll to meetup priority!!! You can enroll to any open session without having it (just close the adv. window). **Being meetup priority will not give you any advantage in the waiting list** neither as we will insure to respect the real order of priority. **Photograph policy**: Please be aware that photos will be taken during the open session for social media and newsletters. Before any photos are taken, we ask participants for their consent and provide an opportunity to opt out. **Code of Conduct**: We are a Vienna-based international community seeking to explore, play, practice, and perform improvised arts in a group setting. In treating this space with integrity and professionalism, we are committed to facilitating a harassment-free space for all persons regardless of cultural background, disability, gender, sexual orientation, race, etc. Therefore, the IICV will not tolerate any inappropriate behaviour as per our [Code Of Conduct](https://www.iicv.at/code-of-conduct). Repeated violations of our guidelines can and will result in warnings, removal from sessions, or cancelation of membership. The **International Improv Community in Vienna** IICV e.V. ZVR Nr:1236421179

Let’s kick off the year with some talks in collaboration with the **[Java and Friends](https://www.meetup.com/java-and-friends/)**[ meetup group](https://www.meetup.com/java-and-friends/). Fresh topics, shared knowledge and a strong community vibe. **===Topic===** **1st talk: WebAssembly** If you have been living under a rock like me and have heard about WebAssembly but don't really know what it does, then this talk is right for you! WebAssembly is one of the biggest standardization efforts in modern computing and we will have a look at how it works, why you should care, and why big players like Microsoft, Intel, and the CNCF alike have a vested interest to push it further. Did you know that Kotlin is implementing a wasm backend, so we can run Kotlin code without the JVM? What once started out as a browser hack to make javascript faster is slowly but steadily growing into a new computing substrate, and finally, a common architecture and compilation target for our programs. It's write once, run everywhere, but hopefully for real this time. Oh and it will also replace docker. And Kubernetes. Okay, I am overdramatizing. I swear my takes are not as biased as this introduction but you will have to listen to my talk to find out. **Speaker:** Florian Schindler **2nd talk: Spring Boot 4 with Kotlin: Modern Spring Development, Refined** Spring Boot 4 raises the bar for modern development in the JVM ecosystem, and Kotlin fits it perfectly. This talk highlights what’s new in Spring Boot 4 and how Kotlin helps you build cleaner, safer, and more concise applications with less boilerplate and better defaults. **Speaker:** Marián Varga **===Schedule===** 18:00 - Doors open 18:30 - Welcome by Erste Bank, Kotlin Vienna & and SQUER 18:40 - First talk 19:25 - Break 19:35 - Second talk 20:20 - Pizza, Drinks & Networking **===How to find us===** Canetti Tower - Erste Group, Canettistraße 5, 1100 Wien

Hello everybody, Let’s start the new year with two great talks on how we can avoid falling into the legacy debt trap … **Agenda** 🕡 17:30 - Doors open 🕕 18:00 – Intro & First Talk 🗣️- Tracking Health over Debt: Strategies to keep a Microservice Architecture Healthy 🕢 18:50 – Break 🕖 19:00 – Second Talk 🗣️ - Architectural Fitness in Practice: Defining & Measuring your architecture goals with fitness functions 🕗 19:50 – 🎉 Open-end with 🍕&🍻 \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- **🗣️ First Talk - Tracking Health over Debt: Strategies to keep a Microservice Architecture Healthy** For a long time kununu focused on fixing what’s broken - a Big Ball of Mud Monolith - and how to move away from it. As we enter the last phase of what has been a multi-year migration, we are shifting from focusing on what's broken into maintaining what’s healthy (Known as [tracking health over debt](https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/tracking-health-over-debt)). Expect an inside view into kununu’s practices that maintain a healthy system. Learn how we define what healthy means through testable System Quality Requirements, how we ensure that we learn from incidents long term, and how regular domain health checks help teams prioritise what’s important. Whether you're stuck in tech debt discussions or looking for a more proactive approach to system quality, join us for practical lessons from our journey. ***Angela Rumpl*** *is a Solution Architect at kununu, the leading employer review platform in the DACH region. With 20 years of experience in software engineering, a strong background in backend development, and extensive leadership experience, she now leads the Architecture Council supporting approximately 80 engineers across 9 cross-functional teams. She drives cross-organisational strategic initiatives such as kununu's migration from monolith to microservices. Her approach emphasises architecture facilitation over gatekeeping – empowering teams through collaborative processes such as modeling workshops, Advice Forums & ADRs for decision making. Angela is a co-organiser of the DDD & MRDS meetup in Vienna and contributes to organising [ComoCamp](https://comocamp.org/).* \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- **🗣️ Second Talk - Architectural Fitness in Practice: Defining & Measuring your architecture goals with fitness functions** Modern software architecture needs measurable guardrails instead of PowerPoint wishful thinking. In this talk, I’ll show how to use fitness functions as a systematic approach to derive the right metrics for you to turn architecture goals into something concrete and verifiable. I'll show you my pragmatic catalog of building blocks you can use and combine to design your own fitness functions and why these are the most important dimensions to consider in practice. On this basis, I’ll introduce a fitness function testing pyramid, walk through concrete examples of useful checks and metrics, and demonstrate how to deliberately use generative AI as an architecture assistant – from generating ideas for fitness functions and target metrics to helping you shape your ideas into concrete metrics to verify. ***Rene Weiss*** *is an independent software and enterprise architect, consultant, and coach based in Vienna. He lives the “Architecture Elevator”: from the boardroom down to the code, he works with top management on transformation programs as well as with development teams on concrete architectures, fitness functions, and effective ways of working.* *For more than 20 years, Rene has supported agile software development projects and has been a regular conference speaker on evolutionary architectures, measurable architecture goals, and pragmatic software engineering practices.* \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- **🏢 Location sponsor** The location, food, and drinks are sponsored by kununu ([https://www.kununu.com/](https://www.kununu.com/)). kununu is the leading employer review and workplace insights platform in the DACH region, empowering employees to share authentic workplace experiences and helping job seekers make informed career decisions. With millions of reviews and salary insights, kununu creates transparency in the job market while helping companies build stronger employer brands. Sounds interesting? Check out [their open positions](https://www.kununu.com/at/kununu/jobs).

Alpha is a place to explore the Christian faith in an open minded environment. We have a meal together(free), watch a video on an aspect of Christianity and then we discuss what we watched. You can ask questions or say nothing at all. It is a course over 12 weeks on Thursdays with one Saturday in the middle. You don't have to come to each session although it's recommended. You can scan the QR code above for more details of the course.

This event is organized as an on-site event only. **LLM Security Day** **1\. Talk:** **"Trustworthy AI: How to Prevent Your Machine Learning Models From Becoming a Security Liability"** By: Tanja Šarčević and Anastasia Pustozerova **2\. Talk: "Using LLMs for Offensive Security"** By: Andreas Happe **Short Discussion** **Talk language:** English **On-site event only!:** Floragasse 7, 1040 Vienna (5. floor) Further information will be announced soon! **Agenda** \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* 17:55: Gathering 18:05: Welcome 18:10: **Talk:** **"Trustworthy AI: How to Prevent Your Machine Learning Models From Becoming a Security Liability"** 18:40: **Talk:"Using LLMs for Offensive Security"** 19:10 **Discussion** 20:00: Food, Drinks & Get together Looking forward to seeing you there! **Talks & Speaker Details:** **"Using LLMs for Offensive Security"** Since 2023, researchers have used LLMs to drive offensive security, e.g., pen-testing. This talk will highlight academic research on LLM-driven pen-testing between 2023--2025, show (the speaker's) current prototypes/research, and detail current engineering/research questions. **Speaker Andreas Happe:** Andreas is a developer gone pen-tester gone phd student that currently focuses on the the intersection between LLMs and Penetration-Testing. Otherwise, you can spot him failing at local bouldering gymns. **Trustworthy AI: How to Prevent Your Machine Learning Models From Becoming a Security Liability** As AI systems power more products, decisions, and customer experiences, one uncomfortable truth is emerging: machine learning introduces entirely new privacy and security risks that most organizations are not prepared for. Models can leak sensitive data, be reverse-engineered, manipulated, or compromised. This talk demystifies what can go wrong when deploying AI in real-world environments and shows how to build trustworthy, resilient, and regulation-ready ML systems. **Speaker: Anastasia Pustozerova** Anastasia received her bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics & Physics from [St. Petersburg University](https://english.spbu.ru/). She has a joint master’s degree from a European Master’s Program in Computational Logic ([TU Wien](https://www.tuwien.at/en),[ TU Dresden](https://tu-dresden.de/), [Free University of Bozen-Bolzano](https://www.unibz.it/en/)). Anastasia is currently working towards a PhD. She is involved in an European research project [FeatureCloud](https://www.sba-research.org/research/projects/featurecloud/) as an expert in federated machine learning, where she is working on cyber risk assessment and mitigation. **Speaker: Tanja Šarčević** Tanja received a bachelor´s degree in Computer Science from the [University of Zagreb](http://www.unizg.hr/homepage/) and a master´s degree in Logic and Computation at the [TU Wien](https://www.tuwien.at/en). She is currently working towards her PhD degree with the focus on ownership protection of data and machine learning models.

**❗️ 👉 TO THE EVENT:** [Kotlin & Java Kickoff 2026: WebAssembly & Spring Boot 4](https://www.meetup.com/de-de/java-and-friends/events/312867286/)**❗️** In cooperation with the[ ](https://www.meetup.com/re-presented-diversevoicesintech/)[Java and Friends](https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/java-and-friends/) Community and [Kotlin Vienna](https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/kotlin-vienna/) are hosting a meetup **at the Erste Bank Campus.** **👉** Please register on the dedicated [Kotlin & Java Kickoff 2026: WebAssembly & Spring Boot 4](https://www.meetup.com/de-de/java-and-friends/events/312867286/) Page to join us on January 27 at 6:00 PM 🥳 We are looking forward to seeing you there!

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!

### Tools in your AI's Toolbox : An introduction to MCP Servers The generative AI revolution has unlocked unprecedented capabilities, but the next frontier is agency: empowering models to interact with, query, and act upon the world. The current challenge is the “N x M integration problem,” where every AI model requires a custom, brittle integration for each external tool or data source. This approach simply doesn’t scale. How can we give an AI access to our sales leads, code repositories, or IoT devices in a standardized, secure, and reusable way? This session introduces Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open-source framework designed to solve this challenge and become the universal connector—the USB-C port—for AI. MCP standardizes how AI models discover and use external tools, moving beyond simple function-calling to a robust, client-server architecture. We will dive into how this open protocol is creating a new ecosystem for building powerful, context-aware AI agents. Join this session for a developer-focused introduction where you will learn how to: Understand the core concepts of the open-source Model Context Protocol and its architecture. Utilize pre-built, open-source MCP servers to instantly connect AI to tools like Git, Slack, and databases. Build a custom MCP server to securely expose your own proprietary data and APIs as tools for any compliant AI. Move beyond bespoke integrations and contribute to a standardized, collaborative, and open ecosystem. Stop building one-off connectors and start building intelligent agents. This session will give you the practical knowledge to leverage MCP and create the next generation of AI that doesn’t just talk, but does. Want to be a speaker? submit your talk to our Call for Presenters!!! [https://sessionize.com/azure-cbus-2026/](https://sessionize.com/azure-cbus-2026/)

Come out to Improving for our monthly iOS and Mac meetings. This Month's Presentation: Nothing yet. (You should volunteer). What is Cocoaheads (http://cocoaheads.org/)? CocoaHeads is a group devoted to discussion of Apple Computer's Cocoa Framework for programming on MacOS X and iOS (including the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch). During monthly meetings, members present on their projects and offer tutorials on various programming topics. What is BuckeyeCocoa (http://buckeyecocoa.org/)? BuckeyeCocoa is a group of Objective-C/Swift developers/enthusiasts. We host monthly Cocoaheads and near-weekly NSCoder meetings in Columbus, Ohio. The meetings are free to attend. Presentations! Presenters welcome! We are always in need of people willing to present material. Any Swift and/or Objective-C related topic is welcome. Times can be 5 minutes (i.e. lightning talks) to a maximum of 2 hours. Interested? Contact info is on the BuckeyeCocoa website. To volunteer for a presentation contact us at @BuckeyeCocoa on Twitter. Follow us on Twitter! @BuckeyeCocoa (https://twitter.com/#!/Buckeyecocoa/) For more information: http://buckeyecocoa.org/

Bring your work or your hobby, hang out, and code with us. Follow @buckeyecocoa for more information.

**Chaos Monkeys, Open Telemetry, and .NET Aspire: Taming Complexity in Modern Apps** .NET Aspire is far more than just a sleek dashboard for wowing your boss and co-workers. It's also a gateway to increased observability with open telemetry, better fault tolerance to fend off chaos monkeys, and a drastically improved onboarding experience for new developers. This session will explore Microsoft's latest guidance for building distributed, cloud-first applications, with practical strategies for enhancing simpler existing apps. You'll discover the inner workings of Aspire, from installation to customization, and learn how it streamlines integration with performance boosters like Redis. Most importantly, you'll see why scalable microservices architectures can be challenging—and how Aspire helps simplify the journey. **Presenter:** Lee Richardson, Microsoft MVP **Pizza starts at 6. Presentation starts around 6:30.**

## Learn Infrastructure-as-Code (the FUN Way) — Through Minecraft 🎮☁️ **Joint Meetup: Azure CBUS × Columbus HashiCorp User Group** What if learning Terraform and Infrastructure-as-Code didn’t feel like a whitepaper… but more like a game? Join us for a joint Azure CBUS and Columbus HashiCorp User Group meetup where **Mark Tinderholt** \(Principal Architect\, Microsoft Azure \| HashiCorp Ambassador \| “The Azure Terraformer”\) shows how **Minecraft** can be used as a surprisingly powerful way to understand real-world Infrastructure-as-Code concepts. In this session, Mark will demonstrate how Terraform and Azure can be used to provision, configure, and manage Minecraft servers—while teaching the same patterns you’d use for production cloud infrastructure. ### What we’ll cover * Infrastructure-as-Code fundamentals using **Terraform** * Provisioning real infrastructure on **Azure** * Applying **IaC best practices** (immutability, repeatability, versioning) * How playful environments like Minecraft make complex concepts *click* * Why learning through experimentation beats click-ops every time ### Who should attend * Developers, platform engineers, and cloud engineers * Terraform users (new or experienced) * Anyone curious about Infrastructure-as-Code but tired of boring examples * Minecraft fans who want to see it used in a totally unexpected way No prior Minecraft experience required—just curiosity and a willingness to learn infrastructure the fun way. Come for the blocks, stay for the Terraform. 🧱➡️📐 Want to be a speaker? submit your talk to our Call for Presenters!!! https://sessionize.com/cbus-hug-2026/