About us
We are a community of engineers, developers, and data practitioners focused on building applications powered by Artificial Intelligence. Our meetup explores the emerging field of AI Engineering, focusing on the tools, patterns, and best practices that enable production-ready AI systems.
We originally founded this meetup group in 2015 as the "Vienna Spark Meetup" and then evolved into the "Vienna Data Science Tools Meetup" as our focus shifted towards broader topics beyond Spark. After the pandemic, we revived our meetup with in-person events and a fresh focus on the "Modern Data Stack". After covering the MDS for some time, we decided to embrace the next topic that we are deeply passionate about: AI Engineering.
What do we mean by AI Engineering? Well, the aspirational definition we came up with is:
AI Engineering is the art and craftsmanship of creating reliable AI-powered applications that users love.
A more down-to-earth definition would be:
AI Engineering is the discipline of designing, developing, and deploying AI-driven applications in a scalable, reliable, and maintainable way. It merges principles from Software Engineering, Machine Learning, and Data Engineering to bring AI into real-world production environments.
So whatever your preferred definition is, if you're already building AI-powered applications, looking to integrate AI into existing products, trying to improve your agentic coding process, or simply curious about this transformative technology, join us to share knowledge, learn from practitioners, and help shape the future of AI Engineering together.
Upcoming events
1
Pi Durable & Groma.md - with Mario & Alex
Dynatrace Austria GmbH - Lab Vienna, The Icon Vienna, Tower 17, 17th Floor, Wiedner Gürtel 13, 1100 Wien, Austria, Wien, ATHello everyone!
We're excited to announce the next Vienna AI Engineering Meetup on Tuesday, November 10th! This time we'll be again hosted by Dynatrace at their Vienna office in the ICON Tower next to Hauptbahnhof.
Mario Zechner, the creator of Pi, will kick off the meetup and explain "WTF is Pi durable", the new experimental harness for long-running, crash-proof, multiplayer agents that shipped together with Pi 1.0. Then Alex Gavrilescu, co-organizer of this meetup and creator of Backlog.md, will show how to stay in control of your agents with Groma.md. Finally, Peter Melchart will wrap up with a short talk on device logging for hybrid apps.
Join us to explore the future of AI Engineering together!
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Here are the detailed abstracts:WTF is Pi durable (Mario Zechner)
Pi the coding agent is built for one human in a terminal: if the process dies, you look at what happened and tell it to continue. But what if you want an agent that lives in Slack for years, talks to many people in parallel, survives the laptop going to sleep or the container being redeployed, and runs on Cloudflare instead of your Mac? That's Pi Durable, the experimental harness Earendil shipped alongside Pi 1.0. Mario will explain in detail WTF it actually is.In the loop, not in the dark: staying in control in the era of dark software factories (Alex Gavrilescu)
After Backlog.md enabled agents to generate 300,000 lines with limited oversight, Groma.md restores architectural ownership. It maintains a real-time project blueprint as the source of truth, guiding agent-driven implementation while keeping humans focused on meaningful design decisions. A live demonstration will map a large open-source repository into Groma.Device Logging Like a Pro (Peter Melchart, short talk)
Hybrid apps are complex. Debugging them doesn’t have to be. Discover a better way to see what’s happening on your device.-------------------------------
About the speakers:- Mario Zechner (@badlogicgames) is the creator of Pi, a minimalist, self-modifying AI coding agent now stewarded by the startup Earendil, where he's a stakeholder and team member. Before AI, he built the popular cross-platform Java game framework libGDX and spent years on the animation tool Spine. Refreshingly blunt about the industry, Mario calls permission popups "security theater," warns about "token addiction," and tells engineers to slow down and treat agents as surgical tools. Blog: https://mariozechner.at/
- Alex Gavrilescu leads backend & web engineering at Funstage GmbH in Vienna, keeping millions of free‑to‑play gamers happily tapping. He still ships code, tinkers with Raspberry Pi Kubernetes clusters for fun, and is passionate about weaving project‑management smarts with practical AI. Most recently he created Backlog.md, Groma.md, became the OpenAI Codex Ambassador in Vienna and joined the org team of this very meetup.
- Peter Melchart has spent nearly his entire career making games - from the Amiga to PC, consoles, and for the last 20 years, on (mostly smart) phones. Now he is leading the Mobile Development for Social Brands at Funstage.
-------------------- Schedule -------------------
18:00 - Get together with food and beverages
18:30 - Welcome talk by Dynatrace
18:45 - "WTF is Pi durable" (Mario Zechner)
19:15 - "In the loop, not in the dark" (Alex Gavrilescu)
19:50 - "Device Logging Like a Pro" (Peter Melchart)
20:00 - More drinks & networking.Looking forward to seeing you on November 10th!
-------------------- Location -------------------
Dynatrace Austria GmbH
THE ICON VIENNA
Tower 17 - 17th Floor
Wiedner Gürtel 13, 1100 ViennaWhen you arrive in the ICON tower, walk straight to the info point and ask for a visitor’s card for Dynatrace (17th floor). They will explain your way to tower 17. Walk through the 1st glass door. At the 2nd glass door you will need your visitor’s card (left side) hold it against the card reader to open. At the turn stiles, hold your visitor card against the card reader, walk through and have a look at the screen on your side (while entering). The screen will display a letter (A-D) which elevator you need to take. At the elevator entrance is a small display showing you the floor where it is going -> enter if you see the number 17.
----------------------- Sponsor ---------------------
This event is generously sponsored by Dynatrace. 🙏Dynatrace is one of Austria’s big business & technology success stories in recent history. Founded 2005 in Linz, we're now one of the fastest growing SaaS companies on the planet. Dynatrace is market leader in software intelligence, that is: We provide full-stack insights into user sessions, applications' runtimes and infrastructure.
And guess what? We're always looking for engineers:
https://www.dynatrace.com/careers/jobs170 attendees
Past events
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