RSVP on our Meetup event >> https://www.meetup.com/gdg-melbourne/events/306605644

Ready to Build with AI (#BuildwithAI)? Join GDG Melbourne for an exciting in-person meetup! ☁️

💻 What do you need to bring?
- Make sure to bring your laptop (better if fully charged) to do some hands-on training. Also, check the talk descriptions to stay ahead of the game

Join us for an evening of inspiring talks, delicious food, awesome networking, and some surprise swag you won’t want to miss. 🎉

Whether you're a seasoned developer, a cloud enthusiast, or just dipping your toes into the world of AI and tech, this is the place to be. And don’t worry if you can’t make it—all talks will be recorded and shared on YouTube for you to catch up later.

📍 Where?

Mantel Group Office, Level 2/452 Flinders St, Melbourne

Doors open at 5:45 PM—message us on Meetup or Slack if you're arriving after 6:00 PM, as the lifts won’t let you up.

🎤 Agenda:

6:15 PM - Welcome & Intros

6:20 PM - Talks by incredible speakers:

1. Wonderful World of Open Weights AI - Hands-on Workshop
   Bishal Sapkota, AI Lead @Outback Yak
   This hands-on workshop will explore how to run locally hosted Open Weight, large language models, particularly when working with sensitive data. We’ll go through a couple of hands-on examples, and then deploy our app to Google Cloud using Cloud Run with GPU support.

   To make the session as interactive as possible, it’d be great if participants could prepare by:
       •  Installing ollama locally (download from here)
       •  Downloading any foundation model between 1B to 3B parameters (roughly 1–3GB in size) (for simplicity, run ollama run gemma3:1b)
   Having these ready before will help us dive straight into the fun parts! D

2. Automating user onboarding with Cloud run functions - Lightning Talk
   Yash Shreshta, System Administrator @Crayon
   In this lightning talk, hear Yash's journey about leveraging Cloud Run to build a workflow that automates the user onboarding journey.

3. Build RAG from Scratch - Live Coding Session
   Phil Nash, Google Developer Expert, DevRel Engineer @ DataStax 🎤
   In this live coding session, we'll build the components of a RAG system from scratch. (Aside from the LLM, there probably isn't time for that!) By building our own, we'll understand vectorisation, similarity search, and the role of embedding models and vector databases. We'll then plug it all together to see our augmented bot in action. You'll get a good grounding in the components of successful chatbots and why they work.

8:10 PM till late - Networking, chats, and optional drinks 🍻

🎁 What’s in it for you?

• ⚡ Lightning-fast workshops & talks from industry experts

• 🍕 Cloud-shaped snacks (okay, maybe not literally, but the food will be delicious!)

• 🤝 Networking that’s as smooth as a well-architected cloud solution

• 🎁 Surprise swag

💡 NOTES:

• This is an in-person-only event, but if you have any accessibility requirements, reach out to us via Meetup or Slack, and we’ll do our best to accommodate you.

• Doors open at 5:45 PM at our host the Mantel Group, Level 2/452 Flinders St Melbourne. Message via Meetup or Slack if you are arriving after 6:00 as the lifts won't let you up. 
  

Don’t miss this epic night of learning, networking, and fun! RSVP now and we’ll see you there! 👋

#gdgMelbourne #BuildwithAI