Craftsmanship on RVASDUG

Small AI, Big Impact: Why Surgical Precision Beats Computational Power

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

In good engineering practice, designing a solution is both an art and a science. We can store passwords in plain text or hard-code credentials into a repository—but experience tells us those shortcuts create far more problems than they solve. As our industry pushes rapidly into new technologies, it’s easy to forget the engineering principles that got us here in the first place. Even with AI, the quality of our software craft still matters.

Delivering Value through Software: A Practical Guide for Tech Leads

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

As a tech lead, you will be faced with shifting requirements, tight timelines and unexpected complexities while bridging the gap between business goals and engineering realities. But your primary concern should be keeping your team motivated and performing at a high level without drifting into burnout. Fortunately, there already are many established software development patterns and practices designed to help teams develop quality products efficiently. Additionally new tools are constantly hitting the market, each promising faster and cheaper delivery. How do you find the strategies that work for your team? In this talk, Sujith will share lessons from years of experience in software delivery both as a creator and a consumer of business value. He will walk through a practical rubric he uses to choose the appropriate processes, practices, and tools for specific situations. You will learn how to apply this approach yourself - so you can build a framework that empowers your team and drives lasting stakeholder satisfaction.

A Year on the Blvd of Broken Hearts aka Security Lessons from Sh***y Dating Apps

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Description

30-50% of your employee base are actively using dating apps to find love or romance. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies and Wi-Fi usage are just some of the reasons that your enterprise security is at risk. I’ll tell you more.
Examining the risks posed by dating apps provides crucial security lessons for individual users and organizations. Learn what the dating app landscape looks like and why, how to defend your heart & finances, how to help your people protect themselves, and how to defend your environment. Learn all the spicy and valuable secrets of a battle-tested, security-focused dating app diva.

Evolving the Tree: Multi-Agent LLMs that Plan, Retrieve, and Ship

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Description

The Business Problem
In the real world, AI solutions work crosses documents, systems, and approvals. You need agents that can plan, look things up, challenge each other, and show their work with clear guardrails.
The Tools
Lightweight orchestration that explores options before acting
Retrieval and memory so answers are grounded in your corpus
The Takeaways
A copy-able reference architecture for multi-agent work
A starter path - add retrieval, add a critic, add review, then instrument quality

Lightning Talks (Joint event with Richmond JUG)

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Description

If you are interested in getting exposed to a variety of software development related ideas in a condensed window, this is the event for you. Come and support your peers in the community as they give short interactive talks on topics they are passionate about.

Talks

Ask Your Developers If Elixir Is Right For You by Aleksandr Podyachev
- Abstract: Elixir is a functional programming language that compiles to Erlang’s BeamVM Bytecode. Elixir has a Ruby like syntax, but has some powerful features. It is able to be updated without restarting the VM. It is also good at handling faults using the let it fail philosophy that let’s it handle errors with grace. Tt is also great at handing concurrent workloads and I/O operations.
- Speaker Bio: Aleksandr Podyachev is a Software Developer at Booz Allen Hamilton. He has a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science from Virginia Commonwealth University. His interests include Elixir, Web Frameworks, Physics, and Game Development. He lives in Williamsburg, VA with his family playing Halo and thinking of new ideas to create.
- Links:
A Cheapskates Guide to AWS by Michael Soh

Rage Against the Python Machine: Building a New Generation of Node.js ML

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Description

When we hear ‘AI’ in 2025, we tend to think chatbots and API calls to massive Large Language Models. But powerful intelligence in your application doesn’t always require the network latency, cost, and conversational overhead of an LLM. This talk explores the “other” side of AI: silent, efficient machine learning that runs directly inside your JavaScript code.

Machine learning is no longer just the domain of Python developers. With a maturing ecosystem of JavaScript-based ML tools—from versatile libraries like Danfo.js for data modeling, to neural network builders like Synaptic.js, and working with Natural Language Processors using Natural.js—developers can now build and deploy powerful models directly within their existing JavaScript stacks. This talk explores how to bring intelligence into your JavaScript applications.

AI & the Cloud: Mastering Tenant Isolation in the LLM Era

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Description

How do tenant isolation strategies shape your AI and machine learning maturity? Join me to explore the real-world implications of silo, pool, and bridge models for LLMs and enterprise AI. Learn why the right isolation approach is critical for balancing innovation, cost, and data security as you scale AI in the cloud.

Speaker: Lucas Ward

Lucas Ward is a Senior DevOps Engineer and Manager at Ippon Technologies. As a passionate technologist, Lucas spends his days building the future, but his most important roles are that of a proud father and devoted husband. This balance fuels his “mad scientist” approach to innovation, where he blends creativity with a deep-seated desire to create a better world for the next generation.

Stay Ahead with Java’s Latest Features

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Java’s evolution is remarkable, and the leap from JDK 17 to today brings a wealth of powerful features to elevate your projects. Join us for an exciting session to explore select JEPs (Java Enhancement Proposals), diving into their use cases and practical benefits for your work or open-source initiatives.

What You’ll Learn: How to enable and utilize advanced Java features introduced in JDK 24. Real-world demonstrations of cutting-edge updates, including:

Hexagonal and Screaming Architecture in .NET

Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Hexagonal architecture is an architectural pattern designed to create loosely coupled application components that can seamlessly connect to their software environment using ports and adapters. This approach makes components interchangeable at any level and facilitates test automation, offering a robust alternative to the traditional layered architecture. In hexagonal architecture, each component communicates with others through well-defined “ports,” following a specified interface to ensure loose coupling and flexibility.

Screaming architecture, a concept introduced by Robert Martin (Uncle Bob), emphasizes that a software system’s structure should clearly communicate its purpose. Much like a building blueprint reveals the function of a structure, a well-designed software architecture should make its intent immediately apparent.

Harnessing the power of AI in Test-Driven Development

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Test-Driven Development (TDD) has long been recognized as a best practice in software development, allowing developers to write robust and reliable code with confidence.

In recent years, GitHub Copilot has emerged as a groundbreaking tool that promises to revolutionize the coding experience. This AI-powered companion aims to automate many aspects of coding, including code completion, debugging, and even testing.

In this talk, we’ll explore the exciting intersection of TDD and GitHub Copilot, showcasing how this powerful tool can be leveraged to accelerate your development workflow. We’ll discuss how Copilot’s AI-driven capabilities can assist in writing high-quality tests, ensuring that your code is robust and reliable from day one.

Ensemble (Mob) Programming

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Ensemble programming (sometimes informally called mobbing, mob programming or software teaming) is a software development approach where the whole team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer. This is similar to pair programming where two people sit at the same computer and collaborate on the same code at the same time. With mob programming, the collaboration is extended to everyone on the team, while still using a single computer for writing the code and inputting it into the code base.

Lightning Talks

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Talks

Lua: The Moon To Light An Embedded Programmer’s Path - Aleksandr Podyachev
Saving money on Cloud bills by moving from Postgres to DuckDB - Greg Kontos
Why You Shouldn’t Buy a Software Company. Or at least a warning. - Myles Marino
DIY OS DevOps - Alfred Gamulo
Dev Containers - Sam Sunvold
The Impacts of AI on Personal and Organizational Performance - Cody Frenzel

Call for Speakers
Please fill out the form below if you are interested in giving a lightning talk. Submissions will be open through October 16th.

Fundamentals of Homomorphic Encryption

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Homomorphic encryption is a groundbreaking technology that allows computations on encrypted data without needing to decrypt it, preserving privacy and security. This presentation will cover the fundamentals of homomorphic encryption, including basic concepts and potential applications. Additionally, we will demonstrate a practical case study showcasing how homomorphic encryption enables secure, collaborative analysis of sensitive data. Attendees will gain an understanding of the technology and its real-world implications through both theoretical insights and a detailed demo.

Automated Testing with Playwright

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Description

When developing any software application, testing is critical to success. Even if only done manually, applications must be tested before they can be shipped to customers. Playwright is an automation library from Microsoft that enables developers to build automated tests for web applications. These automated tests can allow teams to quickly regression test features, and validate new changes. Playwright has a robust set of features that include reports and other artifacts that teams can share with stakeholders. Playwright also has a low learning curve, and an intuitive feedback loop for development.

Getting from XKCD 1296 to Automated Versioning in the Pipeline

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Description

CI/CD is more than just automating the build. It is about consuming change and releasing meaningful and reproducible software bound to the automation in your pipeline. Hands off release automation begins with the commit. In this presentation we will start, in some ways where my previous presentation on GitLab CI/CD left off and we take a deep dive to look at how mixed technology tooling can improve you and your team’s commit habits, providing meaningful and semantic messages to enable end-to-end automation.

Why Rust?

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Hundreds of companies around the world are using Rust in production today for fast, low-resource, cross-platform solutions. Software you know and love, like Firefox, Dropbox, and Cloudflare, uses Rust.

In this talk, Robert will provide an overview of the features, benefits, and downsides of the Rust programming language, aiming to highlight its strengths and where it can fit into your organization’s tech stack.

Speaker: Robert Fontaine

Staff Software Engineer at GreyNoise Intelligence

SBOMs: What are they good for?

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Security bloggers and compliance folks love to talk about SBOMs (software bills of materials), but what is an SBOM? And more importantly, what is it good for? Come to this talk to learn to make and inspect SBOMs, and answer questions like: Are we running log4j? Are we running any open source code whose license could get us in trouble? Or maybe whose license terms recently changed? Is there a copy of this exact file anywhere in our production images? And many more.

Darting into Dart and Fluttering into Flutter

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Dart is a multiplatform, type safe language developed to be client optimized. It was created by Google as a replacement for JavaScript. Flutter is a framework that was developed for cross platform mobile applications. It has been extended to allow for the creation of web applications and desktop applications. Flutter uses Dart as the default language for Flutter projects.

Speaker: Aleksandr Podyachev

Aleksandr Podyachev is a Software Developer at Booz Allen Hamilton. He has a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science from Virginia Commonwealth University. His interests include Julia, Simulations, Physics, and Game Development. He lives in Williamsburg, VA with his family playing Halo and thinking of new ideas to create.

Entando Explored: Reduce Kubernetes Complexity for Micro Frontends & Services

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Description

RSVP to join us for Pizza, networking, and a talk from Anil Palat about building Enterprise Application Integration software using modern techniques.

Entando is a cutting-edge platform engineered to turbocharge the development of modern web applications. It’s based on a microservices architecture, allowing for scalable and flexible applications. What’s exciting for engineers is that Entando seamlessly integrates with Docker and Kubernetes, enabling familiar, containerized deployments. It also champions DevOps practices with robust CI/CD support, automating testing and deployment, while its clear separation of frontend and backend simplifies development. Entando is all about empowering software engineers to excel in the rapidly evolving landscape of modern application development.

Accelerate Your Developer Productivity with AI: Embrace the Future Now!

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Description

In recent years, the integration of AI into the software development landscape has revolutionized the way we work. With diverse fields such as computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, speech recognition, and reinforcement learning, AI offers a wealth of powerful tools and APIs that many of us have already started incorporating into our workflows. However, a groundbreaking advancement in deep learning known as large language models (LLMs) has ushered in a new era, exemplified by game-changing tools like Github Copilot and OpenAI ChatGPT that possess the ability to comprehend and generate code. The impact is profound.

Building a Baby Tracking App with React and AWS

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Description

This past year, Andrew Evans built an application to track his newborn’s regular care. Starting with a simple React app and a DynamoDB table, Andrew expanded the app to cover all facets of the baby’s care from daily feedings to height & weight. The app now includes integrations with Alexa via Home Assistant as well as statistical data graphing and tracking. In this meetup, Andrew will walk through how the app works, and how it leverages many AWS services to help him care for his new son.

From Sponge to Shark: A New Software Engineer's Agile Transformation Story

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Description

“Going the extra mile isn’t just what we do - it’s who we are”. It is from this mindset that Estes Express Lines was able to grow from the one-man trucking operation founded in 1931, to being the largest privately held freight transportation company in North America, however; rapid growth and success do not come without challenges. In order to continue supporting their scaling business and operations, Estes’s IT Department needed to evolve.

Micro-Frontends with Angular: How & When

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Anyone developing frontend applications over the past two years has no doubt heard about micro-frontends, an application architecture that allows developers to divide an application up into smaller individually deployable applications that together make a whole by leveraging many of the long popular principles surrounding microservices. In this talk, we’ll discuss what micro-frontends are and what they aren’t, as well as how and, more importantly, when to implement them. Examples will be provided using Angular and Webpack 5’s Module Federation, however prior knowledge of these technologies is not required.

API Design Fundamentals

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Description

At this point in history, few questions remain on implementing Application Programming Interfaces. Our API journey has spanned over five decades, during which we have iterated through dozens of implementations. That experience taught hard lessons that led to an industry-wide consensus of defaulting to REpresentational State Transfer and handling special cases with protocols such as ProtoBuff and Parquet.

This presentation will go beyond the well-established implementation details of REST and RPC to discuss how organization and structure impact the integrator’s Developer Experience. Some questions we’ll cover include:

Log4Shell - The Inside Story

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Description

On December 10th, 2021, the world learned about a critical zero-day vulnerability in Log4j circulated by the name “Log4Shell”. Apache gave Log4Shell a CVSS severity rating of 10, the highest available score. Rob will describe the Log4j defect and its implications, and how to protect against it and such defects in the future.

Added bonus: As an Apache committee member, Rob was privy to some details that were not publicly known and might share them if we ask nicely.

CICD with Gitlab

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Description

We will cover two topics during the event.

GitLab CI – Learn how easy it is to deploy your first App in the cloud.
To Be Continuous – Learn about creating modular and easy to use professional CI pipelines.

Speakers

Tim Stone: Senior Solution Architect at Kinsale Insurance with 20 years of experience in web application design for enabling business objectives with a diverse management and technology implementation background. From advanced cloud and Serverless implementation including on-prem server procurement, configuration and uptime resiliency. Specializing in the implementation of open source operating systems, servers, development tools, web accessibility and usability in a REST API-driven, HTML5, mobile ready, business environment.

Lightning Talks Are Back

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The October meetup will feature the following lightning talks. Please sign up for the event and come support these wonderful speakers from our community.

Your Commit Messages Suck / And Why You Should Care by Jonathan Pryor
- Abstract: Your useless commit messages are harming your understanding, sanity, and productivity. Join me in writing useful commit messages! https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-android/blob/main/Documentation/workflow/commit-messages.md
- Speaker Bio: .NET Android team Engineering Manager. Mono Project contributor. JNI Sorcerer.

How to Ship Less JavaScript - with Astro! by Michael Marino
- Abstract: What is Astro? Your new favorite static site generator, that’s what. “But what about the JavaScript?” you ask? Astro lets you write your websites in the language or library you feel most comfortable in - whether that’s React, Vue, Svelte, whatever - and compiles it down to just HTML & CSS so you ship 0kb JavaScript by default. Of course you can opt-in when you need to, and the dev server is based on Vite so you know it’s fast. Come find out how easy it can be to build fast websites, with tools built for the modern web!
- Speaker Bio: Michael Marino is a software engineer at Virginia Credit Union. Specializing in .NET and front-end web technologies and with a passion for open source, he’s here to teach you about some of the latest and greatest tools and techniques for developing faster, more reliable, and more user-friendly web applications.

Why You Should Isolate Your Web Apps During Automated Testing by Michael Marino
- Abstract: Everyone knows you should be testing your applications. But when all of your services are interconnected, how do you make sure that your tests are really testing your application, and not some other service? I’ll show you how to automate your testing to walk through your application like a real user would, and isolate it from the rest of your infrastructure.
- Speaker Bio: Michael Marino is a software engineer at Virginia Credit Union. Specializing in .NET and front-end web technologies and with a passion for open source, he’s here to teach you about some of the latest and greatest tools and techniques for developing faster, more reliable, and more user-friendly web applications.

Webhooks with Google Dialog Flow by Jainit Harsora
- Abstract: Google Dialog Flow is an Artificial Intelligence interface where we can design the system to have life like conversations. It uses natural language processing to understand and interact with the users for seamless communication. Along with some of its cool features, we can also validate complex/custom data given by the users using webhooks. This allows us to dissociate and associate back with Dialog Flow, strengthening the validation process.
- Speaker Bio: I am currently a Data Engineer at Terazo. As always interested in data, tools and technologies, I understand the importance of softwares and other applications that help regulate our daily lives. I am also pursuing Doctorate of Education in Computer Science researching around in the field of machine learning and natural language processing. With my knowledge and expertise gained over the years, I plan to give it back or contribute to the society in ways I can!

OAuth Best Current Practice for Public Clients by Kyle Almas
- Abstract: OAuth is complicated, and using it in native apps and SPAs is even worse. This talk will cover some current recommendations on using OAuth safely, and hopefully convince you that the complication is worth the reward.
- Speaker Bio: Lead Software Engineer at Terazo. Loves going on long runs, eating oysters and listening to audiobooks while he does the dishes.

G1GC: There and Back Again by Greg Kontos
- Abstract: A quick deep dive into the inner workings of the G1GC garbage collector. G1GC has been available since Java 7 and the default garbage collector since Java 9. This presentation aims for a basic understanding of how garbage collection works in Java and provides a few best practice settings for G1GC.
- Speaker Bio: Greg Kontos is a software engineer and architect with Ippon USA. In his long and illustrious career as an engineer he has created software in a variety of companies and roles. Today he continues to write software in a variety of roles for various companies.

Lessons from 20 years of Software Engineering

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Description

This is a presentation based on the hard lessons Adam has learned through his own mistakes. It came to be as part of an attempt to codify the soft skills that are most important to convey when mentoring software engineers. The presentation will include stories of how he messed up, and the changes that helped keep those mistakes from repeating. Adam hopes that these anecdotes can be useful to others, and invites the attendees to discuss, challenge, and dissect his conclusions.

Brainstorm Mini Project Ideas

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Description

Since mini-projects were a top choice among the activity ideas from the kickoff survey, we would like to come up with a concrete plan to get started.

The purpose of this session is to brainstorm ideas for mini-projects. We will discuss the following topics:

Project ideas
Personal goals
Community goals
Languages, frameworks and tools
Collaboration practices

Please come prepared with your ideas and suggestions.

To support maximum participation, we are switching back to a virtual format for this event.

The "Fake It" Pattern in TDD

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Description

You may have heard of Test Driven Development (TDD) and its benefits. You may even have tried using it with your hobby projects. But if you are like me, you probably decided it was too difficult to apply in real world projects.

Adopting powerful patterns such as “Fake It Until You Make It” by Kent Beck can ease some of that pain. In this session, we will learn a specific approach to implement this pattern. Then we will split up into small teams and practice using it in a coding kata exercise. All you will need is a web browser.

Code Katas - An Introduction

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Description

A big thank you to everyone who filled out the survey that was sent out after our first gathering of the year! It was pretty cool to see such an overwhelming response and we will kick off the February meetup with a review of the results.

As a warm up for the rest of 2022, we will spend a bit of time learning about an online code kata tool. https://cyber-dojo.org/ Following that, we will break out into small groups and practice doing a simple code kata. Finally, we will close out with a retro.

Craftsmanship on RVASDUG

Small AI, Big Impact: Why Surgical Precision Beats Computational Power

Description

Delivering Value through Software: A Practical Guide for Tech Leads

Description

A Year on the Blvd of Broken Hearts aka Security Lessons from Sh***y Dating Apps

Description

Evolving the Tree: Multi-Agent LLMs that Plan, Retrieve, and Ship

Description

Lightning Talks (Joint event with Richmond JUG)

Description

Talks

Rage Against the Python Machine: Building a New Generation of Node.js ML

Description

AI & the Cloud: Mastering Tenant Isolation in the LLM Era

Description

Speaker: Lucas Ward

Stay Ahead with Java’s Latest Features

Description

Hexagonal and Screaming Architecture in .NET

Description

Harnessing the power of AI in Test-Driven Development

Description

Ensemble (Mob) Programming

Description

Lightning Talks

Description

Fundamentals of Homomorphic Encryption

Description

Automated Testing with Playwright

Description

Getting from XKCD 1296 to Automated Versioning in the Pipeline

Description

Why Rust?

Description

Speaker: Robert Fontaine

SBOMs: What are they good for?

Description

Darting into Dart and Fluttering into Flutter

Description

Links

Speaker: Aleksandr Podyachev

Entando Explored: Reduce Kubernetes Complexity for Micro Frontends & Services

Description

Accelerate Your Developer Productivity with AI: Embrace the Future Now!

Description

Building a Baby Tracking App with React and AWS

Description

From Sponge to Shark: A New Software Engineer's Agile Transformation Story

Description

Micro-Frontends with Angular: How & When

Description

API Design Fundamentals

Description

Log4Shell - The Inside Story

Description

CICD with Gitlab

Description

Links

Speakers

Lightning Talks Are Back

Lessons from 20 years of Software Engineering

Description

Brainstorm Mini Project Ideas

Description

The "Fake It" Pattern in TDD

Description

Code Katas - An Introduction

Description