Join us as Dave walks through what it actually takes to build custom AI agents from scratch - not theory, but real projects he has shipped for his family, his work, and his community.

Dave shares how he used Kiro and Claude to solve real problems: normalizing flood-damaged library inventory data, automating AWS well-architected review collateral, building a room-cleaning task agent for his 12-year-old, planning family menus with Apple Calendar integration, and post-processing live concert recordings. You will learn how agents reason and take action, when to reach for a Kiro power versus a simpler automation, how MCP servers connect agents to real-world tools, and practical strategies for keeping agents accurate without burning through tokens.

Timestamps

0:00 Welcome & Introduction

7:57 Dave's Background and How He Got Started with Agents

• 13:00 The Library Flood Story - First Real-World Agent Use Case

How to find Dave:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-stauffacher/

Links from the show:

https://kiro.dev/

Join us as Dale Orders (AWS Community Builder, four-time All Builders Welcome participant from Australia) walks through everything you need to know about getting to AWS re:Invent completely free - flights, hotel, conference pass, and more.

Dale shares her personal journey from being rejected the first time to attending four AWS conferences through the All Builders Welcome grant program, including two as a mentor. You'll learn the exact eligibility criteria, what the grant actually covers (flights, accommodation, Uber vouchers, a prepaid Visa card, and a free AWS exam voucher), how to write an application that stands out, and the one thing that will get yours rejected immediately. Dale also covers what happens after you're accepted, how to handle the visa process if you're outside the US, and a full list of other tech conference grant programs beyond AWS. Applications typically open in late June - this episode is your head start.

Timestamps

0:00 Welcome & Introduction

4:11 What is the All Builders Welcome Program?

8:03 Dale's Journey: Rejected Once, Accepted Four Times

• 11:07 Eligibility Criteria & Who Should Apply

How to find Dale:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dale-orders/

Links from the show:

Join us as Dale Orders (AWS Community Builder, four-time All Builders Welcome participant from Australia) walks through everything you need to know about getting to AWS re:Invent completely free - flights, hotel, conference pass, and more.

Dale shares her personal journey from being rejected the first time to attending four AWS conferences through the All Builders Welcome grant program, including two as a mentor. You'll learn the exact eligibility criteria, what the grant actually covers (flights, accommodation, Uber vouchers, a prepaid Visa card, and a free AWS exam voucher), how to write an application that stands out, and the one thing that will get yours rejected immediately. Dale also covers what happens after you're accepted, how to handle the visa process if you're outside the US, and a full list of other tech conference grant programs beyond AWS. Applications typically open in late June - this episode is your head start.

Timestamps

0:00 Welcome & Introduction

4:11 What is the All Builders Welcome Program?

8:03 Dale's Journey: Rejected Once, Accepted Four Times

• 11:07 Eligibility Criteria & Who Should Apply

How to find Dale:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dale-orders/

Links from the show:

Join us as Mike Fiedler (AWS Hero, PyPI Safety & Security Engineer, Python Software Foundation) makes the case for eliminating long-lived credentials from your release workflow - before an attacker does it for you.

Mike walks through the real-world incidents that motivated Trusted Publishing, how OIDC-based short-lived tokens work under the hood, and the step-by-step process for setting it up in GitHub Actions. You'll learn how the 2024 Ultralytics compromise was forensically investigated thanks to Sigstore attestations, why that API token in your repo is just a password with a fancy hat, common pitfalls that will have you debugging for four hours, and why deleting your old token after setup is the step everyone forgets. PyPI went from 10% Trusted Publishing adoption in February 2024 to 36% today - this episode is how you become part of that number.

Timestamps

0:00 Welcome & Introduction

4:00 Mike's PyCon US World Tour Recap

8:00 The Scale of PyPI: 13B Requests/Day & 36% Adoption

• 12:09 Why Long-Lived Tokens Fail: Four Attack Models

How to find Mike:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/miketheman/

https://www.python.org/psf-landing/

Links from the show:

AI subscriptions are becoming as essential as internet bills - and just as expensive. The vBrownBag gang takes a hard look at the real cost of LLMs and what happens when the free ride ends.

Chris, Shala, and Damian dig into the Anthropic pricing plot twist, why AI data centers consume 10x the power of traditional racks, the DeepSeek distillation controversy, and what happens when the first hit's free phase ends. You'll learn practical strategies for reducing token burn, why local models are becoming a viable cost escape hatch, how to pick the right model for the right job, and why blindly using Opus for everything is lighting money on fire. This is the unfiltered conversation every AI practitioner needs to have - before the subsidies disappear and the real bills arrive.

Timestamps

0:00 Cold Open: Get These Darn Kids Off My Lawn

1:27 Chris's Big News: Leaving IBM for Six Feet Up

8:09 How Many AI Subscriptions Do You Have?

• 16:41 Stack Overflow Is Dead, Long Live Claude

Links from the show:

Join us as Brian Hough (CEO & Founder of Tech Stack Playbook, AWS Hero) gets brutally honest about the state of tech hiring and what skills developers actually need to survive - and thrive - in the AI era.

Brian walks through his frontline perspective on why tech layoffs aren't about skills - they're about market economics - and what that means for engineers trying to stay relevant. You'll learn which roles are actually hot right now (ML engineer, AI engineer, cloud architect, full stack dev), why companies want utility players who can build end to end, how to use social media and building in public to get quietly hired, and why the engineers who thrive will be those who can go from vision to deployed system. Brian also covers practical strategies for positioning yourself before the next wave hits, including using roadmaps as a personal curriculum and leveraging AI as a career accelerator rather than a threat.

Timestamps

0:00 Cold Open

0:11 Welcome & Introduction

2:16 Taking Vibe Code to Production-Grade Systems

3:01 Brian's Update: Dog Feeding & Building Internal Tools

8:05 Mac Maximus: Building on AWS EC2 Mac

9:49 Let's Get Into the Presentation

• 10:10 Agenda Overview

How to find Brian:

https://brianhhough.com/techstackplaybook

Links from the show:

https://roadmap.sh/python

https://roadmap.sh/ai-engineer

https://roadmap.sh/machine-learning

https://roadmap.sh/ai-agents

Andrew Brown (ExamPro) joins the vBrownBag crew to talk Gen AI skills, bootcamps, and whether vibe coding has made "learning to code" irrelevant. 🤖 Spoiler: it hasn't. Andrew walks through his upcoming Cloud Code Camp, demos agentic workflows he's built using Claude Desktop and Claude Code, and breaks down how to actually think about coordinator patterns, MCPs, and token-efficient development. 💡 The crew also gets into the "coders are obsolete" debate, AI-assisted JRPG game development, and whether AI certifications are worth your time in 2026. 🎮

Chapters:

• 00:00:01 - Andrew Brown, Classified Backstories, and Gen AI Fatigue

#GenAI #CloudComputing #AIAgents #ExamPro #vBrownBag

AWS Hero Stephen Sennett joins the vBrownBag crew to argue that foundational knowledge matters more now, not less. 🧠 They dig into why communication skills have become a functional technical requirement, 💬 how to build a T-shaped career that AI can't commoditize, and where LLMs still fall completely flat. 🤖 There's a live car wash prompt test 🚗, an honest AGI reality check, and a look at how junior and senior expectations are shifting in the cloud careers era. ☁️ Worth the watch for anyone mapping out their tech skills strategy for 2026.

Chapters:

• 00:01:35 - Why Foundational Knowledge Is Your Advantage in the AI Era

#CloudComputing #AWS #TechCareers #AISkills #vBrownBag

Join us for Part 1 of a 3-part series as Du'An Lightfoot (Senior AI Engineer at Akamai) breaks down everything you need to know to get started running AI models locally on your own hardware.

Du'An walks through the fundamentals of local AI - from understanding why you'd want to run models privately (data ownership, air-gapped environments, IP protection) to the hardware concepts that make it possible. You'll learn how inference actually works under the hood, why GPUs matter for AI workloads, how to choose and quantize models for your hardware, and how to get up and running with tools like Ollama. This is Part 1 of a 3-part series - future episodes cover serving models via API and distributing inference at the edge with Kubernetes.

Timestamps

0:00 Cold Open: Why Local AI?

0:26 Welcome & Introduction

1:30 Following Up on the Frontier Models Episode

2:25 Du'An's Background & AI Inference at Akamai

3:49 What If You Wanted to Own Your Data?

5:00 Local AI vs Cloud AI: A Different Layer of the Stack

5:47 Why GPUs Matter: The Nvidia Story

7:03 CPU vs GPU: Serial vs Parallel Processing

8:28 Model Weights & Quantization Explained

• 12:45 Choosing the Right Model for Your Hardware

How to find Du'An:

https://www.duanlightfoot.com/

https://github.com/labeveryday/

Links from the show:

https://ollama.com/

https://apxml.com/

https://localllm.in/

https://huggingface.co/

https://github.com/labeveryday/claude-put-in-work

https://claude.ai/

Join us as Kira Intrator (MIT-trained urban planner, systems thinker, and social impact technologist based in Geneva) makes the case that AI for Good isn't failing because of models - it's failing because of systems.

Kira walks through why so many AI pilots never reach deployment, drawing on her experience building tools scaled across 9,000 users, three ministries, and six countries in Central Asia. You'll learn the five factors that kill AI projects in the development sector, why 80% of clinical AI models are trained on data that can't be deployed outside Western contexts, and what the $2.6 trillion opportunity in developing markets actually requires to unlock. This episode is equal parts systems thinking masterclass and call to action - a rare perspective from someone who has moved AI from prototype to production in places most tech professionals never consider.

Timestamps

0:00 Welcome & Introduction

2:47 Kira's Background: MIT, Geneva, Central Asia

3:54 The Core Thesis: It's About Systems, Not Models

5:20 AI is Our Generation's Revolution

6:35 The $2.6 Trillion Opportunity

7:17 The 80% Western Data Problem

8:20 Why AI Projects Fail in Development: 5 Factors

9:28 Systems Mismatch & Low-Bandwidth Environments

9:52 Built for Pilot vs. Built for Deployment

• 10:29 Ownership, Economics & Sustainability

How to find Kira:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiraintrator/

Links from the show:

Infrastructure & Platforms

Anthropic Beneficial Deployments: https://www.anthropic.com/

Google Research Global South Labs: https://research.google/

Lelapa AI: https://lelapa.ai/

Microsoft AI for Good: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/ai-for-good

OpenAI Foundation: https://openai.com/

Research & Innovation Hubs

Data Science Africa: https://www.datascienceafrica.org/

Masakhane: https://www.masakhane.io/

Stanford HAI: https://hai.stanford.edu/

Wadhwani AI: https://www.wadhwaniai.org/

Global Governance & Policy

OECD AI Observatory: https://oecd.ai/

UNICEF Office of Innovation: https://www.unicef.org/innovation/

World Health Organization AI: https://www.who.int/

Funders & Philanthropies

Gates Foundation: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/

Patrick J. McGovern Foundation: https://www.mcgovern.org/

Conferences

AI for Good Global Summit (July 7-10, 2026 - Geneva): https://aiforgood.itu.int/

Data Science Africa 2026 (July 20-24 - Kampala, Uganda): https://www.datascienceafrica.org/

Deep Learning Indaba 2026 (August 2-7 - Lagos, Nigeria): https://deeplearningindaba.com/