Category: Programming

The Arc of AI conference’s workshop day: Monday, April 13, 2026

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date March 15, 2026

From April 13th through 16th — and a couple of days before, because it’s in Austin — I’m going to be at the Arc of AI conference! Over the next little while, I’m going to be posting articles about Arc of AI, in case you’re wondering what the conference is about and whether you should go.

In this article, I’ll talk about the workshop day and one of the workshops in particular.

Monday, April 13: The workshop day

Screenshot of the workshops schedule for Arc of AI’s workshop day. — Click to see the workshops at full size.

Prior to the main conference days (Tuesday, April 14 through Thursday, April 16), Arc of AI will hold its Workshop Day on Monday, April 13, where they’ll have six AI workshops:

Fundamentals of Software Engineering In the age of AI (Dan Vega and Nathaniel Schutta)
Building a Production-Grade RAG Pipeline (Wesley Reisz)
AI-Driven API Design (Mike Amundsen)
Creating AI Assisted Applications Using LangChain4j (Venkat Subramaniam)
Developing AI Applications with Agents, Rag, and MCP using Python (Brent Laster)
Tech Leadership in the Time of AI (Brian Sletten)

The Fundamentals of Software Engineering in the Age of AI workshop

One of the workshops I’m interested in is Nathaniel Schutta’s and Dan Vega’s Fundamentals of Software Engineering in the age of AI, which will be based on their recently-published (November 2025) O’Reilly book, Fundamentals of Software Engineering, but with the application of AI.

Here’s an excerpt from their workshop’s abstract:

This intensive workshop bridges the critical gap between what early-career developers learn in formal education and what they need to thrive in professional environments where human expertise and artificial intelligence increasingly collaborate. Based on our book “Fundamentals of Software Engineering,” we guide participants through a comprehensive journey from programmer to well-rounded software engineer equipped to leverage AI tools effectively while maintaining engineering fundamentals.

Participants will develop both technical capabilities and professional skills that remain relevant regardless of changing languages, frameworks, and AI capabilities. Through a balanced mix of conceptual teaching, collaborative discussions, and hands-on exercises with both traditional and AI-assisted approaches, attendees will work on realistic scenarios that reinforce practical application of these fundamental principles while developing discernment about when and how to integrate AI tools into their workflow.

Learnings:

Understanding the programmer to engineer transition and mindset shift

Developing advanced code reading techniques and comprehension strategies

Crafting maintainable, readable code that communicates intent

Applying software modeling concepts to visualize and plan complex systems

Implementing comprehensive automated testing strategies

Effective techniques for working with legacy codebases and existing systems

Benefits:

Students will understand the concepts and how to apply them right now cutting through the hype surrounding AI. With practical tips and guidance, they can jumpstart their use of AI across the software development lifecycle.

Who should attend:

Primarily developers and architects but ultimately anyone that’s struggling to understand how to apply AI to their world today while avoiding the pitfalls and rabbit holes.

I’m intrigued by this workshop, as it’s about the application of AI tools to the way software is built, which is pretty new turf for all of us. When I learned software development, there were already plenty of lessons from decades of developers’ experiences, and in my career, I and the rest of the industry picked up a couple decades’ more tips and tricks. But all that learning is from the “before times.” Right now, we’re not even five years into the post-ChatGPT era, and we’re only beginning to figure out how to write applications in the era of vibe coding (and remember, Andrej Karpathy coined the term barley over a year ago).

Since the workshop is based on the book, this video might give you an idea of what it’ll be like:

Want to find out more about and register for Arc of AI?

Once again, Arc of AI will take place from Monday, April 13 through Thursday, April 16, with the workshop day taking place on Monday, and the main conference taking place on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Want to see the schedule? Here’s the Arc of AI schedule page.
Want to know who’s speaking? Here’s the Arc of AI speakers page. Be sure to scroll all the way to the end, because you might see someone familiar!
Want to register? Here’s the Arc of AI registration page.

Arc of AI tickets are BOGO!

From Arc of AI’s registration page:

You read that right! For each conference ticket you purchase, you get one free ticket. This applies only to conference tickets and not for workshops.

Tags #ArcOfAI

Artificial Intelligence Conferences Meetups Programming What I’m Up To

I’m speaking at “Arc of AI” in Austin, Texas — April 13 – 16!

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date March 10, 2026

I just got added to the list of speakers who’ll be presenting at the Arc of AI conference, which takes place April 13 – 16 in Austin, Texas!

Arc of AI is the premier AI conference for deep technical talks on everyone’s favorite two-letter field. If you’re one of these kinds of people interested in AI…

Software developer
Architect
Data engineer
Technology leader

…and you want to learn the latest strategies, tools, and practices for building AI-powered applications and boosting your development workflows, with AI, this is your conference!

The early bird ticket price is $799, but that lasts only until this Saturday, March 14th. It goes up to $899 until April 4th, after which the price becomes $999.

Tampa Bay AI Meetup is a community partner of Arc of AI, and we can help you save $50 off the ticket price! Just use the discount code TampaBayAIMeetup when checking out.

There’s another way to attend Arc of AI for even less: come to this Thursday’s Tampa Bay AI Meetup, where we’re covering vibe coding, and find out how you can win a ticket to Arc of AI for FREE!

I’ll be writing more about Arc of AI soon — watch this space!

Tags #ArcOfAI

Programming What I’m Up To

Today’s big win

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 3, 2026

I can’t go into details, but those of you who know your algorithms know how big a deal this is. Better still, the client’s happy.

Artificial Intelligence Process Programming

Projects I’m vibe coding, projects I’m grind coding, and projects in-between

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date January 30, 2026

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about how coding happens on a spectrum whose opposite ends are:

Vibe coding, a term coined by Andrej Karpathy, is where where developers use natural language prompts to have LLMs or LLM-based tools generate, debug, and iterate on code. Vibe coding is declarative, because you describe what you want.
Grind coding, my term for traditional programming, where you specify how a program performs its tasks using a programming language. Grind coding is imperative, because you specify how the thing you want works.

I myself have been writing code for different purposes, on different parts of this spectrum (see the diagram at the top of this article for where they land on the spectrum):

The Tampa Bay Tech Events utility: This is the Jupyter Notebook I use to gather event info from online listings and build the tables that make up the event listings I post every week here on Global Nerdy. I wrote the original code myself, but I’ve called on Claude to take the tedious stuff, including analyzing the obfuscated HTML in Meetup’s event pages to find the tags and classes containing event information.
MCP server for my current client: This is a project that started before I joined, and was written using a code generation tool. The client is a big platform connected to some big organizations; my job is to be the human programmer in the loop.
Picdump poster: Every week, I post “picdump” articles on the Global Nerdy and Accordion Guy blogs. Over the week, I save interesting or relevant images to specific folders, and the picdump poster utlity builds a blog post using those images. It’s a low-effort way for me to assemble some of my most-read blog posts, and it’s more vibe-coded than not, especially since I don’t specialize in building WordPress integrations.
Copy as Markdown: Here’s an example of using vibe coding as a way to have custom software built on demand. I wanted a way to copy text from a web page, and then converting that copied text into Markdown format. This one was purely vibe-coded; I simply told Gemini what I wanted, and it not only generated the code for me, but also gave me instructions on how to install it.

Artificial Intelligence Programming

Grind coding, vibe coding, and everything in between

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date January 19, 2026

If we have a term like “vibe coding,” where you build an application by describing what you want it to do using natural language (like English) and an LLM generates the code, we probably should have an equal opposite term that’s catchier than “traditional coding,” where you build an application using a programming language to define the application’s algorithms and data structures.

I propose the term grind coding, which is short, catchy, and has the same linguistic “feel” as vibe coding.

Having these two terms also makes it clear that there’s a spectrum between these two styles. For instance, I’ve done some “mostly grind with a little vibe” coding where I’ve written most of the code and had an LLM write up some small part that I couldn’t be bothered to write — a regular expression or function. There’ve also been some “most vibe with a little grind” cases where I’ve had an LLM or Claude code do most of the coding, and then I did a little manual adjustment afterwards.

Artificial Intelligence Programming Reading Material

More notes

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date January 13, 2026

Because some people asked, and because I’m going to be busy for the next day (I’ll explain later), here are more shots from recently-added pages to my notebook. These are notes on RAG and LangChain, taken and condensed from a couple of books, a couple of online sources, and my own experimenting with code. Enjoy!