Jason Haley

Ramblings from an Independent Consultant

Boston Azure June 2024

Last night was the Season of AI presentation. We started with Bill Wilder presenting the fundamentals of Generative AI and quick introduction to Azure AI Studio, then I finished up with a .NET code walkthrough implement Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) using Semantic Kernel. It was nice to see a lot of regular faces and meet several new people. Demo Code The demo code is on my GitHub repo BostonAzure-June2024 under a subdirectory. The code is setup as the beginning of the demo (ie. simple echo client/api implementation), you’ll find the steps I used to progressively create the demo in the demo-script.md file. Since I ran of time to do the last “bonus step”, you’ll find it at the end of that script along with the full content of the final code (shown below): …

Memphis Azure User Group

Last Thursday night I spoke at the Memphis Azure User Group, it was nice to meet some people in person and see how excited others are about finding valuable ways to work GenAI into their applications. I also gave my slide deck a completely new look (Memphis themed via Bing/create): Talk: Getting Started with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) The presentation pdf can be downloaded here. Since the presentation was hybrid, there were not as many questions as the other two times I’ve given the talk … or that is my guess at the reason why it was so quiet. That also means I should have put that third demo back in the presentation (I took a demo out after the first version of the talk since there were so many questions and needed to free up time for Q&A). Next time I’ll …

My Session at Boston Global Azure Bootcamp

This past weekend was Boston Azure’s Edition of the annual Global Azure Bootcamp. This year we focused on AI and hands-on-labs. The odd thing about when we scheduled the meetup was we had a lot of people sign up for the group just to rsvp - before most of the existing members had gotten around to rsvp’ing. We did not expect that. It is a mystery as how they heard about the event so quick. We only had one room reserved, so there really was a hard cap on how many people we could let in. There were a couple of challenges to start the day off with: getting into the room (not uncommon with Saturday events) and finding an availble room with tables and outlets (necessary for hands-on-labs). However, once we got those resolved it was pretty smooth sailing from there. It did end up …

Boston Code Camp 36 Sessions

Yesterday was Boston Code Camp 36 hard to believe it has been going on for 20+ years now. For me it is one of those regular events for the Boston tech community that is well worth spending a Saturday attending. It was nice to see a lot of regular faces and meet some new people. Talk: Getting Started with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) I was surprise the room was full, it was good to see so many developers, students and architects - mostly with .NET backgrounds looking to get started with RAG applications. The presentation pdf can be downloaded here. I am already making changes to it for the next time. I had some good questions and also noticed there are some concepts that are more confusing and need explained better. Talk: Azure OpenAI Patterns for Software Engineers This was my …