Jason Haley

Ramblings from an Independent Consultant

Boston Code Camp 37 Session

Yesterday was Boston Code Camp 37. I spent the majority of the day talking with people in the community I haven’t seen for awhile, as well as some new people I hadn’t met before. I only made it to one session (Juan Pablo Garcia Gonzalez - Agentic AI: Unlocking the Power of Multi-Agent Systems), which was good and got me thinking about how to rewrite my demos in my talk to use agents. It was nice to see a good amount of new (and younger) people attending the code camp. We always have a lot of student volunteers from Curry College that help out and the last couple of years I’ve noticed some of them still continue to attend even after they have graduated. After having a full day of socializing, I realized that I must be an introvert because my energy was gone. Talk: Using …

Posted by Jason on Sunday, November 24, 2024

Techbash 2024

This week I presented at the TechBash conference in Pocono Manor, PA. All the resources for the conference are available on the TechBash GitHub repo. Below are links to my presentations specifically. It was great to see companies sending their employees to conferences again. This was my first time at TechBash, and I finally got to meet Alvin Ashcraft in person (the Morning Dew). I also met a bunch of people from the Philly area and around Pennsylvania, but there were attendees from all over-even a couple of guys from Panama! Talk: Getting Started with RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) The presentation pdf can be downloaded here. Talk: What is the Azure Dev CLI (AZD) and How Can You Use It? The presentation pdf can be downloaded here. If you have a questions or comments, please message …

Posted by Jason on Friday, September 27, 2024

Wisconsin .NET User Group

Last Thursday night I spoke at the Wisconsin .NET User Group near Milwaukee, WI. I was nice to meet so many .NET developers interested in RAG and AI. To carry on the tradition from my Memphis talk, I gave the presentation a local look using images related to Milwaukee generated from Bing/create. Talk: Getting Started with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) The presentation pdf can be downloaded here. One of my demos failed to deploy before the talk, but I don’t think it was missed due to having so many good questions. It was really nice meeting a user group with so many core members. Plus the pizza was really good! Also, I mentioned it to someone at that talk - keep an eye out for this repo to show up: https://github.com/dotnet/eShopSupport and here is the talk by Steven Sanderson …

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, August 13, 2024

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): …

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Demo Review: Chat Copilot

Demo Review: Chat Copilot This is the fifth C# demo in The RAG Demo Chronicles (Blog Series) and has the most extensive use of Semantic Kernel out of all the demos I’ve reviewed. The use of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is different with this project than the other demos I’ve reviewed - mainly because RAG is just one of its features. With this demo, I also took the time to configure the optional authentication so I could play with the MS Graph plugin … and WOW! Just adding the web searcher and MS Graph plugin really make this a powerful demo app. It gives me a lot of ideas for my own projects. Demo Details Item of Interest As of 6/9/2024 Number of Contributors: 45 Date repo created: 4/2/2023 Update within last month: Yes Link to documentation: Microsoft Learn Page …

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, June 18, 2024

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 …

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, May 7, 2024

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 …

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, April 23, 2024

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 …

Posted by Jason on Sunday, March 24, 2024

Demo Review: Azure Vector Search AI Assistant

Demo Review: Azure Vector Search AI Assistant This is the fourth C# demo in The RAG Demo Chronicles (Blog Series) and is the first demo so far that saves its history to a database. This Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) demo is a little different than the last three because it primarily uses data from a database as the content to search instead of documents. It also uses Semantic Kernel more than other demos have, which is neat to see too. This demo has me thinking about the many times in my career when executives or product managers have wanted a tool easy enough to use to create their own reports. Certainly, gets the ideas flowing! Demo Details NOTE: The demo is on the cognitive-search-vector branch Item of Interest As of 2/27/2024 Author: 3 Date created: 5/7/2023 Update within last …

Posted by Jason on Monday, February 26, 2024

Demo Review: Azure Search OpenAI Demo (Python)

Demo Review: Azure Search OpenAI Demo (Python) This is the last in the family of Azure Search OpenAI demos that I’m covering (I’m not looking at the Java version). I reviewed the C# version and the Javascript/Typescript version earlier this month. Of the three I’m covering, this one seems to be the most active, popular and have the most documentation. At the beginning of this month, the Hack Together: The AI Chat App Hack used this demo at the sample repository, marking it as a solid reference implementation for RAG. NOTE: That event included several RAG themed sessions that were recorded and are available on a youtube playlist. In case you are wondering what the differences are between the demos (besides the language they are written in), here is a feature comparison of …

Posted by Jason on Friday, February 23, 2024

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ABOUT ME
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Jason is an experienced developer and solutions architect focused on helping companies provide real business value with custom software development using the Microsoft stack of technologies. This includes C#, .NET, Azure and AI services. In 2024, Jason was awarded a Microsoft MVP in AI - highlighting his latest focus on AI and specifically Generative AI technologies in real world business applications. The prior seven years, he was a Microsoft Azure MVP.

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Jason Haley MVP