In this workshop we'll take a tour of applied AI from the perspective of front end developers, zooming in on the emerging best practices when it comes to working with LLMs to build great products. This workshop is based on learnings from working with the OpenAI API from its debut last November to build out a working MVP which became PowerModeAI (A customer facing ideation and slide creation tool).
In the workshop they'll be a mix of presentation and hands on exercises to cover topics including:
- GPT fundamentals
- Pitfalls of LLMs
- Prompt engineering best practices and techniques
- Using the playground effectively
- Installing and configuring the OpenAI SDK
- Approaches to working with the API and prompt management
- Implementing the API to build an AI powered customer facing application
- Fine tuning and embeddings
- Emerging best practice on LLMOps

In this workshop, we'll take a tour through the most effective approaches to building out scalable UI components that enhance developer productivity and happiness :-) This will involve a mix of hands-on exercises and presentations, covering the more advanced aspects of the popular styled-components library, including theming and implementing styled-system utilities via style props for rapid UI development, and culminating in how you can build up your own scalable custom component library.
We will focus on both the ideal scenario---where you work on a greenfield project---along with tactics to incrementally adopt a design system and modern approaches to styling in an existing legacy codebase with some tech debt (often the case!). By the end of the workshop, you should feel that you have an understanding of the tradeoffs between different approaches and feel confident to start implementing the options available to move towards using a design system based component library in the codebase you work on.
Prerequisites:
- Familiarity with and experience working on large react codebases
- A good understanding of common approaches to styling in React

In this workshop, we’ll look at some of the approaches and techniques that can be applied when making refactors or adding new features to a legacy React codebase to bring it inline with the latest approaches. We’ll cover topics such as how to use React Hooks to share component logic in a way that will allow reuse in class components; how to incrementally introduce other patterns to a React Redux app; and how to build in flexible UI components via abstractions where we are tied to some global CSS or a component library. Along the way, we’ll touch on many React patterns and state management approaches with the ultimate aim of being able to evaluate these options and let our requirements drive the architecture in moving towards a more robust and maintainable codebase.