SF Apache DataFusion Meetup · Aug 13 ↗
Alexy is going
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1st Spark meetup in the world ↗
The First Spark
The First Spark Meetup in the World
The first Spark meetup began in a San Francisco room on December 12, 2011. Fifteen years later, its recordings show the starting point of a worldwide developer community.
I’m going to the San Francisco Apache DataFusion Meetup
On Thursday, August 13, the San Francisco data community is gathering for an evening of Apache DataFusion, Rust, Arrow, lakehouse systems, and database infrastructure. I’ll be there—join us.
Rust AI Begins recordings are live ↗
New on FunctionalTV
At the Gemma 4 Launch, Under the Pyramid
On April 17, I went to the Gemma 4 launch: SF Edition at the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. It was one of those Bay Area AI evenings where the setting does half the storytelling before anyone says a word: the sharp geometry of the Pyramid above us, the city outside, and inside, a room full of people building what the next turn of open models will make possible. I shot the event as I usually do, moving between the formal moments and the in-between ones: people arriving, conversations for
AgStack
AgStack, a project of The Linux Foundation, is building the world’s largest and first open-source digital public infrastructure for global agriculture. With 46 communities/repositories and over 1,500 commits from a growing contributor base in the last two years, it provides a community-driven stack for geospatial identity and decentralized data pipelines. By establishing a common "operating system" through active projects like the Asset Registry and OpenAgri, AgStack breaks down data silos to ac
Palefire
Pale Fire combines the use of Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs (semantic artifacts) to support navigation through collections. Situated in the research area of Retrieval Augmented Generation, this workflow focuses on creating local, adaptable chatbots. Based on the EverythingData tool suite on the backend, GhostWriter provides an interface that enables querying and “chatting” with a collection. Applied iteratively, the workflow supports the information needs of researchers when interac
Thor Whalen
Thor is a fascinating serial founder who built a company to understand soundscapes and now is at the frontier of visualization with AI. Alexy interviewed him at PyBay 2025, where Thor accompanied his cofounder Nikita Rokoytan, presenting Cosmograph.
Nikita Rokotyan, Cosmograph
Nikita is a designer, developer, and all-around visualization artist at scale. He built Cosmograph, the fastest graph visualization engine in the browser. Nikita presented it at PyBay 2025, where we interviewed him.
Semantic Croissant
Slava Tykhonov is an innovator in Graph+AI space for decades. He’s been a lead R&D engineer, and now an ambassador, of Dataverse — a distributed public repository of datasets enabling science across the world. Now Slava is a Head of AI and Interoperability at CODATA, the International Science Council, a European consortium building the infrastructure of data and AI for scientific ecosystems. In this interview, we go over various technologies that form the semantic layer for Graph AI. First of
Guido van Rossum By the PyBay
Alexy Khrabrov interviews Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, at the 10th PyBay conference in San Francisco.
AI Agents SF #7: Coding Agents
Our 7th AI Agent Meetup is sponsored by Neo4j and the AI Alliance. The SF AI Agent Meetup is a new & growing community for AI Agent Developers, Engineers, UX, Ops, and Applied Researchers exploring and leading the evolution of AI agents. Whether you're building autonomous systems, experimenting with LLM-powered assistants, or integrating AI agents into real-world applications, this meetup is the place to discover, share insights, and collaborate with your peers. Join us for talks, demos, discus
Graph Exchange, May 2025
We at Neo4j have a tradition to host a Graph Gathering, a chamber event for the global thought leaders in graphs and AI. It’s a special day run as an unconference. There are usually two, one in the Spring, one in the Fall. In 2024, I’ve attended the Spring one as a dinner guest, and the Fall one all day as a new node. This Spring, the stars have not aligned for the traditional gathering, and we decided to try something new — a public conference+unconference! I’ve put together the program from
Michele Catasta, President of Replit
Michele got it all — a strong guy, an Italian, and a veteran of Machine Learning, AI and Data! And he is a great listener and a super fun guy to talk to. When inviting Michele to our Fika series, I found an old thread, from 2015, when I visited Florence for WWW conference and met Michele, then a student of Computer Science and a user of Scala, where I ran the biggest meetup in the world. We talked about Amazon Mechanical Turk (I used to be at Amazon). Thus the recent spectacular success of Repl
Richard Sikang Bian: OSPO at Ant Group
At the Linux Foundation Member Summit in Napa, I’ve been fortunate to meet Richard, an OSS lead at the Ant Group. Richard is a real OG when it comes to OSS strategy and developer relations. He started the OSPO at Ant and drives a multitude of impactful OSS projects. At the LFMS, Richard co-presented on a graph framework that allows for deep dives into GitHub ecosystem. Richard proves that technology is a people’s business first and foremost. You have to like and understand people, and everyth
Ben Hindman, Founder of Reboot.dev
Ben is a real OG when it comes to distributed systems. He is the creator of Mesos, a pioneering orchestration framework that was used to power Twitter and Apple at scale. I’d first heard about Ben from Marius Eriksen, who used it at Twitter to build a series of workflows and functional concepts, most famously, Your Server is a Function. Ben proceeded to cofound Mesosphere, that paved the way for Kubernetes. The ambition to structure complex workflows in rigorous ways was there, with DCOS, a Dat
Self-Expanding Graphs
We are happy to publish the video from Bay Area AI of a talk by Cameron Pfiffer from .txt. Cameron is a developer advocate at .txt, the startup that does structured output with Outlines. He was a regular at Bay Area AI and he’s a really cool, knowledgeable and funny guy (apparently an alpaca rancher at some point!). After following him for a while I’ve invited Cameron to do a joint meetup with Charles Frye of Modal, our OG By the Bay, and they both really liked the idea! Charles invited Neural
Kumo AI+Relational Workshop at AWS
On Wednesday I’ve attended a workshop at AWS hosted by Kumo. The founder and CEO, Jure Lescovec, a legendary graph guy, lead it himself. Jure gave a talk on Graph Transformers. They are solving the positional encoding for graphs, bringing all the machinery we have to bear on graphs. The graphs are composed from customer tables. We had a hands-on experience running Kumo on some generic data with customers, stocks, and trades. It was really easy to identify primary keys linking tables and formatt
FOSDEM and AI Plumbers
I’ve attended FOSDEM for the very first time this February. It’s the biggest open-source conference in the world, and completely free. It occupies the campus of Brussels Free University. Because there are no tickets, there are also no badges. You don’t know where anybody is from until you hear them speak. Most languages of Europe are represented. Little gangs of nerds arrive from Germany or Slovakia. French is spoken in abundance and from all French-speaking corners of the Earth. I spent the mo
OSS Summit Europe 2024, Vienna
Keeping it real with top DevReals We had a great time in Vienna, and OSS AI track had some fantastic presentations by European developers. Here’s two interviews, with Stephen Batifol, Zilliz, and Zoran Jovanivic, Volvo Cars. Stephan placed RAG into an OSS data pipeline architecture we know and love. That aligns with the AI By the Bay approach where we consider AI as a part of a scalable data engineering approach. It’s great to see Milvus at the heart of it. Interview with Stephen Batifol on f
DSPy and Graphs: Making AI Real
Bay.Area.AI meetup at GitHub, September 12, 2024 We had a great meetup following the AI Conference. Neo4j and the AI Alliance were top sponsors, and lots of my colleagues from both were there. I was happy to man the Neo4j booth as the new AI Community Architect. All photos from the meetup: https://www.f.photo/Meetups/Bay-Area-AI/Bay-Area-AI-20240912 The meetup theme was rigorous OSS AI engineering, beyond the prompting. Our first talk was on DSPy, a framework for programming, not prompting,
Secure AI Models and Knowledge Graphs
Bay.Area.AI meetup at the new AWS GenAI Loft, October 1, 2024 We’ve been very fortunate to get an invitation from our AWS friends to open the new AWS GenAI Loft with our meetup! We had a great program, consisting of two deep dives: Knowledge Graphs with WikiHow and Secure AI Model Deployment with Google OSS and OpenSSF. KG-enabled AI workflows Chris Rec, WhyHow In this talk, we’ll explore how knowledge graphs can supercharge your AI workflows. We'll demonstrate entity and triple extraction
Making OSS AI a Reality for Developers
This sounds self-evident — Open-Source AI is software, and software is written by developers. It used to be written by developers alone, but now we have copilots and AI-native coding becomes the norm going forward. Still the ultimate users of AI are people, the organizations that build and deploy it are structured as research, engineering, product and MLOps teams. And the way we build AI starts with wrapping our minds around it. There was nothing comparable with the tsunami of information washi
