Events

AgentCon / MCPCon North America 2026

CFP submitted to share boots-on-the-ground findings from a cohort of over 100 open-source mentees across 14 teams. The cohort generated 651 reviewed contributions and over 16,000 Discord messages -- and the exit survey revealed a sharp tension: 71% of participants used AI to augment their work, 58% wanted clearer guidelines, and AI assistance was the lowest-rated part of the experience. The talk covers how AI helped participants stay engaged, how it made skill-gap identification harder, and why MCP-enabled agentic tooling is reshaping what open-source mentorship needs to look like.

AgentCon / MCPCon North America

Berkeley AI Hackathon 2026

Attended as a Deepgram sponsor and ran a workshop on building a fully functional voice AI agent from scratch. Covered the full real-time loop: audio capture, low-latency transcription, LLM reasoning with context, and streaming text-to-speech back fast enough to feel like a real conversation. Dug into the design decisions that matter most in production: interruption handling, conversation state, and keeping latency low. Attendees left with a clear mental model of how voice agents work under the hood and a working architecture they could ship at the hackathon that same day.

Berkeley AI Hackathon

RainbowGram Pride Presentation — Deepgram All Hands

A Pride month session for the Deepgram all-hands focused on practical allyship in distributed teams, not policy. Covering five concrete daily habits any colleague can adopt immediately: names and pronouns, navigating questions, confidentiality, speaking up when queer colleagues are not in the room, and the cumulative weight of inclusive language. The session opened with a moment of genuine celebration of Pride's origins, addressed the current landscape honestly, and closed with a tiered action list and a reframe: treating queer colleagues as simply normal gives back energy that would otherwise be spent just existing in those spaces.

UCLA x OutInTech: Building a Real AI Agent

A talk on building a real AI agent — not a chatbot — as a solo developer with ADHD. I walked through the five core pieces of an agent (brain, identity, hands, memory, ears), demystified common overcomplication around MCP, hooks, and gateways, and shared the safety framework that lets me grant broad filesystem and repo access without it being reckless. Built solo on Claude Code with MCP servers, a Discord gateway listener, and an Electron desktop app. The talk ended with a four-step starter kit attendees could build that same evening.

Watch on YouTube  ·  OutInTech

CascadiaJS 2026

My first event in the Seattle tech scene. A wonderful couple of days in the Pacific Northwest JavaScript community, and a great chance to catch up with Amanda, Head of DevRel at Vapi (and a Deepgram partner!).

CascadiaJS