HI!
Over the past year, we’ve explored AI from many different angles. This time, we’re putting the hype aside and focusing on practical engineering: how AI is already helping developers review code, build deterministic workflows, and securely access private company knowledge.
You are welcome to Applied AI focused event on July 2, 18:30, at Go Cardless office – Marijas iela 2a, Novira Plaza, entrance “East”, 3rd floor.
Please, register here.
Agenda for “Applied AI” focused 155th DevClub.lv
- Oskars Pakers from Dativa will give a talk “Private GPT: running AI on our own metal”.
Like most teams we use cloud AI — OpenAI, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code. But many of our clients are state institutions that need self-hosted, confidential solutions, so we took the extra step of building our own in-house AI ecosystem to learn on and host some of our internal solutions — knowledge that lets us later offer something similar to them. This isn’t a product pitch — it’s a build log. I’ll cover what a local, confidential AI platform actually takes: the hardware (why VRAM is the number that matters), serving models with vLLM and LiteLLM, and the RAG pipeline and MCP servers we built on top. Plus the lessons along the way — why agentic tool-calling is the natural evolution of classic RAG, why we cycled through gpt-oss, Gemma, and Qwen, and why evaluating an agent is genuinely hard — and where we’re heading next with MCP-based automated workflows.
(Language – English)
Tags: LLM, vLLM, RAG, MCP, self-hosted AI, GPU
Oskars Pakers is the CTO of Dativa, a 200+ person software company building large-scale govtech for state institutions. A hands-on engineer and architect, his focus is evolving Dativa’s technology to meet client needs — self-hosted, confidential AI being one of the latest chapters. - Edvins Antonovs from Dynatech will give a talk on “Frontend Engineering in the AI Era”.
AI can build a working component in thirty seconds. So what is left for the people who used to build them? This talk looks at how the frontend job is changing. The short version: the typing got cheap, and the thinking got expensive. We will look at what AI is still bad at, like taste, judgement, and caring about the real person on the other side of the screen, and what frontend engineers should actually do to stay valuable. No hype, just an honest look and some practical advice.
(Language- English)
Tags: AI, Frontend, Career
Edvins Antonovs has over 12 years of commercial experience working as a front-end engineer, predominantly in product companies, scale-ups, and early-stage startups. During his career he has built products from scratch, led front-end teams, posted memes, and scaled large front-end applications. He enjoys writing blog posts about front-end engineering and learning in public in his digital garden. - Roberts Pumpurs from Modiqo will give a talk “Stop Teaching Agents the Same Workflow Twice”.
A practical look at how successful AI-agent runs can become reusable infrastructure instead of disappearing into transcripts. Roberts will explain why context windows are not workflow engines; how prompts, memory, skills, tools, MCP capabilities, and executable workflows differ; and how Rote turns agent traces into durable procedural memory by capturing real tool calls, retries, assumptions, judgment points, and outputs, then deriving deterministic executables that future agents can call instead of relearning the same procedure.
(Language – English)
Tags: AI Agents, Agent Infrastructure, Workflow Automation, Developer Tools, Rust
Roberts Pumpurs is a software engineer specialising in Rust, blockchain protocol engineering, distributed systems, and AI-assisted development. He has over 7 years of development experience, primarily in the blockchain industry working across the stack from smart contracts to p2p networking and consensus engines. Now he works at an AI startup building Rote, a tool for creating deterministic executables from agent traces – “Modiqo”.
Videos from previous events you can find at our homepage and our YouTube channel. The best way to be informed about new videos is to Subscribe to our YouTube channel.
If you have any challenge where you are looking for external help, remember – Nine Brains can help you find world-class trainers and consultants almost for any need people in software development could have. Contact us to get to know more!
GoCardless is a global fintech building the world’s bank payment network, processing over US$130B annually for 100,000+ businesses. Our teams also use AI and open banking to increase payment success and reduce fraud, creating complex engineering challenges at a massive scale. We’re solving problems that affect how money moves globally. Join us to build the future of payments!
– Data Analyst II
– Software Development Engineer – Payment Intelligence team
– Ruby Software Development Engineer
Com Tec Co (CTCo) is a global digital services provider with 600+ experts driving digital transformation across industries.
We’d love to connect with tech professionals who are passionate about innovation and growth:
– Full-Stack Developer
– Java Developer
– Delivery DevOps Engineer
At Dativa, we deliver secure and scalable IT solutions trusted by governments and enterprises, backed by deep expertise in custom software and e-services development. Join us!
Trading since 2017, Gravity Team is one of the leading crypto market makers and liquidity providers, with cumulative trading volumes to date in excess of $400 billion. Join our community of innovators, problem solvers and owners who apply scientific discovery techniques to make crypto markets a better place for everyone.
Levelpath is on a bold mission to revolutionize procurement software—and make it delightful. Founded in 2022, we’re a AI-powered platform tackling real challenges in the $11.5B (and growing) market. Our engineering team builds cutting-edge solutions that unify workflows, data, and automation for a seamless business experience. Backed by top Silicon Valley VCs and a proven founding team, we’re hiring developers who thrive on solving hard problems and pushing boundaries to transform the enterprise.
– Senior Security Engineer
Thanks to our sponsors for supporting DevClub.lv events:
