This workshop will give you an understanding of how to build with GenAI as a developer. We will go from making a simple API call to an LLM to building interfaces and data pipelines to feed context to your bot. Over 8 hours we will build an application that will give you a basis for creating bots that work with your data and you will leave with a bit of inspiration for what else you can manifest with GenAI.

Prerequisites

We will be working with Google's Gemini models, so you will need a Google account and to be able to generate an API key from Google AI Studio. We will also use DataStax Astra DB, please sign up for a free DataStax account beforehand.

Target audience

If you're looking to get started developing with LLMs and want to learn the fundamentals, this workshop is for you. We will write the code in JavaScript, but the lessons are universal across programming languages.

What you’ll learn

We'll dig into topics ranging from the basics of interacting with LLMs, to prompt engineering, the problems with LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic applications.

Computer setup

We will use GitHub Codespaces for the practical parts of the workshop, all you will need is a GitHub account and a web browser.