For our May meetup we'll be at Redis' offices near London Bridge, with two fantastic guest speakers. Guy Royse is back in town, and this time he's talking about finding your meme twin using embeddings and vector databases, and Yulia Samoylova will be joining us to talk about APM and observability in .NET.
Doors 6:30pm, first talk starts at 7pm, our hosts at Redis will be providing drinks and snacks, and we'll be heading to the pub afterwards to continue the conversation.
HOW TO FIND US: Look for the Barrowboy & Banker pub, which is on the ground floor of Bridge House opposite London Bridge station. The entrance is the door immediately to the right of the pub.
Yulia Samoylova: APM & Observability in .NET: Making Sense of Logs, Metrics, and Traces
Ever spent hours chasing down a performance issue with no clear root cause? Without the right visibility, it’s easy to miss what’s really going on beneath the surface.
In this session, we’ll unpack why observability is essential for modern .NET applications and what APM actually does to help you stay ahead of issues. You’ll learn how logs, metrics, and traces work together to provide a complete picture of your application’s health and explore different ways to instrument them effectively.
We’ll also look at how observability platforms bring these signals together to help you troubleshoot faster, optimise performance, and deliver a seamless experience to your users.
Yulia Samoylova is a Pre-Sales Engineer at Datadog. In her role, she works closely with customers to help them explore and adopt the platform. Before joining Datadog, Yulia built a strong foundation in technology, starting as a developer at BT and WhatsApp, and later transitioning to IT consulting at Accenture. Outside of work, Yulia is passionate about ballet, a hobby she began over two years ago—proving it’s never too late to follow a dream!
Guy Royse: Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions: Finding Your Meme Twin with Embeddings & Vector Databases
Do you look like a famous meme character? Does someone you know? Knowing this information is vital—both for your career and your personal life. After all, am I the only one around here who wants to avoid Angry Walter? And who *wouldn't* want to work with Success Kid.
But can we even find out if we have a meme twin? There are lots of memes. And lots of people. How could we possibly search them all? Well, it's easier than you think if we turn those memes into embeddings and search them with a vector database!
But what's an embedding? And what's a vector database? Well, that's what I'll cover in this session. I'll begin by exploring embeddings, showing how unstructured data, such as text and images, can be translated vectors—which are just arrays of numbers—using both common and custom AI models. Then I'll talk about vector databases, covering what they are and how you can use them to store and search those embeddings with embeddings of your own.
Of course, we'll do this all by example. I've turned all the big memes—from Ancient Aliens Guy to Zombie Boy—into embeddings and have loaded them into a vector database. I've built an application around these embeddings and that database. I'll show you the code and the queries of this application so that you can build something similar for yourself. And, most importantly, we'll take some photos during the session and use it all to find your meme twin!
So, are you ready to find your meme twin? Or are you ready to learn how to use this technology? I say, Why Not Both?
Guy Royse works for Redis as a Developer Advocate. Combining his decades of experience in writing software with a passion for learning—and for sharing what he has learned—Guy explores interesting topics and spreads the knowledge he has gained around developer communities worldwide.
Teaching and community have long been a focus for Guy. He runs his local JavaScript meetup in Ohio and has served on the selection committees of numerous conferences. He'll happily speak anywhere that will have him and has even has helped teach programming at a prison in central Ohio.
In his personal life, Guy is a hard-boiled geek interested in role-playing games, science fiction, and technology. He also has a slightly less geeky interest in history and linguistics. In his spare time he likes to camp and studies history and linguistics.
