Our Meetups

Agent Skills: Brett Miller showed how to turn AI agents from generalists into specialists using Markdown-based skills.

Passion Projects with ASP.NET Core: Malakai (Kai) Mathins demoed CrimeSpot, a crime awareness dashboard for Cape Town built with a Next.js PWA and an ASP.NET Core ingestion API.

95 attendees

Accso South Africa, V&A Waterfront, Clock Tower

Successfully completed

Official Microsoft event for developers and cloud engineers to design, build, and deploy real-world AI solutions on Azure. The day focused on Microsoft Foundry and GitHub Copilot with live demos, guided labs, and practical developer workflows covering key announcements from Microsoft Build 2026, Azure AI and generative AI use cases.

92 attendees

Microsoft Cape Town, Pinelands

Successfully completed

Unifying Local and Cloud AI with Microsoft Agent Framework: Matthew Leibowitz demonstrated how to combine on-device intelligence like Apple Intelligence and Phi Silica with cloud-scale models using the Microsoft Agent Framework, routing work intelligently between edge and cloud.

Breaking the 100% Code Coverage Illusion: Davide Bellone explained why aiming for 100% code coverage can be misleading, how to generate coverage reports in Visual Studio, and how to write valuable tests with the Testing Pyramid and Testing Diamond approaches.

75 attendees

Microsoft Cape Town, Pinelands

Matthew Leibowitz (Microsoft) & Davide Bellone (MVP)

Successfully completed

Snowflake in a Microsoft-first environment: De Wet Conradie introduced Snowflake's architecture and showed how it complements Microsoft data investments through separation of storage and compute, Zero Copy Cloning, Time Travel, Snowgrid collaboration and RBAC governance.

Build First, Scale Later: A Founder's Playbook: Shaqeel Less and Makhi Mangxola shared how they focused on building first with free platforms, AI tools and practical execution to get Uthutho live on the Play Store, and how early technical decisions set them up to scale into Microsoft Azure.

57 attendees

Accso South Africa, Clock Tower, V&A Waterfront

Successfully completed

A global Microsoft initiative bringing hands-on GitHub Copilot learning to Cape Town. The day included early arrival and registration, a keynote intro, sessions on agents shipping code and GitHub Copilot CLI, a pizza lunch, and a hands-on GitHub Copilot workshop where attendees brought their own devices.

110 attendees

Samsung Future Innovation Lab, Cape Town

Successfully completed

AI Engineering Roles: Building healthy teams in the AI era: Jason Tame drew on OfferZen's 2025 developer survey data to explore the roles that enable sustainable velocity and coherent codebases in AI-augmented teams: Multipliers, Builders, Artisans, Explorers and Apprentices.

Local is lekker: Allan Pead showed how to run AI models locally with LM Studio, Ollama and Local Foundry, integrate local models with GitHub Copilot, and build intelligent .NET applications with Microsoft.Extensions.AI.

61 attendees

Accso South Africa, Clock Tower, V&A Waterfront

Successfully completed

The annual CPTMSDUG Games evening! Lou's last Games Night before married life in America. An amazing celebration featuring WHO IS THAT? (logos), BINGO, and the highly coveted NERD OF THE YEAR 2025 award! A perfect way to end the year with prizes, stickers, badges, fun, and community celebration.

90 attendees

Accso South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Cape Town

Successfully completed

An exciting exploration into programming with AI agents! This session covered practical approaches to building intelligent agents, agentic workflows, and hands-on demonstrations of agent development. Featured interactive discussions on real-world agent implementations and best practices.

100 attendees

Accso South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Cape Town

Great session with excellent practical demonstrations

Two dynamic sessions combining cutting-edge AI technology with practical web development. Featured 'Bring Your Data to AI: A Practical Guide to Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG)' exploring AI-powered data retrieval, followed by '60 Minutes to Glory: Building a WordPress Site From Scratch Without Crying (Much)' - an entertaining challenge to build a complete WordPress site in under 60 minutes.

76 attendees

Accso South Africa, Clock Tower, V&A Waterfront

Successfully completed

A special collaboration with Microsoft & the Investec Developer Community! This global initiative focused on AI-assisted coding with GitHub Copilot was part of the worldwide VS Code Dev Days event series. Featured hands-on labs and workshops with industry experts including sessions on agentic development with GitHub Copilot and practical workshops.

97 attendees

Microsoft Cape Town, Pinelands

Global VS Code Dev Days event series

An evening exploring cross-platform .NET development with Uno Platform and Azure IoT. This session covered building native applications from a single codebase and Azure's IoT offerings including IoT Hub, IoT Edge, and IoT Operations. Featured hands-on demonstrations and practical examples.

87 attendees

Accso South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Cape Town

Great session with excellent practical content

An exploration into AI agent development with LangChain and discussing real-world production challenges. This session covered practical approaches to building intelligent agents and lessons learned from production deployments. Featured hands-on demonstrations and interactive Q&A sessions.

107 attendees

Accso South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Cape Town

Highly rated session with excellent practical content

An incredible session focusing on AI agents and their practical applications. The event featured presentations on the latest developments in artificial intelligence and hands-on demonstrations of agent development.

97 attendees

Accso Offices Cape Town

Highly rated session with excellent speaker feedback

The GitHub Copilot Global Bootcamp is a hands-on event designed for developers of all levels, including students, startups, and tech enthusiasts. It focuses on leveraging AI-assisted coding with GitHub Copilot. Key sessions include introductions to GitHub (repositories, branches, commits, pull requests), GitHub Codespaces (developing with Codespaces and Visual Studio Code), and GitHub Copilot (how it works, responsible AI, and setup).

Attendees will participate in hands-on labs with GitHub Copilot's autocomplete-style coding assistance in VS Code and Codespaces. The event will be held at the UWC Samsung Future Innovation Lab on the UWC Campus, with registration starting at 9:00 AM. Completing the labs earns attendees a participation badge.

67 attendees

UWC Samsung Future Innovation Lab, UWC Campus

Participation badge for completing labs

On May 31st, CPTMSDUG hosted an exclusive in-person event featuring Richard Campbell, an international speaker, advisor, storyteller, and host of ".NET Rocks" and "RunAs Radio." Fresh from keynoting DevConf Johannesburg and Cape Town, Richard presented a double-header session covering the History of .NET and The Perils and Promise of Artificial Intelligence.

57 attendees

BBD Cape Town Offices

Hosted by Richard Campbell (.NET Rocks, RunAs Radio)

Mastering Prompt Engineering – Unlocking the Power of AI: This session explores the essential skill of prompt engineering for working effectively with large language models and generative AI. It covers techniques like zero-shot, few-shot, system, role, contextual, and chain-of-thought prompting, demonstrating how to design prompts for accurate and creative outputs. Presented by Abed Matini, Senior Backend Developer at Ogilvy South Africa.

Hybrid Apps: More Than Just WebViews: This talk redefines hybrid app development, showcasing how blending technologies enables seamless integration of native and managed code, local and cloud data, web and mobile UI components, and AI models that function offline. Presented by Matthew Leibowitz, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft.

97 attendees

Accso Offices Cape Town

Abed Matini (Ogilvy) & Matthew Leibowitz (Microsoft)

High quality content and expert speakers