About us
Building software got cheap. Putting it to work inside a business did not. That gap is where this group has lived since 2018: a room for the IT people who end up in the business meeting, and for the business people who need them there. The tools change every year or two. The gap stays.
Every topic here started as a real problem on a real engagement: a team that cannot pick its AI coding tool, a year of Claude Code habits that have to survive a Copilot-only client, a product nobody knows how to sell once anyone can build it. I find the person who has solved it and ask them to show us. The guest is the star; the host stays out of the way; your questions are the point.
We started as evening meetups downtown. These days it is a Friday lunch hour online, recorded. We followed the work wherever it went: serverless, then cloud-native, then data platforms, then GenAI from mid-2023, then agents. Same question every time: why does this matter to the business now?
6,000+ members, rated 4.7 by the people who came. 80+ recorded sessions, over 50,000 combined views, all free and most of it still relevant: youtube.serverlesstoronto.org
For engineers, architects, technical founders and the product and business leaders they work with. Have a topic or a speaker in mind, or just want to say hello? Connect with me: linkedin.com/in/magmainc
Daniel Zivkovic, organizer
Upcoming events
2
Switching Harnesses Without Starting Over: Claude Code to Copilot in VS Code
·OnlineOnlineYou’ve spent a year tuning Claude Code: skills, hooks, a plugin you can’t work without. Then Monday comes, you open the client laptop, and the agent on it is GitHub Copilot in VS Code. Most of us feel clumsy for weeks. Few admit it. Microsoft's Benjamin Clark and Tyler Kendrick will show how to switch harnesses without starting over, and which Copilot features make the switch worth it.
What you’ll learn (the November 2026 edition):- What carries over from Claude Code (skills, plugins, commands, hooks, MCP servers) and what doesn’t, yet
- How the harness picker works, with Copilot, Claude and Codex agents side by side in VS Code
- How to run and review several agent sessions in parallel with the Agents window and the GitHub Copilot app
- The Copilot features worth switching for, including the ones you’d never discover on your own
- A practical path to being productive in your first week
Why this matters: many of us don’t choose our tools at work. The client or the enterprise does. Being productive in whichever harness is on the desk is becoming a career skill, not a preference.
Before you join, have VS Code and Copilot installed (the free plan works), and think about:
- Which Claude Code skills, commands, hooks or plugins can’t you work without?
- What’s in your CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, and how is it organized?
- Does your company limit which models or MCP servers you can use?
Then bring your hard questions for the Q&A.
Friday, November 13 | 12:00-1:30 PM ET | Virtual (Zoom) lunch-and-learn with a live demo. Grab your lunch and join us!
Agenda
- 12:00 - 12:05 PM: Welcome and community updates
- 12:05 - 12:45 PM: Main presentation and demo
- 12:45 - 1:25 PM: Q&A and discussion
- 1:25 - 1:30 PM: Wrap-up and Manning Publications raffle
Homework (optional reading before the session):
Start here:- Tutorial: Agentic coding in VS Code
- Agent harnesses (the harness picker)
- VS Code Agents window: Orchestrate agents across every project
What carries over from Claude Code:
Slash commands side by side (skim both lists):
Many work the same way: /init, /clear, /compact, /plan, /fork, /rename, /help, /agents, /skills, /hooks, and /skill-name to run a skill.
From Benjamin:About the speakers:
Benjamin Clark is a Senior Cloud & AI Solution Engineer in Microsoft’s Specialist Team Unit, focused on developer experience, GitHub and GitHub Copilot for financial services organizations. Before that, he spent years as a Microsoft consultant building solutions alongside developers. He recently presented GitHub Copilot CLI to an audience of 800+ developers, and spoke at the keynote of Mastercard’s Developer Innovation Week.
Tyler Kendrick is a Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, based in Chicago, where he helps enterprises modernize applications and build AI solutions on Azure. Before Microsoft, he was a Principal Enterprise Architect at Northern Trust, leading strategy on developer experience, DevSecOps and cloud modernization.Serverless Toronto has been bridging the gap between IT and business needs since 2018. 6,000+ members. Past sessions: youtube.serverlesstoronto.org
38 attendees
You Can Build Anything. Can You Sell It?
·OnlineOnlineAt every tech meetup these days, someone demos what they built over the weekend with AI, and almost nobody demos what they sold. We’ve been guessing what people want, then adding one more feature instead of trying to sell it, because selling doesn’t come naturally to most of us. Now AI makes the building fast, but when the ladder leans against the wrong wall, we just get to the wrong place faster. Finding the right wall is the part we skip.
This one is sales for people who’d rather be coding. Rob Snyder, author of The Power of Pull, starts with people who are already trying to solve a problem and are stuck. Find them, sell them a way out, and only then build it. Done his way, it feels more like helping than pitching.
What is PULL?
PULL is Rob’s test for whether someone is ready to buy: they have a Project on their to-do list, it is Unavoidable now, they have a List of options (including building it themselves), and every option has Limitations. Rob will show what to do with that.What you’ll learn
- Why buyers act on blocked priorities, not pain points
- How to find the people already trying to buy, before you build anything
- Why selling done Rob’s way feels like helping, not pitching
Who should attend?
Developers, AI builders and technical founders who have built something and are wondering who will pay for it. No sales experience needed; that’s the point.Agenda
- 12:00 - 12:05 PM: Welcome and community updates
- 12:05 - 12:40 PM: Rob Snyder, Feature presentation
- 12:40 - 1:00 PM: Q&A and discussion
Optional homework
- Listen to Rob on Lenny’s Podcast: An 86-minute guide to finding PMF (product-market fit)
- Get the book: The Power of Pull
Keep going after the talk
No Manning book raffle this time, on purpose, and thank you to Manning for always offering one. The best thing to take home from this session is Rob’s method, so here is how to keep going, whatever your budget:- Free: Rob’s newsletter and podcast, The Physics of Startups
- The full course: PULL (five recorded sessions from discovery to designing your sales process)
- Ready to invest in your startup: PMF Camp, Rob’s 2-week founder cohort for finding product-market fit, or a 1:1 sprint with Rob
Speaker
Rob Snyder is a founder and advisor to B2B startups and the author of The Power of Pull. As a founder he has taken three companies from $0 to $1M+ ARR, and as an advisor he has helped more than 50 startups do the same. He writes the Physics of Startups newsletter and podcast.Serverless Toronto has been bridging the gap between IT and business needs since 2018. 6,000+ members. Past sessions: youtube.serverlesstoronto.org
11 attendees
Past events
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