NJ Code & Coffee

NJ Code & Coffee - April meetup

Sat, Apr 11 · 2:00 PM EDT

EqualSpace ES550 Tech & Innovation Campus, 550 Broad St, Newark, NJ, US

Calling all New Jersey techies to the NJ Code and Coffee tech community meetup at the EqualSpace ES550 Tech & Innovation campus!

Code and Coffee is an inclusive, informal networking/co-working session for those in tech (and the tech-curious).
That includes operators, founders, and investors. Developers, data engineers, UX/UI designers, data scientists, product managers, software engineers, solution architects... all are welcome!

People of all skill and experience levels can attend, we love it that way. Many people (optionally) bring projects to work on, and many other people (optionally) socialize the entire time. It's entirely up to you!

Come grab a cup of coffee and meet new people, share stories, find collaborators, talk about everything tech, talk about everything NOT tech, take a break from job applications, get away from the computer screen, make connections, make conversation, make friends!

Agenda:
2pm: Doors open, networking starts
2:30pm: Intro circle
3pm: networking continues/ (optional) "Build Your Own ai Agent" workshop (more details here)
5pm: event ends

The Intro Circle
Near the beginning of the event (about 2:30 pm), we will do a standup in a circle:
We first talk about organizer announcements, updates, and logistics. Then we go around the circle where each person says:

• your name and job title/ role in tech/ tech stack,
• What you can help others with,
• What you would like help with,
• Job opportunities you're hiring for OR announce that you are looking for one. If none, that's cool.

After the introduction circle, everything is self-organized.

Community Discord - come hang out before and after!:
www.codeandcoffee.chat

The Venue
Equal Space is a premium share-space created with multicultural business owners in mind, =SPACE equips founders with resources, programming and a powerful network.

Headquartered in the City of Newark, their share-space provides resources for startups, coaching for tech companies, and a wealth of intellectuals to collaborate and build with. The next wave in enterprises is being born within their walls. Become a part of the story: EqualSpace.co/

Building Your Own AI Agent: A Guided Walkthrough

Sat, Apr 11 · 3:00 PM EDT

EqualSpace ES550 Tech & Innovation Campus, 550 Broad St, Newark, NJ, US

As part of [April's monthly meetup](Building Your Own AI Agent: A Guided Walkthrough), NJ Code & Coffee presents "Building Your Own AI Agent: A Guided Walkthrough".

Join us for a guided walk through of the core principles of AI agents: completions, tools, and the agentic loop.

Whether you're AI-curious or already shipping with LLMs, you'll leave with a solid mental model of how agents actually work under the hood.

We'll use the Anthropic Claude API with the TypeScript SDK as our foundation, building up from a simple completion all the way to a fully autonomous agent.

Bring your laptop if you want to follow along; there'll be one hands-on moment where we build the agent loop together.

All skill levels are welcome.

What You'll Learn:

• How LLM completions actually work under the hood
• How to give agents tools and let them decide when to use them
• The agentic loop — how agents reason, act, and iterate autonomously
• How to build a working agent from scratch using the Anthropic TypeScript SDK
• Mental models for thinking about agents that you can apply to any framework

What You’ll Need To Follow Along:

• A laptop with the latest version of Node.js and git installed
• An Anthropic API key with a few dollars of credits loaded

Doors open at 2pm, talk starts at 3, arrive early for networking and light refreshments.
Bring your laptop.

Speaker Bio:

Aza Walker is a self-taught software engineer with a fascination for computers and the intricate systems that make them work.
He enjoys designing and building large-scale applications, and currently works at ShipBob as a Senior Software Engineer, where he focuses on developing scalable microservices.