AWS Canberra: September 2026

Description

We're delaying our September meetup by a week. It will be worth the wait! This month we're welcoming Poonam Pratik Patel who is traveling from the UK. The delay allows us to take you through a brand new AWS service launching days before the meetup. ​Agenda 6:00pm Welcome and Announcements 6:15pm What Nobody Tells You About RAG: Lessons from Building AI-Native Document Pipelines in Production, Poonam Pratik Patel, The Line Tech 6:45pm Break - food and networking 7:15pm Under NDA, Dave Hall, Dave Hall Consulting 7:45pm Networking 8:30pm Close What Nobody Tells You About RAG: Lessons from Building AI-Native Document Pipelines in Production RAG demos are deceptively simple. A chunker, an embedder, a vector store, and an LLM — and it works beautifully on your laptop. Then you ship it.In this session, Poonam walks through 6 hard-won lessons from building a production RAG pipeline on AWS Bedrock.You'll learn why fixed-size chunking silently destroys retrieval accuracy, why your LLM ignores its own context window and hallucinates anyway, why stale vector indexes are the quietest failure mode in AI systems, and why you need an eval harness before you write a single line of RAG code.Real architecture. Real failure modes. Real fixes. Poonam Pratik Patel Poonam brings 18 years of technical leadership to enterprise generative AI, focused on getting it past the demo stage, AWS Bedrock, RAG pipelines, vector search, plus the less glamorous work of hallucination guards, IAM, and data residency that makes it production-ready. Recent work includes an AI-native platform build and automated document-extraction for UK multi-tenant SaaS. Under NDA In early September AWS is launching a new service. I can't tell you much about it yet, but trust me you're going to like it. During this session I will take you through what the service is, when to use it and how to get the most of out of it. Be one of the first in the world to get an expert walk through. Dave Hall Dave has spent 25+ years in enterprise technology and now runs Dave Hall Consulting solo, building event-driven automation and AI-powered workflows on AWS that replace manual processes for mid-market and enterprise teams. You must register for this event here on Luma. Catering this month supplied by So Lita Pizzeria and Pasta Bar. The AWS Canberra User Group is supported by AWS, Sol People and Agile Digital.