Building Apps with AI: One Year of Real-World Lessons
🗓️ Wednesday, August 19, 2026, 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM EDT
Hosted by
📍 Location:
Gravity IT Resources · Fort Lauderdale, FL 33308
Building Apps with AI: One Year of Real-World Lessons
How AI enabled the creation of GatherLogic.com
AI has evolved from an interesting coding assistant into an essential software development tool. But what is it really like to build a production application with AI every day?
This session shares one year of practical lessons learned using ChatGPT, Windsurf, Cursor, and Claude Code to design, develop, and launch GatherLogic.com, a SaaS platform for managing communities, groups, and events. Rather than showcasing AI-generated demos or isolated code examples, we'll examine how AI performs throughout the software development lifecycle and what actually works in production.
We'll explore where AI dramatically accelerates development, where it still falls short, and how to collaborate effectively with AI on software architecture, debugging, refactoring, API integration, testing, and documentation. Along the way, we'll compare the strengths of today's leading AI development tools and discuss when each is most effective.
The techniques presented are intentionally programming-language agnostic. Whether you develop in Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, Go, Rust, PHP, or another language, you'll see software engineering practices and AI collaboration patterns that apply across languages and technology stacks.
You'll leave with practical techniques, realistic expectations, and reusable development patterns that will help you integrate AI more effectively into your own software projects. Most importantly, you'll discover that successful AI-assisted development still depends on sound engineering judgment—and learning to collaborate effectively with AI can help you build better software, faster.
Schedule:
6:30PM-7:00PM EST Networking /w food and refreshments
7:00PM-8:00PM EST Presentation
8:00PM-8:30PM EST Q&A Discussion
Parking:
Free parking is available in the garage (excluding the reserved parking spots, painted yellow for distinction) and in the outside parking lot directly in front of the building's entrance.
Gravity IT Resources is graciously hosting this event in their Fort Lauderdale office. Thank you, Gravity, for your support.
This a joint presentation with the Miami Java User Group
🎤 Speaker:
Co-Founder, Keystone Logix
Eugenio "Gene" Alvarez is a software engineering leader with more than 30 years of experience building enterprise applications, cloud platforms, and SaaS products. Throughout his career, he has led engineering organizations, modernized legacy systems, and delivered scalable solutions for organizations ranging from startups to global enterprises.
Most recently, Gene designed and built GatherLogic.com, an event and community management platform, using AI as a daily development partner. Over the past year, he has explored how tools such as ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf can accelerate every phase of software development—from architecture and design to coding, testing, debugging, documentation, and deployment.
A longtime member of the Java community, Gene is a speaker at user groups and technology conferences. His presentations focus on practical software engineering, artificial intelligence, cloud-native development, and modern application architecture. Rather than showcasing isolated demos, he enjoys sharing real-world experiences, lessons learned, and proven design patterns that developers can apply regardless of their programming language or technology stack.
Gene is passionate about helping developers become more effective by combining sound engineering principles with the latest AI-powered development tools.
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