Zero to Agent in 30 Minutes
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Build agentic skills in minutes, not hours
Go from zero to a fully working AI agent in just half an hour, every single week.
Join us for this weekly build series where you’ll learn to create real production-ready agents live. Each 30-minute sprint focuses on building a different working agent while introducing the latest AI tools, powerful techniques, pro tips, and clever tricks.
We don’t just show you what agents can do. We show you how they think. You’ll learn the specific skills required to manage memory, integrate external tools, and orchestrate multi-agent swarms.
Every week brings a new agent with varying technical depth, so there’s always something new to explore.
You’ll walk away with practical, usable knowledge, whether it’s a new agent, a game-changing technique, or an emerging tool you can put to work right away.
Review the Schedule section below to see what we’re building each week.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- Learn to rapidly spin up, test, and validate new agent prototypes
- Evaluate the latest AI tools and agentic frameworks for optimizing your workflows
- Discover the clever techniques and shortcuts required to make agents work in real-world settings
This live event is for you because...
- You’re a developer who’s looking to automate tedious tasks and streamline your daily workflows using cutting-edge agentic tools.
- You’re a product manager or builder who wants to rapidly spin up, test, and pitch viable proofs of concept without spending weeks on research.
- You’re a tech lead or architect who needs to quickly evaluate new AI frameworks and identify reliable integration patterns for your teams.
Prerequisites
- Come with your questions
- Have a pen and paper handy to capture notes, insights, and inspiration
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Wednesdays at 7:00am PT / 10:00am ET
- Interactive demo and Q&A (30 minutes)
August 26, 2026 - Jayeeta Putatunda
Build a Financial News Agent That Turns Headlines into Live Analyst Briefings
Financial analysts have access to extensive internal research, company coverage, risk assumptions, and market views. The challenge is keeping that context current when new information arrives daily. To help analysts identify what deserves their attention, Jayeeta Putatunda, forward deployed AI engineering lead at Turing, builds an agent that turns this influx of financial news into focused analyst briefings—categorizing developments, ranking stories against analysts' coverage profiles, and explaining why each news item may matter.
September 2, 2026 - Maxim Salnikov
Build a Supply Chain for Agent Context
Your software supply chain is signed, pinned, and scanned in continuous integration. Your AI agents' context isn't. Spend a worthwhile 30 minutes with Maxim Salnikov as he builds a supply chain for agent context with application performance monitoring: sourcing approved packages from a trusted registry, pinning and hash-verifying them on any harness, and enforcing organization policy with an unbypassable CI gate.
September 9, 2026 - Sajal Sharma
Build a Shared Knowledge Base for All Your Agents
A personal knowledge base stores your research, daily logs, and notes in one place and acts as a shared brain for every agent you run, so Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, and Hermes all have access to the same accumulated information. Sajal Sharma, who builds AI-first products at Menyala, demonstrates how to build one of these digital repositories and shows how they work.
September 16, 2026 - Chester Ismay
Never Miss a Game: Build a Sports Concierge Agent in 25 Minutes
September 23, 2026 - Sajal Sharma
Give Your Agent Its Own Computer
We give the agent its own computer in the cloud. Through sandboxing it can install packages, run real code, drive a browser, and even control a full remote desktop, all without touching your own machine. We use services built for exactly this, like E2B and Scrapybara, so the audience leaves able to give any agent a safe place to do real work and use a real computer for complex tasks not possible without it.
Your Hosts and Guests
Jayeeta Putatunda
Jayeeta Putatunda is a forward deployed AI engineering lead at Turing, with 10+ years of experience bridging AI innovation and enterprise governance in regulated financial services. She is one of 33 NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisors globally, a Corporate Venture Capital Scout at HearstLab, investing in women led startups. Jayeeta is also the New York State Ambassador for Women in AI, a 70K+ global community. A published researcher at ACM ICAIF and AAAI, she also reviews technical papers for NeurIPS and COLING. Her work has been featured at the Gartner IT Symposium, on national TV at The Tamron Hall Show, and her DataCamp technical tutorial on AI agents garnered 70K+ YouTube views. She received the 2024 AI100 Award for Generative AI and was featured on a Times Square billboard as one of North America’s Top 1% mentors.
Maxim Salnikov
Maxim Salnikov is a tech community enthusiast based in Oslo. With more than two decades of experience as a developer, he shares his expertise in the web platform, cloud computing, and AI by speaking at and delivering training for developer audiences worldwide. By day, Maxim supports developer teams across Europe as a Senior Solution Engineer at Microsoft, focusing on AI-native developer tools and platforms. He is also an active builder of developer tooling, creating and maintaining AI agent assets that help engineers adopt AI-assisted development more effectively. In the evenings, Maxim runs events for some of Norway’s largest web, AI, and cloud developer communities. He is passionate about exploring the possibilities of Generative AI, with a strong focus on developer productivity.
Sajal Sharma
Sajal Sharma is an AI engineer and technology leader with over eight years of experience in AI/ML, specializing in natural language processing. He works at Liminal, a venture studio in Singapore, where he focuses on building AI-first products and shaping technology strategies. Previously, he led AI initiatives at various consulting and product companies, developing innovative AI solutions across industries. His on-demand course, Building AI Agents with LangGraph, is available on the O’Reilly learning platform. Sajal has delivered a guest lecture at Yale University and has been a mentor for Udacity and the University of Melbourne, where he guided students in machine learning and AI. He holds a master’s degree in information technology from the University of Melbourne.
Chester Ismay
Dr. Chester Ismay is an experienced data science educator and consultant. Chester enjoys helping others get into data science, figuring out how to best practice and improve their skills. He is co-author of "Statistical Inference via Data Science: A ModernDive into R and the Tidyverse" available at https://moderndive.com/v2/ He likes leading education and data science teams to improve best practices based on data from the learning sciences. Throughout his career, he has worked in academia, as a corporate trainer, at tech bootcamps, and as an independent consultant in the fields of education, insurance, and sports analytics.