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Technical

Context Engineering: Prompting Is Not Enough

This week, let's talk about context engineering: the practical work around AI systems that goes beyond writing a single prompt. Good results often come from better context shaping, retrieval choices, evaluation loops, and clear guardrails, not just "better wording."

Discussion starters:

  • What has had the biggest impact for you: prompt structure, system instructions, retrieval quality, tool use, or evals?
  • Where do AI-assisted workflows still break down in real teams (code review, debugging, docs, testing, handoffs)?
  • What's one habit or pattern you've adopted that made AI outputs more reliable?

Everyone and anyone is welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

In honour of Amii's Upper Bound conference happening this week, the May 19th, 2026 chat will be about AI. Often we limit how much AI chatter is allowed but not today! Anything AI related. Bring your AI hopes, worries, success stories, failures, etc.

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

P.S. - The Weekly Dev Chat will be at the Upper Bound Mega Meetup (May 19th, 5pm to 8pm, downtown library). Swing by and say hi.  A Upper Bound ticket is NOT required to attend the Mega Meetup.

https://www.meetup.com/edmontonunlimited/events/314599992

https://www.upperbound.ai/

3-2-1 Backup Rule: Does Your Data Exist in 3 Places?

Have you heard of the 3-2-1 backup rule? The idea is simple but powerful: if your data doesn't exist in at least 3 places, it doesn't really exist. More specifically, the rule says:

  • 3 copies of your data
  • 2 different storage media (e.g., local disk + cloud)
  • 1 copy stored off-site

It's a well-established baseline in the industry, and some organizations even extend it to a 3-2-1-1-0 model — adding one immutable or air-gapped copy and zero unverified backups. Despite how long this rule has been around, a surprising number of people (and teams) still don't follow it.

This week's (2026-05-12) chat we want to talk about backup habits — at home, at work, for your personal projects, wherever. Some discussion starters:

  • Do devs take better care of their data and have better backup habits than non-devs? Or does knowing how things work make us more complacent ("the cloud handles it")?
  • Do you have your own system for protecting your data? What does it look like in practice?
  • Any nightmares or lessons learned the hard way?

Everyone and anyone is welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

3-2-1 Backup Rule