Naomi Carrigan
Senior software engineer building meaningful communities for Deepgram and freeCodeCamp~
Vancouver, Washington, United States
Actions
Naomi Carrigan is a Community Engineer at Deepgram and Community Manager at freeCodeCamp, where she runs open-source mentorship cohorts pairing experienced contributors with newcomers. She founded NHCarrigan, a technology company focused on inclusive, ethical, and sustainable software. Naomi came to engineering through freeCodeCamp during the pandemic and now works full-time at the intersection of community, education, and contributor enablement.
Area of Expertise
Topics
100+ Members and 16,000+ Messages: What an Open-Source Cohort Taught Me About AI
Earlier this year I ran a cohort with over 100 mentees that was entirely focused on open-source contributions and emulating a real-world developer workflow. There were 14 teams, participants sent over 16,000 messages in the Discord, 651 contributions were reviewed... and then I ran an exit survey.
And that survey was telling: 71% of the participants used AI to augment their work, 58% wished I provided better guidelines around how to do so... this was the lowest rated portion of the experience when I polled participants at the end of the cohort.
I want to share my boots-on-the-ground experience, what the data show, how AI helped our participants stay engaged, and how it harmed my ability to identify skill gaps that led to churn.
Mentorship becomes increasingly important as AI shifts the playing field of our industry, and as MCP-enabled tooling reshapes what "AI-augmented workflow" means. The lessons I learned from this cohort belong to every maintainer.
The key takeaway? AI is drastically impacting the shape of the open source ecosystem. It's the core of the gap between contributors who stay and contributors who churn. And we need to adapt to the ever-changing agentic AI domain.
Architecting Agentic AI
I have ADHD. Executive function is the hardest part of my day. A year ago I built an AI agent - gave her a name (Hikari), a face, a personality, and access to my filesystem, my repos, my Discord, my calendar. She works alongside me from 8am to 9pm every weekday, drafts code, runs my sprints, manages my community, and reminds me to eat.
This talk is the field guide nobody gives you: how a single person, working at home, can wire together an LLM + tools + context + triggers into a real agent that does real work. Not a chatbot you prompt - a coworker you trust with carte blanche on anything you can undo.
I'll walk through the five pieces (brain / identity / hands / memory / ears), demystify what most people overcomplicate (MCP, hooks, gateways), and share the safety framework that lets me hand her broad access without it being reckless.
Built solo on Claude Code with MCP servers, a Discord gateway listener, and an Electron desktop app showing her current state through sprite swaps. Talk ends with a 4-step minimum starter kit you could build tonight.
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top