Nitya Narasimhan
PhD | AI Advocacy @Microsoft
Actions
Nitya Narasimhan is a PhD and Polyglot with 25+ years of experience in software research, engineering and advocacy across industry, startups and academia. Her interests span distributed systems, mobile & web development, cloud and AI. She is currently a member of the AI Advocacy team at Microsoft where she works on empowering the application developer ecosystem to build intelligent apps with Azure and AI. Follow her tech adventures @nitya and her visual storytelling journeys @SketchTheDocs.
Area of Expertise
Topics
The Pharos Of PWA: Deconstructing a Lighthouse Audit
Legend has it that the lighthouse at Pharos helped ships avoid rocks that would wreck them, instead guiding them safely to port. Today, Project Lighthouse serves that purpose for modern progressive web apps by not only shedding a light on potential rocks that wreck app performance -- but also providing audit guidance that allows developers to navigate their way towards the safe harbor of PWA compliance.
We've all heard of Lighthouse audit scores. Chances are we've run the audit report, then blindly followed the guidance to get ourselves to that perfect 100. But have you ever wondered how it works? And why the issues revealed by the audit are important? And what the guidance provided actually achieves?
Come join me as we set sail into the Project Lighthouse documentation. We'll learn how to run a Lighthouse audit on a selected website, and use some of the guidance to changes that improve our audit scores. The bulk of the talk will then drill down into the features that Lighthouse evaluates for Performance, PWA compliance, Accessibility, SEO & more. At the end of the talk, we'll walk away with a better sense of the metrics, goals & best practices involved in crafting modern performant & progressive web apps.
Sketch The Docs: Visual Storytelling For Developers
Did you know that 65% of users are visual learners? Visual learning is a powerful tool for communicating complex concepts in constrained spaces, while also improving later recall of that information. More importantly, visual vocabularies can be more inclusive to diverse audiences by using imagery, iconography, typography, color and other navigational cues that transcend languages. And, they improve your own understanding and recall of ideas in ways that can help with public speaking, technical documentation and more.
In this talk, I'll review my roadmap for visual storytelling - from sketchnoting to visual metaphors - and walk through the basic techniques you'll need to get started on your own visual storytelling journey. Come learn how you can "sketch the docs" and build skills to make you a better communicator and listener.
Models, Agents & MCP Servers - What's New In Azure AI?
Another Microsoft Build event is over - and this time we added quite a few new tools, terms and technologies to our AI Engineer Toolkit. What does Foundry Local mean? What's an AI Agent? Why is everyone building MCP Servers? Join me as we unpack all the key announcements, tools & demos from Microsoft Build - with a focus on Azure AI Foundry and code-first development.
Flutter 102: The Whistlestop Tour of Widgets
So, I'm assuming you've done Flutter 101. You've learnt the basics, setup your environment, built the Hello World, and are now intrigued to do more. What's the next logical step?
Enter Flutter 102: The Widgets Walkthrough.
In Flutter, *everything's a widget*. Not just views and layouts, but behaviors (e.g., animations), styles (e.g., padding & themes), interaction models (e.g., gestures), asynchronous patterns (futures & streams) and more.
At last count, there were 146 widgets in the standard catalog. That's a lot of widgets. And getting productive with Flutter involves knowing some widgets (base) really well, and knowing where to look (and when to use) the others.
That's the goal for this talk. We'll kick off the presentation with a quick look at the Flutter architecture (to understand where widgets fit in) and briefly discuss widget state management (stateful vs. stateless, widget lifecycle) - a critical concept when composing widgets to create the UI.
Then we're off to the races. The bulk of the talk will focus on understanding the broad classes of widgets, then selectively reviewing key widgets in each class that provide the most immediate value.
We'll conclude with a discussion on design challenges (beware the nested widget soup), best practices and resources for self-guided learning.
Get Animated with Flutter!
Flutter is a mobile SDK from Google for building native Android and iOS apps from a single codebase. It promises performant (60fps) user experiences, reactive UI updates and a fully-customizable open-source software stack.
In this talk, we'll explore how developers can craft expressive and custom experiences using Flutter Animations. We'll start with an introduction to Flutter and how it achieves performant rendering. Then we'll look at the Flutter animation framework, covering basic concepts, animation types and common patterns.
We'll walk through code for adding existing animations to a Flutter widget, and explore the process for creating custom animations. We'll conclude with a look at examples of Flutter animations in use today, and review resources for self-directed exploration of this space.
Dual-Screen & Multi-Posture: Rethinking mobile experiences with new affordances
Mobile devices today come in different form factors - tablets, phones, watches, even televisions. We design our apps to adapt to these device affordances but we assume that each device has a fixed form factor and capability. What if you had a mobile device with multiple screens that could support different postures? Does that change your design-development thinking?
In this talk I'll introduce you to the features and functionality of the Microsoft Surface Duo, explore the emulator, and talk about how you can adapt your existing apps to leverage the power of flexible layouts (that can span screens) and hinge events (that define device postures) - with code examples. We'll wrap up by exploring best practices and design challenges for creating new and innovative dual-screen experiences - with a review of relevant resources to jumpstart your journey rethinking the modern mobile app!
Deconstructing Hugging Chat: Explore an open-source Chat UI for Generative AI Apps
Want to build a ChatGPT-like experience for your Generative AI use case but don't know where to start? What if you had an open-source project that was exploring the same goals, so you can learn from it and contribute back or transfer knowledge to your own development journey? How do you get started exploring it, especially if you are unfamiliar with the relevant programming framework or technology community?
In this talk we'll look the "Hugging Chat" application from the HuggingFace community and deconstruct the open-source "Chat UI" project that powers it. We'll learn how the app is built and deployed, and how it can be customized to work with available LLMs, potentially in a local development environment. And we'll explore the value of tools like GitHub Codespaces and GitHub Copilot to help us navigate unfamiliar codebases with confidence, and even try to extend capabilities to suit our needs.
Copilot-ing Your Developer Journey With Azure AI
By now you've probably heard of Generative AI. But do you know why Responsible AI is needed? Or why Agentic AI is the next frontier? Why are you engineering prompts & fine-tuning models but need a RAG for your data? Let's enter the fascinating world of modern AI development and go from prompts to production with Azure and friends! Along the way, we'll learn useful tools & explore open-source communities. We may even make an AI comic or play a round of Prompt Charades! Bring your curiosity & creativity - and build your Copilot IQ!
Build a RAG-based Retail Copilot Code-First on Azure AI Foundry
Want to build a RAG-based custom chat AI code-first but don’t know where to start? In this talk, we’ll deconstruct Contoso Chat, an open-source sample that teaches you how to build a retail chat AI with product data in Azure AI Search and customer data in Azure Cosmos DB.
We’ll walk through the GenAIOps lifecycle—from ideation to evaluation to deployment—and introduce the tools and techniques that can streamline development on the Azure AI Foundry platform. Plus, you’ll walk away with a sandbox sample that you can explore and extend on your own!
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