Programming Café - 7 May 2026
Do you want to meet other researchers, improve your programming skills, or ask questions related to programming? Pick up your laptop and come to the Programming Café!
During this informal meet-up, we will share knowledge about programming through short presentations, work on programming projects, and help each other with challenges in working with code and data.
What to expect
During the Programming Café, you can work on your own project and share knowledge in a community setting. You can also bring your programming questions, bugs, and problems to resolve or discuss with members of RDM Support and researchers attending the café.
Furthermore, each Programming Café will have a special theme. This is typically a short presentation or demonstration of (maximum) half an hour. We are always looking for suggestions on themes and people who want to present something. Don’t hesitate to send an email to info.rdm@uu.nl if you want to provide a suggestion or give a presentation!
Topic: Hands-on LLM with scientific use of LLMs in Python and R
Speaker: dr. Qixiang Fang (UU, ODISSEI Social Data Science team)
Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful, but getting reliable, structured, and reproducible results requires more than just trying out a few prompts. In this hands-on Programming Café session, we’ll explore practical LLM prompt engineering techniques and output structuring using the ellmer package in R (or langchain in Python if you prefer). You’ll learn:
How to design prompts that produce accurate, stable, and predictable outputs.
How to request and validate structured (JSON) output.
We’ll focus on concrete, minimal examples that you can immediately reuse in your own data analysis pipelines.
No prior LLM experience required, just basic programming knowledge.
Who can attend
Everyone is welcome at the Programming Café! You can be of any skill level and at any stage in working with your code and data. We expect most attendees will be R or Python users, but users of other programming languages and software are invited as well.
Registration
Registrations are not mandatory, but we appreciate them in order to arrange refreshments and snacks. For the same reason, it would be helpful to deregister in case you can no longer attend. You can register using the link at the bottom of this page.
Contact
Can't make it to the Programming Café? You can also come by our weekly Walk-In Hours for all your questions about research data and software, or contact us via info.rdm@uu.nl.
- Start date and time
- End date and time
- Location
- Bucheliuszaal 6.18, Universiteitsbibliotheek (Utrecht Science Park)
- Entrance fee
- Free of charge
- Registration
- More information
- Website RDM Support