Office Hours with BJ Hargrave (IBM)
BJ Hargrave and supporting mentors will be available during sprint week to answer technical questions on Granite, agent workflows, open-source contribution strategy, and project scoping.
This is a fantastic opportunity to get expert guidance directly from IBM — take advantage of it! We will be using GitHub Discussions under the Office Hours category to ask questions during virtual session.
Schedule (Daily Virtual Office Hours)
One 1-hour office-hours block is planned each day during active sprint work.
About BJ Hargrave
BJ Hargrave is a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM Research and a longtime contributor to open-source ecosystems. BJ leads the kickoff workshop and participates in the final review/presentation session.
What to Bring to Office Hours
To make the most of your time with BJ, come prepared:
- A clear question or problem description. The more specific you are, the more useful the answer will be.
- Relevant code or error messages. Share your screen or paste snippets.
- What you’ve already tried. This helps avoid repeating steps you’ve taken.
- Your project context. Briefly explain what you’re building and where you’re stuck.
Good Topics for Office Hours
- Questions about IBM Granite model capabilities and limitations
- Agent design and orchestration patterns (including LangGraph-style flows)
- Help choosing the right model or approach for your use case
- Debugging API calls to Replicate or Ollama
- Contribution strategy for open-source repos (PR scope, docs, testing)
- Prompt engineering strategies
- Advice on architecture decisions for AI-powered applications
- Understanding model outputs and improving response quality
- Career and industry questions about AI at IBM
Tips for Fast Help
- Show up early in the week if possible — the first sessions may have shorter wait times.
- Prepare in advance — spend 15–30 minutes trying to solve your problem before office hours so you can ask more focused questions.
- Take notes — write down what you learn so your whole team benefits.
- Bring your target artifact — PR draft, issue draft, or demo checklist.
- If you can’t make a scheduled slot, check the FAQ or class communication channels for async support options.