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ThursdayJan 22 2026PNSQC Quality Jam 2026Website
It’s time to kick off the 2026 Call for Papers with a Quality Jam! This will be an evening of lightning talks to inspire and be inspired for new proposals on software quality — a jam session to get together as a group and hear a variety of perspectives.
The speaker lineup for this year is:
"Testing the Future: From Testing Code to Testing Intelligence" with Premi Vinayagam from Jama software "The OWASP Top 10 Isn’t a Vulnerability List—It’s a Mirror: What 2025 Tells Us About Supply Chain Security" with Caroline Wong "Test Plans Made Easy: Saying a Lot By Saying Very Little" with Wayne Rosenberry "Data-Driven API Test Case Generation Using AI and Model Context Protocol" with Joseph Petsche "Formally Secure Hardware with Rust" with Calvin Deutschbein "Lessons Learned in AI Engineering" with Mitch White "Software Quality by Example as a Senior Engineer" with Mark Kleinhaus
Make a New Year's resolution to build your career by increasing your quality know-how and skills, and make some new connections with other software quality professionals.
The first hour will provide time for networking and a chance to share some food and drink.
This event is hybrid - we'll be returning to the University Place Hotel, and we'll also stream it online, all for free!
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January Cloud Native PDX Meetup: Observability, Kubernetes, and the Beginner’s JourneyWebsite
Let’s kick off 2025 with another great evening of cloud-native learning, real-world talks, and hallway conversations with Portland’s platform-engineering community.
Date: Thursday, January 22 Time: 5:30–7:30 PM Location: Reperio Health, 4784 SE 17th Ave Suite 120, Portland, OR Recording: Talks are typically recorded (opt-in by speakers)
The Observability Reset: 4 Foundational Principles for O11y That Scales by Noam Levy, CTO at groundcover
Let’s face it, collecting metrics, logs, and traces isn’t enough anymore. Most o11y stacks today are drowning in telemetry, buried in cost overruns, and spread so thin across tools that they’ve become more noise than signal. The classic SaaS-based model is cracking.
This talk lays out 4 foundational principles for building a sustainable observability posture - that scale with infra and budget:
- Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC): SaaS o11y is financially unsustainable at scale.
- Consolidate or Bust: DevEx suffers when visibility is fragmented- consolidation isn’t a luxury - it’s a requirement.
- Standardize Everything: Open protocols, pluggable pipelines, and vendor-neutral APIs are the only way forward, or your o11y is a ticking liability.
- Self-Reliance: You can’t rely on app-level instrumentation forever - eBPF enables scalable o11y without complexity
This session pulls from real-world deployments and lessons learned helping engineering teams scale visibility without compromise.
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“What It’s Like to Learn Cloud-Native Today — A Beginner’s Kubernetes Story” by Kelis Hightower
When given the chance to explore cloud-native development, I chose not to avoid the unfamiliar. With no prior Kubernetes experience and only a few weeks to learn, I took a hands-on approach by building a small burnout-aware study tool to ground abstract concepts in something tangible.
This talk shares what it’s like to learn cloud-native technologies today from a beginner’s perspective. Through experimentation with containers, Kubernetes, and cloud services, I’ll reflect on the mental model shifts, early misconceptions, and “aha” moments that emerged from learning by building. Rather than focusing on expertise, this would offer an honest look at what beginners actually take away from a short, modern introduction to cloud-native systems.
Agenda
5:30–6:00 — Check-in, snacks, networking 6:00–6:30 — The Observability Reset (Noam Levy) 6:30–7:00 — Beginner’s Kubernetes Story (Kelis Hightower) 7:00–7:30 — Networking (and games if anyone wants to bring some!)
Who Should Attend
Platform engineers, SREs, DevOps, app/platform teams, OSS maintainers, beginners learning cloud-native, and anyone curious about observability, Kubernetes, modern infra, or developer experience.
Sponsors
Venue Sponsor — Reperio Health F&B Sponsor — groundcover
Tomorrow
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FridayJan 23 2026PNSQC 2026 QA Free Workshop DayWebsite
As part of the start of the PNSQC 2026 Call for Papers, we’re excited to invite the community to a full day of free, in-person workshops in Portland. Held the day after the PNSQC Quality Jam, this Free Workshop Day is designed to sharpen practical skills, spark new ideas, and bring the QA community together for hands-on learning and connection.
Join us for an interactive day led by experienced practitioners and thought leaders, featuring two workshop tracks with sessions offered in both the morning and afternoon. Whether you’re strengthening your core testing skills or exploring how AI is shaping modern quality practices, there’s something here for you.
Registration on the PNSQC website is required.
You can register for the full day, or choose only the workshop options that fit your schedule. Space is limited, so we encourage you to register early and help spread the word.
Morning Workshops (8:30 AM – 12:00 PM)
AI Orchestration: Dual Stewardship with John Cvetko. Explore how humans and AI can collaboratively manage quality, risk, and decision-making in modern systems. QA Re-Bootcamp with Heather Wilcox & Bhushan Gupta. Refresh foundational testing skills and examine modern quality practices through engaging, activity-based learning.
Afternoon Workshops (1:00 PM – 4:30 PM)
Integrate MCP into your workflow with Joe Petsche. We will work with a variety of MCP servers to connect your quality apps and find ways to do your job better and faster. Come with your apps and we will connect in to your scenarios too. Writing Practical Test Plans, Fast and Easy with Wayne Roseberry. This workshop teaches a pragmatic, lightweight approach to writing effective test plans—fast.
There will be morning refreshments, and we'll take a group lunch, giving you plenty of time to connect with fellow quality professionals throughout the day.
Next two weeks
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SaturdayJan 24 2026Web Day!
WebsiteWeb Day is a monthly free, open celebration of the good parts of the web.
This is your invitation to share and learn about the web in physical presence other people, to radically oppose all those forces which would keep us separate and isolated.
We play games, surf, delve, search, and link together. You don't need to bring anything. Stop in and stay for as long or as little as you like.
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TuesdayJan 27 2026The Power of Storytelling for Founders
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OnlineWebsiteThe Power of Storytelling for Founders: For Pitching or Selling, Be More Engaging with Stories
Make your investor or sales pitch more memorable and engaging with storytelling.
People naturally connect with stories and using storytelling can make your pitch more memorable and impactful. In today's competitive market, it's not enough to just have a good product or service; you also need to be able to effectively communicate your vision and value proposition. This is where storytelling comes in.
Storytelling helps founders stand out and make a lasting impression on potential investors and customers.
In this virtual workshop, Dana will take us through some strategies to:
· Make complex ideas more understandable and relatable to your audience.
· Increase engagement and keep their attention
· Build trust by sharing authentic stories that demonstrate your values and capabilities.
Join us to transform your big vision into stories that grab attention.
Dana Sather Robinson
Dana is an angel investor, pitch trainer and creator of the Pitch 4 Impact Framework. As a professional presentation skills trainer, she understands how to help clients communicate with impact, clarity and authenticity. Dana is an active member on the board of E8 Angels, an innovative cleantech angel investing group. The Pitch4Impact program was created from two perspectives, as an investor and as a trainer of presentation skills. Dana emphasizes how to make the most of your own natural style to be memorable and authentic. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-sather-robinson/
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WednesdayJan 28 2026PDXOSGeo January MeetupWebsite
Happy New Year geo-nerds!
PDXOSGeo connects again this week, Wednesday Jan 28, 6:30p Hot Lips Pizza @ the Natural Capital Center 721 NW 9th Ave, Portland OR. Join us for some show and tell and good open geo discussion!
Topic for January: David Percy “Percy” has been doing research on applying Reconstructability Analysis (RA) to categorical raster datasets since 2012, and is preparing to defend his dissertation on Spatial Reconstructability Analysis soon. RA is a form of machine learning that works exclusively with discrete data, so categorical data such as the National Land Cover Database is a perfect source of data for it. These NLCD data have been analyzed in attempts to predict forest dynamics (clearcuts), and wildfire size, specifically looking at how historical vegetation affects these outcomes. Results will be presented that show how these data are useful in modeling future events. All of the extraction for analysis was done in Python using open source GIS libraries Shapely and Rasterio. Code will be shared and discussed.
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ThursdayJan 29 2026Assessed Intelligence Networking Happy Hour
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The MuleWebsiteJoin Assessed Intelligence for an end-of-January AI networking happy hour bringing together professionals working in artificial intelligence, data, and intelligent systems. This relaxed, after-hours gathering is designed for thoughtful conversation, new connections, and idea sharing in an informal setting. Whether you’re building, deploying, or guiding AI initiatives, we’d love to have you join us.
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Ephemeral by Design–
VirtualWebsitePortland Design Thinkers are excited to welcome Leksi Kostur, Ephemeral by Design.
This talk explores the role of biodegradable materials in the future of design. Drawing from work in festivals, weddings, and funerary contexts, Leksi examines design situations where short-lived and single-use objects are not failures, but appropriate and even advantageous choices. Rather than positioning biodegradability as a universal solution, she focuses on material logic and circular design practices, aligning purpose with lifespan. She also looks at whimsy, imagination, and references to nature as intentional design choices, framing optimism as a designer’s responsibility at a time when environmental fatigue and resignation are widespread. Designing with nature becomes a way to counter eco-nihilism and imagine more regenerative futures
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Better Futures Club
WebsiteBetter Futures Club is a weekly event (alternating Tuesdays and Thursdays) focused on imagining and making better futures.
Imagine an artist community, a think tank, and a research center in the same building. People in all of those fields working alongside each other imagining and creating different futures together. Cross pollination and inspiration. Liberal Arts and STEM and R&D. Photographers, physicists, authors, astronomers, musicians, makers, mathematicians, designers, developers, fashionistas, climatologists and all manner of imaginative optimists.
All Better Futures Club events are covered by the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct (https://www.contributor-covenant.org)