Topic

Writing proper alt text is hard. But it doesn't have to be. There's a minimum standard and an advanced approach. People who need alt text will appreciate you for the former and love you for the latter. Alt text is also a whole lot more than the alt attribute. That's just one of the many ways to make content accessible. In fact, there are a number of considerations for writing great alt text.

In this presentation, Mark Wyner will help you understand the spectrum of options so you can take good care of your audience. We'll walk through implementation methods, phonetics, composition, complex sources, and tackling social media.

Let’s give screen readers and other assistive technologies something to talk about.

Agenda

The event begins at 6 pm; join early, starting at 5:45 pm for networking.

• 5:45 Networking
• 6:00 Introductions and announcements
• 6:15 Presentation
• 6:45 Q&A and discussion

About the presenter

Mark Wyner is an autodidactic polymath with over two decades of experience in design and development. His approach prioritizes usability, accessibility, and inclusivity. He’s also an antifascist humanitarian. So diversity and equity are overarching principles for everything he does in this space. Currently, as the Lead Product Designer at BookNook. His pronouns are he/him/his. You can follow him on Mastodon or his accessibility writings on his website.

Accommodation requests

If you have any accommodation requests, don't hesitate to contact us before the event to discuss.

​Better 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)

Come join Community Broadband PDX to talk about building a publicly owned broadband network here in Portland.

See you there!

The Portland Linux Kernel Meetup for May 2026 will be at...

• Date: Thursday, May 14, 2026
• Time: 06:00 PM to 09:00 PM US/Pacific
• Location: Lucky Labrador Beer Hall, 1945 NW Quimby St, Portland, Oregon 97209 US

Come enjoy a beverage and chat with other people who are interested in the Linux kernel. All experience levels are welcome. This is a friendly and casual meetup. Look for a table with a plush Tux penguin.

To get timely reminders of Portland Linux Kernel Meetups, see https://ikluft.github.io/pdx-lkmu/subscribing-to-pdx-lkmu-events.html.

Cloud Native PDX May: Change-driven Architecture and Serving Inference at Scale

This May is all about scaling; scaling your infrastructure management, or scaling your LLM inference serving. Join us to find out about some open source tools to make managing large modern stacks easier.

Date: Thursday, May 14 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)

A big thank you to Microsoft for sponsoring food & beverage, and to Reperio Health, our venue host.

Drasi, a new take on Change Driven Architectures: Aman Singh, Microsoft

Modern cloud-native systems constantly generate data changes, and applications often need to react to them. Building change-driven solutions that respond to specific changes in distributed data is challenging. This talk introduces Drasi, a CNCF Sandbox project that simplifies the design and implementation of change-driven architectures using Graph Queries and pluggable components. For example, with Drasi you can declaratively write automation to detect and respond to running containers with newly identified vulnerabilities across pods and deployments in a Kubernetes cluster. Join us for a walkthrough of real-world use cases that show how Drasi’s approach brings structure and responsiveness to complex distributed environments - without writing custom code.

Dynamo: Large Scale Distributed Inference David Zeir, Director, DL System Software, Nvidia Neelay Shah, Distinguished Engineer, Nvidia

This talk introduces Dynamo, NVIDIA's open-source Kubernetes-native distributed inference platform. We'll cover the problem space, walk through Dynamo's architecture — disaggregated prefill/decode, KV-cache-aware routing, and a transport layer that moves KV blocks directly between GPUs — and dig into the Kubernetes integration for scheduling, autoscaling, and graceful failure handling. We'll close with a demo of Dynamo serving a real workload.

​Better 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)

Note: Your RSVP is required in order to attend this event.

Let’s get together for an informal BEAM PDX hangout: coffee, conversation, and light co-working.

This is a low-key monthly meetup for folks working with Elixir, Erlang, Gleam, and other BEAM languages, aimed at reconnecting the local community and rebuilding momentum after a long quiet stretch. We'll holding this on the second Thursday of each month.

There will be opportunities to:

• Ask questions about Elixir and other BEAM languages
• Share what you’ve been working on (or stuck on)
• Get help with programming or design problems
• Co-work: get things done with like-minded folks nearby
• Brainstorm ideas for future talk-based meetups and identify potential speakers
• Bring your laptop if you’d like. It's totally optional.

New to BEAM languages, or just curious? You’re very welcome.

Please RSVP so we know roughly how many people to expect. If your plans change, un-RSVP when you can.

This meetup is also part of our transition away from Meetup to a new home for the group, where we’ll be organizing future events.

Pull your shorts out of the back of the drawer and don’t forget the sunscreen! 🍷

Join us on Wednesday, May 13 at 6:00 PM for a golden hour evening with friends, wine, and refreshing drinks at Company Wine Bar in SE Portland.

Come join Community Broadband PDX to talk about building a publicly owned broadband network here in Portland.

See you there!

A toolkit for founders from Ali Maaxa, Ph.D., incubation product & marketing strategist (founder: ProductTheory.io, former: AWS AI, New Relic AI, Meta AI, Recreation.gov), guest VC expert Marianne Motus (UC Berkeley Business School), PDX startup dev team Semi-Decent, and leaders from CHIFOO and the ORPIB Incubator.

This is a FREE lightning workshop to help scrappy startup founders nail product-market fit (PMF) and go-to-market strategy (GTM). Be your own incubator, be nimble, and be ready to answer deep strategic questions for potential investors, flagship customers, or strategic partners — in a flash.

Sure, PMF and GTM are buzzwords thrown around constantly. But they stand in for due diligence that actually makes a difference. Skipping the fundamentals is the primary reason 91% of startups fail:

The classic frameworks that undergird successful incubations — from enterprise AI to EdTech startups Rigorous market research powered by smart AI context engineering Real-deal, progressive hypothesis-testing toward a heavy-hitting MVP In fact, 82% of "failed" founders say that challenging their assumptions about their market would have saved their business.

Most startups don't find product-market fit for one of two reasons: consultancies charge high overhead to run studies and then throw their findings over the wall — or founders rely on raw AI outputs without the frameworks and context engineering that hold up under VC scrutiny and real product + user discovery.

Founders need a toolkit they can use throughout their entire product and business development journey. Before you hire a fractional, take generic expert advice from someone who doesn't understand your context, or worse — guess your way into brand damage — let us help you develop your ProductTheory with startup-friendly canvases that will anchor your pitch deck and your upcoming rounds of critical business decisions.

Learn more about Ali Maaxa's work: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alimaaxa/

Get on board with ProductTheory.io: https://www.producttheory.io/

People doing strange things with electricity (and code)!

DorkbotPDX is a laid-back meetup and show-and-tell for those who make, modify and use technical tools to weird and imaginative ends. You might run into creative coders, electronic artists, circuit designers, retro computing archaeologists, video game devs, modular synth gearheads and cyberpunk DIYers.

Bring your electronic wonders, monsters, and works-in-progress to show off, or come see what others have been working on! Code or circuits, electronic creativity of all sorts is welcome here.

Most of Dorkbot is a freewheeling hangout, but each month we feature a short talk about a cool project or teaching some esoteric wizardry.

This month, Matthew Nielsen is sharing: A novel, super efficient data compression technique used for audio time stretching (and more!). The intended audience is not just synthesizer/sampling nerds but anyone with an interest in digital signal processing, particularly the efficient embedded variety. I've successfully applied this to weather data, GPS/IMU, and a range of industrial transmitters. See demo here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ3FgaHN-ig

Table space with power will be available for project show-and-tell; we have a table for drinks and snacks, feel free to contribute to the communal cache/BYOB.

We do this every month, usually on the second Monday night (check the site for upcoming dates to be sure)

Note: We may be famous for the free parts cart…but the pile has gotten unruly, so we’re not accepting new stuff. If you have things to give away, check the Discord offer/ask channel to see if anyone would like to claim them. Feel free to exchange items at Dorkbot, just no leftovers please!

You can subscribe to our calendar and mailing list, join the Discord and find our social links on https://www.dorkbotpdx.org (It also has our Code of Conduct, which we'd like you to check out while you're there)

​Better 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)

Come join your fellow idealists, builders, and shitposters for another meetup about the atmosphere! Together, we’re doing our part to create a more social web so the internet belongs to The People and not the oligarchs.

Co-organizer Brittany Ellich will give us a preview of the AT Proto 101 talk she’s presenting at CascadiaJS June 2nd - including a raffle for a ✨ free ticket to the conference ✨. And, since we got lots of love re: the open, collaborative style of our last meetup, we’re doing it again!

How it will work:

• @BrittanyEllich.com , will kick the meeting off with her AT Proto talk, including:
  • The problem with social media
  • What is the atmosphere?
  • Overview of DIDs/lexicons/etc
  • How we can get involved
• We’ll ask for 3 -4 volunteers to lead a discussion group
• Then, we’ll break out into huddles, and everyone can join their chosen discussion group

Example discussion ideas:

• How to Make ATProto Normie-Friendly
• Here’s how I built XYZ
• My Experience Working on ATProto as an Absolute Beginner
• Let’s Discuss: Getting Funding for Our Projects

Agenda:

• 6:00 - 6:10 (ish) | Snacks, hangout, shooting the shit, whatevs
• 6:10 - 6:40 (ish) | AT Protocol 101 by Brittany Ellich
• 6:40 - 6:45 (ish) | Discussion huddle ideas
• 6:45 - 7:15 (ish) | Huddle breakout
• 7:15 - 7:30 | Regroup and discuss
• 7:30 | Close, announce raffle winner, and after-hangout at a nearby bar

Special thanks to @jason.energy for offering his CodeTV studio for our meetup space! Hope to see you all there!

Portland 503 Day Block Party

Ankeny Alley

featuring local vendors + artisans, a silent disco dance party, live performances

Kick off the month with First Friday at UpStart Collective, a relaxed happy-hour style gathering for good conversation, new connections, and a little end-of-week celebration. Join the UpStart Collective community on the 5th floor in downtown Portland for an easygoing hour of meeting people, catching up, and easing into the weekend with a festive vibe.

​Whether you’re stopping by after work or making this your first Friday tradition, it’s a great chance to unwind, share what you’re working on, and enjoy a welcoming space with a lively crowd. Come as you are, bring a friend if you’d like, and settle in for a fun start to the month.

​Better 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)

The Portland Linux Kernel Meetup for April 2026 will be at...

• Date: Thursday, April 23, 2026
• Time: 06:00 PM to 09:00 PM US/Pacific
• Location: Lucky Labrador Beer Hall, 1945 NW Quimby St, Portland, Oregon 97209 US

Come enjoy a beverage and chat with other people who are interested in the Linux kernel. All experience levels are welcome. This is a friendly and casual meetup. Look for a table with a plush Tux penguin.

To get timely reminders of Portland Linux Kernel Meetups, see https://ikluft.github.io/pdx-lkmu/subscribing-to-pdx-lkmu-events.html.

TokioConf 2026

hosted by the Tokio Project ( https://tokio.rs )

All about RSS! Wish you could have a dedicated place for all those newsletters in your email inbox? Got an RSS reader yet? Want your very own RSS feed for your blog? We'll help you get set up!

RSS LIBERATES YOU.

But what do #pdx and RSS have in common? A LOT! Try this. Download an RSS app on your phone. Go to @[email protected]'s website. "Share" the link to your RSS app, and click Add Feed. Never miss a local story or event!

Free public library workshop on how to minimize your digital trail using the Activist Checklist

Come join Community Broadband PDX to talk about building a publicly owned broadband network here in Portland.

RSVP to be added to our mailing list!

See you there!

HackUP is Portland's first intercollegiate hackathon: a 24-hour tech innovation marathon where students and industry leaders converge to network, compete for major prizes, and build something meaningful.

Let’s get together for an informal BEAM PDX hangout: coffee, conversation, and light co-working.

This is a low-key monthly meetup for folks working with Elixir, Erlang, Gleam, and other BEAM languages, aimed at reconnecting the local community and rebuilding momentum after a long quiet stretch. We'll holding this on the second Thursday of each month.

There will be opportunities to:

Ask questions about Elixir and other BEAM languages Share what you’ve been working on (or stuck on) Get help with programming or design problems Co-work: get things done with like-minded folks nearby Brainstorm ideas for future talk-based meetups and identify potential speakers Bring your laptop if you’d like. It's totally optional.

New to BEAM languages, or just curious? You’re very welcome.

Please RSVP so we know roughly how many people to expect. If your plans change, un-RSVP when you can.

This meetup is also part of our transition away from Meetup to a new home for the group, where we’ll be organizing future events.

​Better 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)

​Better 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)

This one-hour tour of the Portland Art Museum will include a tour of accessibility features, followed by an exploration of the museum's tactile graphics.

The studio has been reserved - so we will have a quiet place to talk and explore the tactiles. Personal belongings can be left in this area during the tour, as the studio will be securely locked.

This tour is being offered free of charge, but an RSVP is required. Once the tour is completed, food and beverages can be purchased at Coquelico within the Portland Art Museum. Attendees can continue to tour the museum if they wish.

Museum Staff Request: Please avoid wearing scented body and laundry products, as well as essential oils.

Accessibility Request: The Portland Art Museum (PAM) now has elevators and an accessible entrance. Here are further details on the PAM's accessibility offerings. Please let us know if you have any accommodation requests, such as stools, etc.

Where to Meet: The lobby, more details to come. Please look for our logo.

RSVP https://luma.com/hu8ooquo?tk=MzDiPB

Lovable Hackathon — brought to you by PDX Hacks & AI Collective, sponsored by Lovable.

The Portland Linux Kernel Meetup for March 2026 will be at...

• Date: Thursday, March 19, 2026
• Time: 06:00 PM to 09:00 PM US/Pacific
• Location: Lucky Labrador Beer Hall, 1945 NW Quimby St, Portland, Oregon 97209 US

Come enjoy a beverage and chat with other people who are interested in the Linux kernel. All experience levels are welcome. This is a friendly and casual meetup.

Look for a table with the plush Tux penguin.

To get timely reminders of Portland Linux Kernel Meetups, see https://ikluft.github.io/pdx-lkmu/subscribing-to-pdx-lkmu-events.html.

March is all about infrastructure! We'll learn to manage edge container deployments, and then how to account for our AWS infrastructure drift.

Date: Thursday, March 19 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)

A big thank you to Reperio Health, our venue host, and Red Hat, our food and beverage sponsor this month. If your company can sponsor our meetup, please contact the organizers.

Running MicroShift on Fedora Bootc for Scalable, Secure, and Resilient Edge Deployments - Ram Gopinathan, Red Hat

As edge computing accelerates across industries—from utilities and manufacturing to retail and smart cities—organizations are looking for lightweight, reliable, and secure platforms to deploy containerized applications at scale at the edge. Enter MicroShift, a small-footprint Kubernetes distribution, paired with Fedora Bootc, an image-based, immutable operating system built for consistency and resilience.

In this session, we’ll demonstrate how running MicroShift on Fedora Bootc creates a powerful foundation for edge workloads, combining the familiarity of Kubernetes with the reliability of image-based OS updates and atomic rollbacks. Learn how this approach reduces operational complexity, improves boot-time performance, and enhances system integrity—especially for unattended or resource-constrained edge environments.

Mind the Gap: Tracking AWS Infrastructure Drift Over Time - Christopher Buckley, Buckshot Technologies

Modern DevOps pipelines focus heavily on deploying infrastructure-as-code, but what happens after the deploy? In many organizations, the infrastructure evolves outside of Git — through the console, ad hoc scripts, or third-party tools — leaving behind blind spots and compliance risk.

In this talk, we’ll explore practical ways to track infrastructure drift and deltas across AWS environments. You’ll learn how to snapshot configurations, compare changes between points in time, and surface deltas across accounts in a format that’s accessible to engineers, auditors, and security teams alike.

We'll demo an open-source tool built to show Git-style diffs for AWS infrastructure — not as a pitch, but as a case study in how visibility empowers better decisions, faster troubleshooting, and cleaner audit trails. Whether you're running one VPC or a hundred, knowing what changed is the first step to staying in control.

​Better 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)

Registration required.

This event is open to all.

​Curious about building with Claude but not sure where to start?

​Join us for a hands-on Claude Code Workshop led by Todd Greco, designed for beginners, builders, and anyone curious about using Claude inside a real coding environment.

​This session will walk through how to set up the Claude Code CLI and development environment, and how Claude can assist with everyday coding tasks like debugging, file manipulation, and feature building.

​Claude Code allows developers to run Claude directly in the terminal, making it a powerful companion for building software, experimenting with ideas, and accelerating projects.

​After the workshop, participants are welcome to stay, experiment, and work on ideas together in an open build session.

​Whether you’re a developer, hacker, or simply curious about how AI can support your workflow, this session will help you get started.

​What you'll learn

​How to set up the Claude Code CLI

​How to authenticate and connect your Claude account

​Using Claude inside your terminal development workflow

​Practical ways Claude can assist with coding tasks

​Tips for experimenting and building with Claude

​Requirements

​Participants should have:

​A laptop

​A Claude account (Claude Pro recommended)

​Basic familiarity with using a terminal

​Note: Claude Pro provides access to the Claude app and Claude Code. API access is separate and billed based on usage.

​Schedule

​10:00 AM – 11:00 AM Claude Code Setup Workshop with Todd Greco

​11:00 AM – 1:00 PM Open build session — experiment, collaborate, and work on ideas.

​Come learn something new, build something interesting, and meet others exploring the Claude ecosystem in Portland.