The Power in the Pause, The Bravery in the Shift

You’re invited to an inspiring morning with Shi Choong, Founder & Event Producer of Women Who Dare PDX. This intimate speaker event will explore the deeper mission behind WWD and the transformational theme for 2026: “The Power in the Pause, The Bravery in the Shift.” This event is for women and allies who support women empowerment and lifting women up.

In this session, Shi will share: ✨ Her personal journey of courage, reinvention, and leadership ✨ Why intentional pauses and pivotal life shifts shape who we become ✨ How Women Who Dare creates spaces for women to be seen, heard & celebrated ✨ What to expect at the March 8, 2026 WWD Conference

If you’re navigating change, seeking clarity, or craving a community that supports your evolution—this conversation will speak to your heart. Bring a friend, your journal, or simply your open mind. Prepare to feel inspired, grounded, and ready to rise.

RSVP (free): https://www.meetup.com/startup-your-startup/events/312356008/

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)

Topic

Often relegated to episodic efforts such as late-stage audits and ad hoc projects, digital accessibility is most effective and efficient when it is the organization’s default mode of operation. Making the shift to continuous accessibility leads to better outcomes across the board, including improving the experience of disabled users, mitigating the risk of accessibility-related lawsuits, improving brand reputation, and even creating a positive return on investment (ROI).

In this talk we provide practical strategies for embedding accessibility into daily routines and technical systems, demonstrating how to start small and scale over time. Key topics include:

• Establishing a repeatable accessibility routine and improving it over time.
• The importance of data and metrics, such as bug counts and time-to-resolution (TTR), to establish a baseline and measure progress.
• Rallying cross-functional allies to drive change (yes, even without C-suite mandates).
• Creating a unified system where human workflows and technical tools work in concert.

A real world case study illustrates how the strategic application of automated regression testing and clear bug prioritization led to a profound cultural shift where accessibility is treated like any other product quality concern. Attendees will leave with actionable ideas for initiating and sustaining cultural change, making the case for accessibility as a core business principle.

Agenda

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

• 5:45–6:00pm Networking
• 6:00–6:15pm Introductions and announcements
• 6:15–6:45pm Presentation
• 6:45–7:15pm Q&A and discussion

About the presenters

Devon Persing is your neighbor to the north in Seattle, WA. Before joining "big" tech as an accessibility professional around 2012, she worked in "small" tech as a UI designer, front-end web developer, and usability advocate in libraries, higher education, and local government. She has an MS in Information and is disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent, and as a result her approach to digital accessibility centers information literacy, organization dynamics, and disability justice. Her current focus as a solo consultant is on helping people do accessibility work that is more holistic, inclusive, cooperative, and sustainable. She wrote a book called The Accessibility Operations Guidebook with that goal in mind.

Portlander by birth and by choice, Andrew Hedges is COO for Assistiv Labs, an accessibility tooling company based in the PNW. His 28-year career as a web developer and engineering leader has taken him to companies from Apple to Zapier. As a longtime advocate for improving the usability of websites for people with disabilities, Andrew would love nothing more than for accessibility to become the default so we can finally realize the original promise of the web to democratize access to information for everyone.

RSVP

Please RSVP for the Zoom link.

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)

​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)

TokioConf 2026

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

​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.

RSVP to be added to our mailing list!a

There will be Snacks! This is a kid friendly event!

​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)

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.

#

“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

​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)

Topic

This talk explores the incredible power of tiny CSS snippets that create big accessibility improvements, proving that sometimes the most impactful code is measured in lines, not libraries. We'll dive deep into practical, copy-paste-ready CSS solutions that require minimal implementation time but deliver maximum inclusivity. Each snippet comes with real-world context, showing exactly how these small changes impact actual users.

Agenda

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

• 5:45–6:00pm Networking
• 6:00–6:15pm Introductions and announcements
• 6:15–6:45pm Presentation
• 6:45–7:15pm Q&A and discussion

About the presenter

Mike Mai is an expert in design systems, web accessibility, HTML/CSS, and typography. His design philosophy is rooted in a fundamental understanding of the web. Mike's passion for typography, cultivated during my BFA in Graphic Design at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, directly informed my decision to pursue web design professionally. He considers typography to be the most critical foundation of any website, given its text-centric nature, making typeface selection and typesetting my first order of business on any new projects.

Mike firmly believes that design is about solving problems, a principle instilled by a formative mentor. This conviction drove his path to specializing in accessible web design. While strong typographic forms are important, they must be balanced with robust function and an intuitive user experience. He is committed to ensuring all his designs are usable, useful, and truly inclusive.

RSVP

Please RSVP for the Zoom link:

• Meetup
• Eventbrite
• email

Accommodation requests

If you have any accommodation requests, don't hesitate to get in touch with us before the event to discuss.

Join the Portland AWS User Group for an evening of technical learning with other tech professionals!

Starting networking at 5:30 PM, Presentation at 6:00 PM

Enjoy drinks & PIZZA provided by ProFocus.

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

• Date: Friday, January 16, 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.

​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)

Let’s get together for an informal BEAM PDX (formerly the Portland Elixir & Erlang User Group) 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.

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.

Kick off 2026 with an uplifting morning of connection, empowerment, and community! Join us for a casual Women Who Dare Mix & Mingle where you’ll meet like-hearted women and allies who value authenticity, courage, and meaningful conversations.

Whether you’re new to Women Who Dare or already part of our growing movement, this is a beautiful opportunity to:

✨ Make genuine connections ✨ Share your goals and intentions for 2026 ✨ Find encouragement from a supportive community ✨ Get a sneak peek of what’s coming for Women Who Dare 2026: “The Power in the Pause, The Bravery in the Shift”

Get a sneak peek of what’s coming for Women Who Dare 2026: “The Power in the Pause, The Bravery in the Shift”

Come as you are—bring your curiosity, your story, and your desire to rise alongside other women who dare.

RSVP (free): https://www.meetup.com/startup-your-startup/events/312355895/

Join us for drinks and friendly conversation at Tap Union Freehouse in downtown Vancouver for our monthly social gathering! Meet fellow designers and engineers from the north side of the PDX metro and talk about your craft over tasty pints and good eats.

This is a casual social meetup for the people in tech who build products to network and get to know their local community. While we are new, there are no scheduled talks, but we're interested in meeting people who want to share their knowledge with others! We meet every second Tuesday of each month.

We've chosen Tap Union as our meetup location because of its friendly staff, wide variety of rotating craft beer (including numerous Non-Alcoholic and Gluten-Free options!), and its cozy atmosphere. There are also board games and a mini arcade on-site to enjoy!

People doing strange things with electricity! Along with the usual freewheeling chaos, the quick talks continue this month with Joe FitzPatrick (aka SecurelyFitz), presenting:

"Probing Pins for Protocol Polyglots" This talk explores stacking multiple protocols, like UART, SPI, and I2C, onto the same GPIO pins by exploiting undefined “don’t care” regions. Learn how to bitbang several devices at once, creating protocol polyglots without extra hardware.

DorkbotPDX is a relaxed, informal show-and-tell for electronic artists, circuit designers, microcontroller programmers, retro computing enthusiasts, video game designers, digital archaeologists, and mod synth gearheads in Portland, Oregon.

Bring your electronic wonders, monsters, and works-in-progress for others to see, or come see what others have been working on! Whether it's code or circuits, electronic creativity of all sorts is welcome here.

Table space with power will be available for project show-and-tell; we'll have a table for drinks and snacks, feel free to contribute to the communal cache/BYOB. The Free cart is back, take or leave some components (don’t leave TOO much, if you have big stuff, maybe check the Discord/mailing list to see if anyone is interested in taking it first!)

Info and links to our Discord and other social channels are at https://dorkbotpdx.org

We’re back for our January monthly mixer! Come mingle with your Out in Tech PDX community. Looking to meet new friends? Searching for new opportunities? Or simply looking to mingle in a queer space with other queer humans?

Come join Out in Tech PDX at Peacock PDX on Thursday, January 8th from 6pm to 9pm.

Whether you're interested in tech, working in tech, or you're tech-adjacent (hint: that's everyone), come mingle with us, have a beverage of choice, and meet the fabulous members of your PDX Out in Tech community.

We are looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Join us for another exciting session of Portland's longest-running robotics meetup! This month, we're thrilled to welcome Dr. Joe Cole, an honored member of our community, who will be presenting on Teaching Physical AI with the PARTS Common Platform.

Abstract

At Rose City Robotics, we use hands-on robotics to bridge the gap between abstract AI and real-world autonomy. In our Engineer Boldly: AI Robotics Sprint, students learn physical AI by building and programming mobile robots that perceive, map, and act in the physical world using modern tools such as ROS 2, LiDAR-based SLAM, and deep-learning-based perception.

This talk describes how we use the PARTS Common Platform robot as a shared, open foundation for teaching embodied intelligence. Students train and deploy object-detection models, experiment with imitation and reinforcement learning, and confront the real challenges of noisy sensors, imperfect models, and hardware constraints. By learning AI directly on physical robots, participants develop an intuition for autonomy that cannot be gained from simulation alone.

I’ll share lessons learned, example student projects, and why accessible, community-designed platforms like the Common Platform are essential for educating the next generation of roboticists.

Who Should Attend This presentation is designed for robotics enthusiasts of all levels. Whether you're a professional engineer, a hobbyist, a student, or simply curious about the intersection of AI and robotics, you'll find valuable insights in this talk.

About the Speaker Dr. Joseph (Joe) Cole is a distinguished figure in the Portland robotics community and an honored member of P.A.R.T.S. With a Ph.D. in Applied Physics, Joe brings over 20 years of experience developing computer vision and machine learning algorithms.

As the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Rose City Robotics, Joe is currently focused on building robots for many tasks. His extensive background includes work at Northrop Grumman, Applied Materials, and YorLabs, specializing in image processing and applied physics.

Joe has been a valued contributor to the Portland Area Robotics Society, regularly sharing his expertise through presentations and helping to bridge the gap between professional robotics development and our local community.

About P.A.R.T.S. The Portland Area RoboTics Society (P.A.R.T.S.) is THE longest-running robotics meetup in Portland. We are an Oregon non-profit formed to help those interested in learning about and building robots. Our monthly meetings are open to the public and welcome everyone from professionals to amateurs, students to professors, engineers to artists. P.A.R.T.S. members explore all aspects of robotics and work toward expanding communication between robot enthusiasts. We share ideas, experience, and enthusiasm for building robots in an informal and supportive environment.

What to Bring

Your curiosity and questions A robot (working or not) if you'd like to share or get help A notebook or laptop for capturing ideas After the Presentation As always, there will be time for Q&A and informal discussions after the presentation. This is your chance to connect with other robotics enthusiasts, share your projects, and get feedback from the community.

The Portland Linux Kernel Meetup for December 2025 will be at...

• Date: Saturday, December 27, 2025
• 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.

Happy Holidays!

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

PDX Shopify - Build & Brew series is Back for another edition! - Wednesday December 17th (6:00 - 8:00 pm) - 6 pm Start Time Great Notion Brewing on NW 28th - Member Showcase - starts promptly at 6:30pm - First Beverage is FREE for Members (delicious NA drinks available too 😎 ) - We also have some end of year prizes to give away!

We have a few people singed up to share their Shopify Projects / Websites, but there are still room for more.

➡️ Signup Here to Share Your Project https://forms.gle/2NNw4RQdAGnsokiSA

I look forward to hanging out!

Best, - Brian

Join us for a casual year-end accessibility social! Chat about your favorite accessibility topics, meet new people, and discuss what you'd like to learn at events in the new year.

Location: The Zipper

The Zipper is a food court with multiple vendors providing different cuisines, including vegan and gluten-free options. Alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages are available. See individual vendors for menus. This event is no-host (each participant pays for their own food/drinks), but there's no obligation to buy something to attend.

Accessibility + COVID Safety

The location is wheelchair accessible, near public transit, and has street parking for bikes and cars. This event will be held outside in the covered patio space with outdoor ventilation and heaters.

People doing strange things with electricity!

Along with the usual freewheeling chaos, the quick talks continue this month with Zach Babb, presenting on: "Ripping Digital Identity through Magic: Multi-device Asynchronous Generic Input/output Consensus"

DorkbotPDX is a relaxed, informal show-and-tell for electronic artists, circuit designers, microcontroller programmers, retro computing enthusiasts, video game designers, digital archaeologists, and mod synth gearheads in Portland, Oregon.

Bring your electronic wonders, monsters, and works-in-progress for others to see, or come see what others have been working on! Whether it's code or circuits, electronic creativity of all sorts is welcome here.

Table space with power will be available for project show-and-tell; we'll have a table for drinks and snacks, feel free to contribute to the communal cache/BYOB. The Free cart is back, take or leave some components (don’t leave TOO much, if you have big stuff, maybe check the Discord/mailing list to see if anyone is interested in taking it first!)

Info and links to our Discord and other social channels are at https://dorkbotpdx.org

We’re back for our December monthly mixer! Come mingle with your Out in Tech PDX community. Looking to meet new friends? Searching for new opportunities? Or simply looking to mingle in a queer space with other queer humans?

Come join Out in Tech PDX at Peacock PDX on Tuesday, December 2nd from 5:30pm to 8:30pm.

Whether you're interested in tech, working in tech, or you're tech-adjacent (hint: that's everyone), come mingle with us, have a beverage of choice, and meet the fabulous members of your PDX Out in Tech community.

We are looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Sip, snack, and slay... LGBTQ+ tech demos with plenty of sparkle ✨

What to expect ✨ 4 fabulous demos from your LGBTQ+ tech community 💻🏳️‍🌈, each 10–15 minutes with Q&A. After that, snacks 🥨, drinks 🍷🥤, and plenty of sparkle. Allies welcome, too 💕.

Schedule ⏰ - 6:00p — Doors and check-in 🚪 - 6:30p — Demos begin (10–15 min each + Q&A) 🎤 - 7:30p — Drinks, snacks, and mingling 🍻 - 9:00p — Close 🌙

Apply to demo 🎬 Got something fierce to show? Tell us what you’re building and why it slays 💅. Email us at [email protected]

Food & drink 🍽️ Beer 🍺, wine 🍷, and non-alcoholic options 🧃. You must be 21+ to consume alcohol 🪪.

Food available at the food cart pod next door!

Photos 📸 Event photos may be taken by OIT staff. If you’d prefer not to appear, let us know when you arrive 🙅‍♂️🙅‍♀️.

House rules 📖 - We follow the OIT Code of Conduct: outintech.com/conduct 🌐 - Be kind 💜. Ask before photos 🙋. - If you feel unsafe, find an organizer wearing an OIT shirt 👕.

Get involved 🌈 - Volunteer with OIT PDX:[email protected] - Join the community: outintech.com/join - IG/Twitter: @outintech

What if you didn’t need to move to SF to be a builder? What if the same energy that fuels the frontier could happen right here in Portland?

​That’s the idea behind Open Build — a hands-on event where AI-native developers, indie hackers, and curious tinkerers come together to experiment, create, and connect using Windsurf, the AI-powered coding environment that’s redefining how builders work.

​Join us for an evening of creativity, collaboration, and good vibes — plus free Windsurf credits, exclusive swag, and direct time with the Windsurf team.

Breaking Into the Education Market: How to Sell Your Product in EdTech

Thinking about launching or scaling a product for the education sector? Whether your innovation is designed for K–12 classrooms, higher ed, district administrators, workforce training, or lifelong learners, the education market comes with unique challenges—and enormous opportunity.

This session focuses on how early-stage founders can move from idea to traction by understanding how education markets actually buy, and how to turn early wins into sustainable growth. Hear from experienced founders and industry experts who have successfully navigated the edtech landscape and lived to tell the tale.

The panel will discuss:

Key differences across K–12, higher ed, and consumer learning

How to get your product in front of educators, decision-makers, and influencers

What to expect from the sales cycle

The importance of proving outcomes.

Opportunities in adult learning, professional development, corporate upskilling, and lifelong learning

Whether you’re at the idea stage or preparing to scale, you’ll walk away with practical insights, realistic expectations, and strategies to build credibility and adoption in one of the most rewarding (and complex) markets.

Panelists include

Justin Wolske (Moderator) | Chief Product Officer, Yellowbrick

Pamela Judge| EdTech Demand Generation and RevOps leader

John Moore | Global Edtech Executive & Experienced Founder

Shannon Schrecengost | Principal Consultant, Serendipity Lane

Scott Wallace K-12 EdTech Sales Leader

Agenda

5:00-5:15p: Networking

5:15 - 6:15p: Panel & Q&A

6:15-6:45p: Founder Pitches (3 startups pitch their sales strategies and get live feedback)

6:45-7:00pp: Event Wrap & Next Steps

Cost: FREE (snacks and light refreshments provided)

ABOUT LRN|PDX

LRN|PDX is a new initiative designed to serve education-focused ventures across the Portland and Oregon entrepreneurship ecosystems. Sponsored by Airy Disc Learning and the Metro Region Innovation Hub, LRN|PDX provides programming, networking opportunity, and expertise to help entrepreneurs solve the most pressing problems across the education landscape.

The Portland Linux Kernel Meetup for November 2025 will be at...

• Date: Thursday, November 13, 2025
• 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.

People doing strange things with electricity! Along with the usual freewheeling chaos, the quick talks continue this month with Daniel Temkin, author of the new book "Forty-four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code":

"Software art is widely accepted, but can programming languages themselves be art? The new book Forty-Four Esolangs makes this argument, collecting work by a single artist who poses code as prayer to the Greek gods, patterns of empty folders, or typed in tandem by two programmers, the rhythm and synchrony of their typing determining commands. Temkin will share projects from the book in the context of thirty plus years of esolangs, showing the poetic possibilities of this medium.”

DorkbotPDX is a relaxed, informal show-and-tell for electronic artists, circuit designers, microcontroller programmers, retro computing enthusiasts, video game designers, digital archaeologists, and mod synth gearheads in Portland, Oregon.

Bring your electronic wonders, monsters, and works-in-progress for others to see, or come see what others have been working on! Whether it's code or circuits, electronic creativity of all sorts is welcome here.

Table space with power will be available for project show-and-tell; we'll have a table for drinks and snacks, feel free to contribute to the communal cache/BYOB. The Free cart is back, take or leave some components (don’t leave TOO much, if you have big stuff, maybe check the Discord/mailing list to see if anyone is interested in taking it first!)

Info and links to our Discord and other social channels are at https://dorkbotpdx.org

Hey PDX AI enthusiasts! Ready to connect, learn, and have some fun? Join us for The PDX Hacking Agents meetup hosted by IBM.

​Whether you're an AI developer, engineer, or just someone excited to learn more, this meetup is the perfect spot to mingle, share ideas, and geek out about all things AI.

​​We'll have engaging talks from speakers, plenty of time to network with fellow AI enthusiasts, and of course, some tasty light refreshments to keep the conversations flowing.

​We’ll kick things off by building an AI Agent live, showcasing both an MCP server and client in action. You’ll learn what makes Agentic AI enterprise-ready, from scalability to governance, and see a real-world industry case study showing how Agentic AI is already transforming a specific vertical. Expect a fast-paced, practical, and insight-rich experience that connects the technical foundations to real business impact.

RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/cloud-native-pdx/events/311422780/

OpenSearch - Your Friendly Neighborhood Vector Database by Nathan Boot @ AWS

OpenSearch, aside from being a search, analytics, and observability solution, often gets overlooked as a fully functioning open source vector database. I’d very much like the opportunity to showcase the progress we’ve made here at the OpenSearch project implementing vector database operations and making them accessible to developers of all skill levels.

Let’s learn how to create and query vector embeddings, the basis for semantic search and RAG. You’ll get introduced to embeddings, vectors and semantic search in this “OpenSearch Vector Operations for Dummies” presentation. Hopefully it will bring a user-friendly path on a battle tested, fully open source platform.

Edge Orchestration: Challenges and Solutions by Scott Baker @ Intel

The edge differs from the cloud – rather than consisting of a handful of centralized infinitely-elastic Kubernetes clusters, the edge consists of thousands of geographically distributed edge nodes, often with constrained resources. The talk will begin with a discussion of the edge, how it differs from the cloud, and the unique challenges that this presents. After the overview of the edge, we will discuss Intel’s Open Edge Platform and its Edge Manageability Framework (EMF) that was built to demonstrate orchestration of edge nodes, Kubernetes Clusters, and applications to those clusters. The software is fully open source, actively developed, and readily available on GitHub.

We will discuss how we onboard and lifecycle the nodes, how we bring up Kubernetes clusters with our CAPI-based cluster management layer, and how we deploy and manage applications to those clusters. We will introduce technologies that enable the edge, such as Intel’s vPRO and Edge Microvisor Toolkit (EMT). We will talk about the architecture and design of this open-source project, and if time and connectivity permits, we will do a short demo to get a feel of the user interface.

Agenda

5:30–6:00 — Check-in, snacks, networking 6:00–6:30 — OpenSearch - Your Friendly Neighborhood Vector Database 6:30 - 7:00 — Edge Orchestration: Challenges and Solutions 7:00–8:00 — Networking (and games if anyone wants to bring some!)

Who Should Attend

Platform engineers, SREs, DevOps, app/platform teams, OSS maintainers, and anyone curious about Kubernetes, supply chain security, observability, eBPF/WASM, finops, or AI for infra/devex.

We’re back for our November monthly mixer! Come mingle with your Out in Tech PDX community. Looking to meet new friends? Searching for new opportunities? Or simply looking to celebrate Pride Month in a queer space with other queer humans?

Come join Out in Tech PDX at White Owl on Wednesday, November 5th from 6pm to 9pm.

Whether you're interested in tech, working in tech, or you're tech-adjacent (hint: that's everyone), come mingle with us, have a beverage of choice, and meet the fabulous members of your PDX Out in Tech community.

We are looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Join us for the October edition of ProductTank PDX!

We’re excited to welcome two incredible speakers, Sarah Crispin (Product Management, Strategy & Operations Consultant) and Justin Wolske (Chief Product Officer @ Yellowbrick), for an evening exploring the problem with problems, and how to leverage frameworks to move fast. As always, we’ll also have plenty of time to meet other product folks over drinks and tasty snacks.

📅 Wednesday, October 29, 2025 🕕 6:00 – 8:00pm 📍 Kiln

Lighting the Frameworks on Fire

We learn a lot about best practices and frameworks, but it’s rare that product managers find themselves with the space and time to use them as intended. This is a story about learning the rules of the game you’re actually playing so that you can adjust your approach and cobble tools together to move fast, play hard, and maybe even score. Spoiler: success in this endeavor requires an A+ team and, if we’re being honest, luck.

About Sarah: Sarah found her way to product management after teaching middle school, coaching collegiate track & field, and working as a management consultant. In her most recent full-time role, Sarah served as a Global Director of Product at ASICS, where she worked to pivot a legacy fitness app. Originally from Maine, Sarah moved to Portland after almost 20 years in Boston. She loves dogs, running in the woods, learning about big ideas, and sports documentaries (recommendations welcome).

The Problem with Problems: Rethinking Urgency

A discussion centered around reframing problems as jobs to be done, and how that helps you build better personas and psychographics. The talk is catered first toward early-stage founders with product responsibilities (others can find something useful, too).

About Justin: Film producer by trade, he has worked in EdTech since 1999. Currently, he's the Chief Product Officer @ Yellowbrick and Principal @ Airy Disc Learning. His areas of focus are around digital learning products (with a specialization in using narrative-based pedagogies to drive executive-function learning), media production, lean/agile product development, and early/mid-stage entrepreneurship strategy.

🎉 Don’t miss it!

Come connect with fellow product managers, designers, engineers, and enthusiasts over drinks and snacks. See you there!