Assistive Tech User Research

Join us as Cindy Merrill shares her work making technology more accessible to people with disabilities. Cindy conducts remote moderated research with people who use assistive technology, including screen readers and screen magnifiers. In this presentation, she'll discuss real-world insights from her research and share proven best practices for planning and conducting effective user research with people who rely on these essential tools.

This event is co-hosted by CHIFOO (pronounced ‘ky – FOO’), the Computer Human Interaction Forum of Oregon, and PDX A11Y UX, the Portland Accessibility & UX Meetup.

Bio

Cindy Merrill is a Lead UX Researcher at Pluribus Digital, a consulting firm specializing in modern digital experiences for the federal government. With more than 20 years of experience in user research across government and industry, she is passionate about making technology more accessible and easier to use. She has conducted numerous research studies on websites, consumer products, and automotive systems while working at Intel, Jaguar Land Rover, Cvent, and various consulting firms.

Event is in person and online

We are in person at the Multnomah County Central Library (Large Community Room 1A) and online via Zoom for remote participation (Zoom link will be posted a few days before event). Introduction starts at 6:00 pm, and we need to leave the room by 7:45pm.

Accommodation requests

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

Get up-to-date information at: https://luma.com/3e2o26k9

Address: Hawthorne Asylum Food Cart Pod Portland, Oregon United States

Hosted by Erin M Miles Rasmussen

Get up-to-date information at: https://luma.com/wf629e9l

Address: Hawthorne Asylum Food Cart Pod Portland, Oregon United States

Hosted by Erin M Miles Rasmussen

Get up-to-date information at: https://luma.com/waifbpzl

Address: Hawthorne Asylum Food Cart Pod Portland, Oregon United States

Hosted by Erin M Miles Rasmussen

Get up-to-date information at: https://luma.com/fgpd1gc8

Address: Hawthorne Asylum Food Cart Pod Portland, Oregon United States

Hosted by Erin M Miles Rasmussen

Summary:

Meson is the new build system on the stack and is an alternative to tools such as Autotools and CMake. Since its release in 2013 a number of large software projects such as X.org, Mesa3D, and SystemD have adopted it as their build system of choice.

In this talk, I will provide an introduction to Meson by explaining how it works and what makes it different from other build systems. For developers this may be useful when choosing how to set up your next project. For users I will explain how Meson makes it easier for you to configure, build, and install your favorite FOSS projects.

Bio:

I am a Support Technician and Desktop Linux User who has been compiling software from source for 26 years. You can usually find me working on some random Linux hobby project or filling in for PLUG Talks when we can't find a speaker.

Get up-to-date information at: https://luma.com/weiq3t3f

Address: Hawthorne Asylum Food Cart Pod Portland, Oregon United States

Hosted by Erin M Miles Rasmussen

Summary:

Russell will talk about OpenWrt on Realtek-based switches, like the EnGenius EWS2910P and Zyxel GS1900 line of managed switches. Some devices provide Power over Ethernet with port-level control. The talk will include some fun demonstrations of installation and reverse engineering.

Bio:

Russell has been a Linux user since December 1992. Since 2005, he's been involved with the Personal Telco Project, and has been the President of that organization since 2009, building public-access wifi networks and advocating for better telecommunications policy. He's also been active in an effort to energize political support for a public fiber-optic last-mile network in Portland in order to break the monopoly power of the deregulated incumbent carriers. In recent years, he's become more active in recruiting speakers for PLUG, kind of accidentally falling into the coordinator role as Michael Dexter stepped back. This talk represents a failure to find a better speaker, not only Russell's failure, but the failure of the entire PLUG community. Shame on one and all! ;-)

Event Agenda: There will be a main talk between 30 minutes to 1 hour followed by optional lighting talks.

Scalable processing with Ray: unstructured data, multimodal data, and integration with your custom code by Adam Breindel

In this talk, we'll look at building applications and data pipelines that operate on unstructured or multimodal data using the open-source Ray framework. Ray provides abstractions for running distributed, scalable, stateful code as well as higher-level constructs for orchestrating data pipelines where you can supply your own business logic.

Some logic might involve using or training AI models -- but this talk is not focused on (or written by) AI. We'll look at general issues that arise when scaling interesting logic and talk a bit about the algorithms that the Ray Core and Ray Data schedulers employ to address common challenges.

Last, since I've met so many awesome folks in the local Python communities who are looking for jobs, we'll also talk a bit about the tech stacks and other dynamics driving employment and the role of Portland's economy in the evolving landscape.

Lightning Talks: Lightning talks are talks up to 5 minutes in length on any topic that might interest other Python people. See PyCon’s Lightning Talks description for more details.

Get up-to-date information at: https://luma.com/ok3tf9ls

Address: Hawthorne Asylum Food Cart Pod Portland, Oregon United States

Hosted by Erin M Miles Rasmussen

Summary:

What happens to legacy internet infrastructure when the sole technical owner passes away? When Jon Backstrom (AKA Prairie Nyx) died in 2023, they left behind critical pieces of community infrastructure under risk of going offline completely —including the nameserver prairie.net and vital segments of the geography-centric .US locality domain space (RFC 1480).

This talk covers the messy, real-world saga of digital succession and infrastructure rescue. We'll walk through the technical and human challenges of breaking into systems without passwords, tracking down next of kin and the remaining passionate user base to keep them informed.

On the technical side, we will look at how to quickly audit, patch, and migrate legacy services under pressure. We'll discuss practical strategies for cloud juggling, lowering operational costs, and eliminating both technical and human single points of failure by balancing the best of modern cloud automation with DIY resilience.

Finally, we will dive into the history, near-death, and possible resurrection of the Internet for actual human communities. Ultimately, this is a talk about digital stewardship, service preservation, and remembering why we build and maintain systems for the pure joy of the craft.

Bio:

Ryan Sayre is a cloud and storage technologist who enjoys the restoration, maintenance, and tinkering of vintage computing hardware. In his spare time, he manages legacy internet infrastructure (skylab.org and prairie.net), coordinates a Portland school bike bus initiative, and tries to keep good stuff alive for the good of the commons.

The PNSQC and Portland AWS User Group are joining forces this June at ProFocus Headquarters for an evening of technical learning with cloud, security, and quality professionals from across the region.

This month, Trevor Gudeman, Senior Software Engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, takes us inside how AWS can level up code quality across CI/CD workflows. With a focus on CodeBuild and CodePipeline, Trevor will show how AWS-native tools can take the manual effort out of key quality checks — think linting, unit testing, code coverage, static analysis, security scanning, and quality gates — so your team can catch issues earlier and ship with more confidence.

This will be a hybrid meetup, so mingle in person or tune in online. Doors (and virtual lobby) open at 5:30pm for a half hour of pre-talk networking.

Drinks provided by ProFocus. Free to attend! ‎ Schedule:

5:30pm - 6pm Networking 6pm - 7:30pm Tech Talk

Get up-to-date information at: https://luma.com/dltup2wh

Address: Hawthorne Asylum Food Cart Pod Portland, Oregon United States

Hosted by Erin M Miles Rasmussen

topic: Agentic AI

description:

You're a developer. You know AI can write code. You've used Copilot, Claude, or ChatGPT to ship faster, debug, or figure out what a library is doing. That part is well-trodden ground.

This talk explores something different: using agentic AI as a general-purpose problem-solving tool. Yes, the tool is called Claude Code. But what I want to show is what happens when you stop thinking of it as "the thing that writes my code" and start thinking of it as "the thing that can build me something useful in 20 minutes."

That's the idea behind disposable software: small, single-purpose tools you spin up to solve one specific problem, use as long as you need, and then move on. There's a whole class of problems sitting on your plate right now that don't warrant a project plan, a sprint, or a code review. They need someone to build the thing and move on.

In this session, we'll go over how to set up an agentic environment, dive into a real-world problem, and then spend a good amount of time on Q&A and diving into real solutions that people are solving today with agentic AI.

Speaker Lucas Bennington is the founder of Codi Tech, an AI-native software development agency. Over the past three years, he's built a practice around helping teams turn ideas into working products using AI and modern development tools. His team uses AI across every part of how they operate, from project intake and scoping to building internal tools and delivering client work. Lucas brings a practitioner's perspective: he's not talking about AI in the abstract, he's building with it every day.

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.

Get up-to-date information at: https://luma.com/76lre84o

Address: Hawthorne Asylum Food Cart Pod Portland, Oregon United States

Hosted by Erin M Miles Rasmussen

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/

Portland Java User Group

April's topic: AI Assisted Software Development

AI tools are accelerating the pace of software development. These tools are transforming the way that software engineers deliver systems.

In this talk, we will examine how software teams can take advantage of new AI tools. We’ll discuss the pro’s and con’s of artificial intelligence in software engineering. Attend this talk if you are curious about new software tools and emerging engineering practices.

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.

This is an in-person meetup.

Modern developer experience on WildFly

Has your view of Enterprise Java evolved with the platform? In this session, James R. Perkins (Jakarta EE & Jakarta REST Co-Lead) dives into the modern developer experience on WildFly.

We will explore the latest in Jakarta EE and how WildFly has transformed its provisioning model.

You will learn how to build slim, cloud-ready runtimes using the WildFly Bootable JAR and Galleon, moving away from the traditional "full server" installation. Finally, we will look at a new approach to integration testing using wildfly-testing-tools, demonstrating how to easily spin up environments and test Jakarta REST endpoints with confidence.

Speaker: James Perkins is a Software Engineer at IBM and a longtime open-source contributor. He currently leads the RESTEasy project and helps drive the future of enterprise Java as a co-lead of Jakarta EE and Jakarta REST. A WildFly committer for over 15 years, he also leads several WildFly integration projects focused on simplifying the testing and development experience for modern Jakarta EE developers.

Event Agenda 5:30 PM: Assembling, Pizza 5:40 PM: "Modernizing WildFly" by James R. Perkins

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.

This is an in person meeting

Agenda

5:30 pm - 5:45 pm - Pizza and Intro 5:45 pm - 6:45 pm - Presentation

Details

So you have a new Workflow in your application. Let's say that it has 20 steps in the workflow

What happens if the instance handling the workflow goes down What happens if a remote service that is invoked in one of the Workflow steps is down This is where a durable workflow comes in. DBOS is a durable Workflow engine that provides this capability along with many other features.

Come learn about the durable workflow space and how you can add such a capability to your Java application

Speaker

Harry Pierson is a Software Engineer at DBOS and is responsible for the Java implementation of DBOS Peter Kraft is the Co-founder of DBOS

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.

Event Agenda: There will be a main talk between 30 minutes to 1 hour followed by optional lighting talks.

Main Talk by the Lake Monsters Robotics Team

The Lake Monsters Robotics Team competes in FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics every year. They will give an overview and demo of their robot and how they prepare for competition. They are also always looking for mentors to help assist the students in the program-so they'll provide information for that too if you are interested in getting involved!

Lightning Talks: Lightning talks are talks up to 5 minutes in length on any topic that might interest other Python people. See PyCon’s Lightning Talks description for more details.

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.

Built an app that needs real user feedback? Tired of testing in isolation?

Break - It! brings Portland founders together to stress-test each other's applications and get honest feedback before launch.

This edition will be led by Beth Fuller, a professional software product manager who specializes in helping teams refine their products before release.

To kick things off, we’ll be starting with one brave volunteer: TBD — a local startup ready to be really broken. It’ll set the tone for how deep and constructive we’ll go with feedback throughout the session. 😉

App Creators - Whether you've been hand-coding, AI-coding, or no-coding your way to success, get your app in front of fresh eyes who understand the founder journey.

Everyone Else - Here's your chance to break something for good! Channel your inner chaos agent, find those sneaky bugs, and give feedback so insightful it makes founders weep tears of gratitude.

What You'll Do

Demo your app (5 minutes) - Show what you've built Test others' apps (rotating 15-minute sessions) Give & receive real-time feedback from fellow builders Discover bugs before your users do Connect with Portland's founder community

Perfect If You Have

Apps in development or beta testing Prototypes needing concept validation Launched apps wanting UX optimization Side projects that need a sanity check All platforms welcome: Web apps, mobile apps, browser extensions, PWAs All dev approaches welcome: Hand-coded, AI-assisted, no-code, hybrid

What to Bring

Your app (any stage, any platform) 2-3 specific feedback questions Laptop/device for testing others' apps Open mind for constructive input

Event Flow

11:30 AM-12:00 PM: Arrival & casual networking 12:00-12:30 PM: Quick app intros (2-3 minutes each) 12:30-1:30 PM: Testing rounds (4 sessions, 25 minutes each) Work from the space all day! Come early or stay late to enjoy our downtown workspace.

Ground Rules

Constructive feedback only - We're here to help each other win Respect IP - No screenshots or sharing without permission Meet apps where they are - Rough prototypes to polished products all welcome Come to give AND receive - Your fresh perspective helps everyone

Get up-to-date information at: https://luma.com/jeua3y5o

Address: Ate-Oh-Ate Portland, Oregon United States

Hosted by Erin M Miles Rasmussen

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.

Event Agenda:

There will be a main talk between 30 minutes to 1 hour followed by optional lighting talks.

Main Talk by Michelle Bird:

Surviving the Snake Pit: How to Spot Threats, Read the Room, and Keep Your Job

A workplace survival guide for smart people who’ve been burned before. Ever worked somewhere that felt more like politics than teamwork? This talk is for professionals who’ve been punished for being too honest, too capable, or simply too observant. You’ll learn how to recognize dysfunctional power dynamics, decode unspoken cues in meetings, and protect your reputation without losing your integrity.

Through humor, real-world examples, and “Snake Pit Bingo,” you’ll walk away with practical tools to read the room like a strategist, speak up without self-sabotage, and thrive even in ego-driven environments. Because you’re not paranoid — you’re perceptive.

Lightning Talks:

Lightning talks are talks up to 5 minutes in length on any topic that might interest other Python people. See PyCon’s Lightning Talks description for more details.

How safe is the web for all users and where does design cross the line into deception? From misleading prompts to confusing layouts, deceptive patterns can quietly compromise both user trust and accessibility.

Join Todd Libby, a seasoned web developer and accessibility advocate with 25 years of experience, as he examines how deceptive design practices affect digital safety and inclusion. Drawing from his extensive background in accessibility, Todd sheds light on how small design choices can create big barriers for people with disabilities.

In this session, Todd will explore real examples of deceptive design, discuss their ethical and accessibility implications, and offer practical guidance for building safer, more transparent online experiences.

Join us for this live Tech Talk on Friday, November 14 at 1 PM PST | 3 PM CST | 4 PM EST.

Whether you’re a designer, developer, or simply curious about ethical tech, this talk will encourage you to think critically about the balance between persuasion, safety, and accessibility in digital spaces.

Reserve your spot today and be part of the movement toward a more honest and inclusive web.

RSVP here: https://www.meetup.com/techacademy/events/

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.

Portland Java User Group meeting

RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/pdxjug/events/311627978/

this month's topic: Dependency Management for Java applications

Details

Modern Java systems utilize hundreds (or thousands) of dependencies. Each additional dependency adds complexity to the application development process. Java developers need to think about how to manage internal libraries and external libraries. In this talk, we will share our experiences with dependency management in large Java systems.

We'll cover technical challenges that Java developers face when maintaining legacy applications. We will also examine best practices for managing dependencies in greenfield projects. We will discuss standard build tools such as Maven and Gradle. We'll share mistakes that we made and bugs that we encountered.

Speaker: Sean Sullivan

Topic

Accessibility at your org doesn’t need another pitch deck. It needs a brand. In this session, you'll learn how to market accessibility like a movement: using storytelling, emotional resonance, and brand-building techniques to influence culture, elevating far above compliance. Whether you're a developer, designer, or advocate, you'll walk away with practical ways to boost visibility, build momentum, and reframe accessibility as something people want to rally around accessibility as a movement, not check boxes. (Spoiler alert: you’re the one who can make it happen!)

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

Dr. Angela Young, CPACC (they/them) is a renowned Senior Accessibility Consultant and advocate for workplace wellbeing, specializing in empowering queer, neurodiverse, and disabled professionals. Based in the Washington DC-Baltimore area, they have dedicated nearly two decades to promoting diversity and inclusion. Dr. Young holds a Doctor of Education from the University of Maryland and has worked extensively in education, learning & development, and digital accessibility. As an international speaker, they have addressed audiences globally, advocating for accessibility and inclusion in various sectors. Dr. Young is also known for their work in personal branding and has founded "A11y With Angela," a platform focused on accessibility and inclusion.

Follow and connect with Dr. Young at https://linktr.ee/a11ywithangela.

Accommodation requests

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