Details

What to Expect:

Code and Coffee is an inclusive, informal co-working session. Drink some coffee, bring your laptop, and have engaging conversations. This is a great opportunity to learn from others, share your knowledge, and possibly collaborate on side projects, online courses, or even your day-to-day work tasks. Still uncertain? Let's chat on Discord!

Venue:

The Venue is at Roseline Café, who is graciously allowing us to host a space. WIFI, power outlets Recommended Parking: Smart Park, $7 all day https://www.portland.gov/transportation/parking/smartpark

Coffee:

Roseline Café has drip coffee and fixings available for it

Agenda:

10 AM - Arrival 10:15 AM - Introductions: Share your name Discuss your current projects or interests. If you don’t have a specific project, share what intrigues you! Mention your expertise and how you can assist others. Are you job hunting or hiring? Let us know! Community events you wanna plug. If none, that's cool too. 12:30 AM - Wrapping Up: You can stay longer, but we'll officially be done! We usually grab lunch as a group at near by food carts

Everyone is being told to move faster: ship the product, leverage AI, raise the round, make the brand, post the content, find product-market fit...pronto! How can it ever be possible to do all the things, just right with less money, fewer people, and a screaming free-for-all to get to the market amidst the chaos and noise of the landscape?

Our collective work with hundreds of startups has shown us that, in the chaos of this moment, fast is not always the same as forward.

Velocity to Market brings together four deeply experienced Portland practitioners who work alongside founders and innovation teams every day: Kate Carter (Saint Friend), Nick Carter (Saint Friend), Ali Maaxa (ProductTheory), and Jeremy Solly (Defyner).

We will share candid stories from the field: what they are seeing work, what is quietly failing, where founders are lured into wasting precious time and capital, and how the smartest teams are building momentum without skipping the work that makes a business viable.

This is not a generic “AI will change everything” panel, nor a dog-and-pony show of startup clichés. It is an honest conversation about how companies move from an interesting capability to:

A product people need A story people understand A brand people trust A go-to-market motion that can survive contact with the real world We are on a mission to helping founders avoid misdirection that comes from using outdated frameworks or half-baked new tools.

Together, we'll explore:

How founders can distinguish urgency from actual progress Why product-market fit, customer understanding, and positioning cannot be automated away Where AI genuinely helps teams work faster—and where it creates costly false confidence How brand, narrative, and trust become strategic advantages in an increasingly crowded market What investors, advisors, and founders can do to build companies that are not merely launchable, but durable How to “game” the moment without being gamed by its hype cycles, pressure, and endless stream of supposedly essential tools Come for sharp stories, useful provocations, practical frameworks, and a more grounded way to think about building in 2026.

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

• Date: Thursday, October 29, 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.

The Portland SIMposium is a premier event designed for IT leaders, taking place at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Portland, United States. This all-day event brings together CIOs, CISOs, and technology leaders from across the Pacific Northwest, offering a unique opportunity for collaboration, insight, and innovation. Attendees will engage in a series of mainstage panels, breakout sessions, and fireside conversations that delve into key themes reshaping technology leadership today. Topics of discussion will include AI-driven transformation, cybersecurity resilience, workforce evolution, and the human side of digital leadership.

Participants will hear from executives who are at the forefront of technology change across various industries, as well as thought leaders from Oregon's vibrant innovation ecosystem. The event also features the prestigious Oregon CIO & CISO of the Year Awards, highlighting exceptional leadership and impact within the region. With the chance to connect with over 150 regional technology and business leaders, attendees can expect to gain actionable insights that will enhance their strategic governance and leadership effectiveness. The Portland SIMposium promises a day filled with knowledge-sharing, networking opportunities, and community engagement.

Join PDX Women Coders for a back-end study session, where we read and discuss Designing Data-Intensive Applications (2nd edition) (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensive-applications/9781098119058/) by Martin Kleppmann. We plan to go over one chapter (or so) each session, and we will be meeting every two weeks for 7-8 months to finish the book. Each session, we'll go over that we learned in that chapter, and explore key concepts in distributed systems, data storage, and scalable architecture. We hope this will be a good opportunity to learn and connect with fellow engineers.

Before our reboot* meeting, please read the first chapter.

Some additional details: - We are meeting every two weeks @ 10AM PT on Zoom - The Zoom event link willl be shared 2-3 days before the event - Anyone can attend, regardless of gender, as long as you support our mission - Reading is not required for attendance (but you'll get more out of this session if you read along 😉) - The event photo comes from Martin Kleppmann's blog post: Drawing a map of distributed data systems (https://martin.kleppmann.com/2017/03/15/map-distributed-data-systems.html)

*This event series was created and organized by Kat K. starting in February 2024. We read the first edition of the book back then; we will be reading the second edition this time around.

Details

What to Expect:

Code and Coffee is an inclusive, informal co-working session. Drink some coffee, bring your laptop, and have engaging conversations. This is a great opportunity to learn from others, share your knowledge, and possibly collaborate on side projects, online courses, or even your day-to-day work tasks. Still uncertain? Let's chat on Discord!

Venue:

The Venue is at Roseline Café, who is graciously allowing us to host a space. WIFI, power outlets Recommended Parking: Smart Park, $7 all day https://www.portland.gov/transportation/parking/smartpark

Coffee:

Roseline Café has drip coffee and fixings available for it

Agenda:

10 AM - Arrival 10:15 AM - Introductions: Share your name Discuss your current projects or interests. If you don’t have a specific project, share what intrigues you! Mention your expertise and how you can assist others. Are you job hunting or hiring? Let us know! Community events you wanna plug. If none, that's cool too. 12:30 AM - Wrapping Up: You can stay longer, but we'll officially be done! We usually grab lunch as a group at near by food carts

Looking for something different to do on a Sunday afternoon?

PNSQC Innovation Day is a free community event for anyone curious about technology and how it is changing the world around us.

Students, families, educators, and technology professionals.

Come see commercial robots, augmented and virtual reality, rockets, exoskeletons, student projects, and more. Attend practical conversations about AI, meet the people working with these technologies, ask questions, and experience some of the technology firsthand.

You do not need a technical background. You only need to be curious.

RSVP https://pnsqc.org/innovation-day/

Please share this with anyone who might enjoy an afternoon of technology, exploration, and new ideas.

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.

When AI begins to feel uncanny, dangerous, or too powerful to contain, our cultural imagination reaches quickly for Frankenstein.

The comparison is everywhere in the current news cycle: a creation escapes its maker, technology accelerates beyond human control, and the world discovers too late that it has built something it cannot govern. The fear is not foolish. AI is moving rapidly into the systems that shape work, education, media, public services, and democratic life.

But Frankenstein offers a more interesting warning than the one we usually tell. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel was shaped by fascination with galvanism, the early electrical experiments that made dead muscle appear to twitch. Its central horror is not simply that Victor Frankenstein creates something powerful. It is that he creates it and then abandons responsibility for what follows.

In This Is Not a Talk About AI, digital anthropologist Ali Maaxa, Ph.D. asks what changes when we stop treating AI as an alien force with a destiny of its own and start recognizing it as a human-built infrastructure. A system does not simply “take over.” It receives power through human decisions: whose data it uses, who funds it, what it is allowed to access, which institutions treat its outputs as legitimate, whose labor maintains it, and whether people can challenge its decisions.

The story begins long before AI.

Neanderthals made birch-bark tar with controlled fire to bind stone tools to handles and hunting shafts. The Gutenberg Bible made authoritative texts reproducible at unprecedented scale and turned interpretation into a public struggle. Electricity extended the human day and television reorganized public attention. The internet promised open connection before becoming an infrastructure of platforms, surveillance, ranking, and concentrated control.

Each technology changed not only what people could do, but what became normal. Each produced new anxieties, new gatekeepers, new forms of dependence, and new struggles over who should set the rules.

AI belongs in that longer history. It is not “just like” fire, print, or electricity. It is faster, more networked, more opaque, and increasingly able to generate language, classify people, and act through connected systems. It also has a body: chips, data centers, electricity, water, land, extraction, invisible labor, public subsidies, and communities asked to absorb costs that rarely appear in a product demo.

For more than 20 years, Dr. Maaxa has studied how people around the world encounter, repurpose, resist, innovate with, and make meaning around emerging technologies. As a researcher funded by Mellon, Peacock, REACH, Wilgus, and NEH, an author of books and articles, and a professor at UNC, Duke, William & Mary, Virigina Tech, PSU & Pierce, she has produced leading work on global digital cultures. A leader in AI innovation and incubation, she has spent the past decade working across New Relic AI, AWS AI, Meta AI, startups, and accelerators, bringing new technologies into public and professional life while advocating for responsible, accessible, deeply ethical use.

This is neither an AI sales pitch nor an apocalypse sermon. It is a lively intervention into an overblown public conversation.

It asks:

• What is AI actually doing now?

• Which human relationships, forms of labor, judgments, and institutions is it rearranging?

• Who gets to build and govern it?

• Who pays for its infrastructure?

• Who can inspect, interrupt, challenge, or repair what it does?

The answer is not to pretend risk has disappeared. It is to recover agency as a shared public practice.

A technology is not the same thing as a culture of use.

The question is not only what AI can do. It is what kind of public we are becoming while we learn to live with it.

Learn more, book me for a keynote or interview, or get involved: https://notanai.site

Happy Fall PDXOSGeo! 

Join us fourth Wednesday September 23rd for more of your favorite open source geo-goodness. Tonight's special guest is Regan Hutson who has worked with both Enterprise and Open-Source geospatial tools for over 15 years. This has included incorporating spatial analysis into various roles at Kaiser Permanente, as well as pro-bono work for groups like the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.

Regan’s presentation will outline decision points and development steps that went into building a mobile-focused web-map to support the first ever Portland Pastry 10K Walk event.

As always there will be pizza, and BYOB is available from across the hall at HotLips.

Time / Space Coordinates: Wednesday September 23rd, 6:30–8pm
Hot Lips Pizza @ the Natural Capital Center: 721 NW 9th Ave, Portland OR 

See you there!

Our mailing list is a google group: drop us a line with any questions: http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-osgeo

Frontiers: Exploring What's Next in Electronics and Manufacturing The 23rd edition of the NW Electronics Design & Manufacturing Expo returns to the spacious Wingspan Event & Conference Center at the Washington County Fairgrounds — our third year in the hall. One focused day of the latest trends and innovations in electronics design and manufacturing, with the people who build the industry in the Northwest.

We’re thrilled to announce that Jamie Hyneman, special effects expert, co-host of MythBusters, inventor of the Sentry unmanned firefighting vehicle, and CEO of M5 Industries, will be our special gues at NEDME 2026

Join us for a Virtual Lunch & Learn presented by Dr. Yoanne Clovis as she explores how PhD and MD founders can adapt their communication approach as their companies grow.

As the scientist who discovered and developed your product, you are the best person in the company to explain the science to other experts in your field. You can close the first round and convince the first hires, usually also scientists. But scientists often fall into the expert trap, when your deep expertise prevents them from connecting with non-experts, like angel investors and non-scientist executives who could become your next hire or your next partner. What made you credible in the lab becomes a liability as the team grows.

This session looks at the specific pattern PhD and MD founders fall into somewhere between fifteen people and sixty: the founder keeps leaning on the science and insists on leading the communications alone, long after the company has outgrown that approach. Dr. Clovis will walk through when things tend to change structurally, why “I’ll handle it myself” stops working, and what early-stage and pre-Phase II leaders can put in place now to maintain scientific integrity while growing the company.

Details

What to Expect:

Code and Coffee is an inclusive, informal co-working session. Drink some coffee, bring your laptop, and have engaging conversations. This is a great opportunity to learn from others, share your knowledge, and possibly collaborate on side projects, online courses, or even your day-to-day work tasks. Still uncertain? Let's chat on Discord!

Venue:

The Venue is at Roseline Café, who is graciously allowing us to host a space. WIFI, power outlets Recommended Parking: Smart Park, $7 all day https://www.portland.gov/transportation/parking/smartpark

Coffee:

Roseline Café has drip coffee and fixings available for it

Agenda:

10 AM - Arrival 10:15 AM - Introductions: Share your name Discuss your current projects or interests. If you don’t have a specific project, share what intrigues you! Mention your expertise and how you can assist others. Are you job hunting or hiring? Let us know! Community events you wanna plug. If none, that's cool too. 12:30 AM - Wrapping Up: You can stay longer, but we'll officially be done! We usually grab lunch as a group at near by food carts

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.

No featured speaker this month, but 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.

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: If you bring things to give away, please pack out anything that doesn't get claimed! We don't have the space to store unclaimed items.

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)

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.

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

• Date: Thursday, August 27, 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.

Happy tail end of summer PDXOSGeo! 

Join us fourth Wednesday August 26th for more of your favorite open source geo-goodness. Tonight's special guest is EJ Fox: a designer, developer, and journalist who most recently collaborated with Colin Miller to bring Subway Builder to Steam.

EJ's talk is titled "Gamifying GIS: From OpenStreetMap to Steam ", and the talk will share the technical and creative process of turning OpenStreetMap data, routing algorithms, and maplibre styles into gameplay. We’ll explore data sonification, interface design for spatial data, shipping with Electron, and lessons from supporting an active modding community.

As always there will be pizza, and BYOB is available from across the hall at HotLips.

Time / Space Coordinates: Wednesday August 26th, 6:30–8pm
Hot Lips Pizza @ the Natural Capital Center: 721 NW 9th Ave, Portland OR 

See you there!

Our mailing list is a google group: drop us a line with any questions: http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-osgeo

Join us for a Virtual Lunch & Learn presented by Oliver Richards and Madelyn McCormick as they explore the common patent mistakes that early-stage companies make and how to avoid costly issues down the road. Most patent mistakes are cheap to avoid and expensive to fix. The trouble is that the fixing usually happens years later, in a licensing dispute, a due-diligence review, or a courtroom, long after the startup that made the mistake has moved on. This session looks at the most common patent errors early-stage companies make, from public disclosures that quietly forfeit foreign rights, to ownership and inventorship gaps, to provisional applications that don’t actually protect what the founders think they do.

Rather than a checklist of best practices, the talk works backward from how these mistakes surface once a patent is challenged or enforced, from the vantage point of a patent litigator who spends his days on the consequences. Attendees will leave with a practical sense of which early decisions actually matter, which ones are recoverable, and where a modest investment of attention up front saves a great deal of money and heartburn later.

Details

What to Expect:

Code and Coffee is an inclusive, informal co-working session. Drink some coffee, bring your laptop, and have engaging conversations. This is a great opportunity to learn from others, share your knowledge, and possibly collaborate on side projects, online courses, or even your day-to-day work tasks. Still uncertain? Let's chat on Discord!

Venue:

The Venue is at Roseline Café, who is graciously allowing us to host a space. WIFI, power outlets Recommended Parking: Smart Park, $7 all day https://www.portland.gov/transportation/parking/smartpark

Coffee:

Roseline Café has drip coffee and fixings available for it

Agenda:

10 AM - Arrival 10:15 AM - Introductions: Share your name Discuss your current projects or interests. If you don’t have a specific project, share what intrigues you! Mention your expertise and how you can assist others. Are you job hunting or hiring? Let us know! Community events you wanna plug. If none, that's cool too. 12:30 AM - Wrapping Up: You can stay longer, but we'll officially be done! We usually grab lunch as a group at near by food carts

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.

No featured speaker this month, but 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. 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)

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.

Talks, workshops, installations, demos, and space to hack - check out the schedule.

For anyone interested in hardware: engineers, designers, artists, educators, or enthusiasts.

Early bird tickets are now sold out.

Heavily subsidized tickets for low income individuals are available.

Free tickets for anyone with something interesting to show off as part of a demo table or installation.

Details

What to Expect:

Code and Coffee is an inclusive, informal co-working session. Drink some coffee, bring your laptop, and have engaging conversations. This is a great opportunity to learn from others, share your knowledge, and possibly collaborate on side projects, online courses, or even your day-to-day work tasks. Still uncertain? Let's chat on Discord!

Venue:

The Venue is at Roseline Café, who is graciously allowing us to host a space. WIFI, power outlets Recommended Parking: Smart Park, $7 all day https://www.portland.gov/transportation/parking/smartpark

Coffee:

Roseline Café has drip coffee and fixings available for it

Agenda:

10 AM - Arrival 10:15 AM - Introductions: Share your name Discuss your current projects or interests. If you don’t have a specific project, share what intrigues you! Mention your expertise and how you can assist others. Are you job hunting or hiring? Let us know! Community events you wanna plug. If none, that's cool too. 12:30 AM - Wrapping Up: You can stay longer, but we'll officially be done! We usually grab lunch as a group at near by food carts

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

• Date: Thursday, July 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 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.

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.

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, Chris Holmes will be showing us the ins and outs of safely powering your projects with Li-Ion batteries safely and effectively. Learn about protection circuits, gas gauging, failure modes, battery management, serial/parallel configurations and more!

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. 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)

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 Portland Linux Kernel Meetup for June 2026 will be at...

• Date: Thursday, June 25, 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.

Details

What to Expect:

Code and Coffee is an inclusive, informal co-working session. Drink some coffee, bring your laptop, and have engaging conversations. This is a great opportunity to learn from others, share your knowledge, and possibly collaborate on side projects, online courses, or even your day-to-day work tasks. Still uncertain? Let's chat on Discord!

Venue:

The Venue is at Roseline Café, who is graciously allowing us to host a space. WIFI, power outlets Recommended Parking: Smart Park, $7 all day https://www.portland.gov/transportation/parking/smartpark

Coffee:

Roseline Café has drip coffee and fixings available for it

Agenda:

10 AM - Arrival 10:15 AM - Introductions: Share your name Discuss your current projects or interests. If you don’t have a specific project, share what intrigues you! Mention your expertise and how you can assist others. Are you job hunting or hiring? Let us know! Community events you wanna plug. If none, that's cool too. 12:30 AM - Wrapping Up: You can stay longer, but we'll officially be done! We usually grab lunch as a group at near by food carts

Have you ever wondered if your product truly has the upside you believe—or have sold to your investors? Given the remarkable failure rate of new products, it’s worth understanding what separates the winners from the losers, and how you can see more clearly which of those paths you’re on.

“From Half-Baked to Fully-Baked: Getting Your Product Right for Faster Market Uptake” is for entrepreneurs who run lean and can’t afford a new product failure. The talk is based on case studies with local Inc.-5000 companies that, while smart, made product blunders costing millions of dollars because of overconfidence and hubris.

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.

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, Helen Leigh will share some of the musical instruments she's made over the years and share some of the technologies behind them. Helen's projects include: spider harp, purring tentacle, golden disco ball theremin, robotic midi drum machine, and an embroidered kraakdoos. (https://helenleigh.me)

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. 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)

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.

Details

What to Expect:

Code and Coffee is an inclusive, informal co-working session. Drink some coffee, bring your laptop, and have engaging conversations. This is a great opportunity to learn from others, share your knowledge, and possibly collaborate on side projects, online courses, or even your day-to-day work tasks. Still uncertain? Let's chat on Discord!

Venue:

The Venue is at Roseline Café, who is graciously allowing us to host a space. WIFI, power outlets Recommended Parking: Smart Park, $7 all day https://www.portland.gov/transportation/parking/smartpark

Coffee:

Roseline Café has drip coffee and fixings available for it

Agenda:

10 AM - Arrival 10:15 AM - Introductions: Share your name Discuss your current projects or interests. If you don’t have a specific project, share what intrigues you! Mention your expertise and how you can assist others. Are you job hunting or hiring? Let us know! Community events you wanna plug. If none, that's cool too. 12:30 AM - Wrapping Up: You can stay longer, but we'll officially be done! We usually grab lunch as a group at near by food carts

Join us for our very first Gresham Vibecoders Meetup! We'll kick things off with introductions — who you are, what you're building (only if you want to share), and what tools you're using. From there, we'll do an open show-and-tell where anyone can demo a project they've been working on, no matter how finished (or unfinished) it is. We'll swap tips, talk about what's working, what's broken, and what we're figuring out as we go.

Expect good conversation, a few laughs, and maybe a spark for your next build. Come as you are — beginner, builder, or just AI-curious. All are welcome!

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.

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)