We're hosting an unconference focused on finding ways to use AI and machine learning to improve the lives of everyone in the community on October 19, 2019 in Portland, Oregon.

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are predicted to affect aspects of every business, government agency and organization. In order to understand, better use and control these technologies and changes. We ran a similar event a year and a half ago and everyone got a lot out of it. Many things have changed since then and many issues are the same. Let's figure out where we stand.

This will be a great way to meet others in the community and discuss related topics of interest and concern.

Get your ticket today. There is a small fee that will go towards lunch and supplies. Any extra funds will be donated to a local non-profit.

The Puppet community has a lot of people with exciting Open Source tricks up their sleeves. Are you interested in what they're hacking on or want to share what you're hacking on? An even bigger question…. Will you be in PDX for OSCON and want to come have a good time?

Puppet is hosting a Science Fair party in our Portland home office the evening of July 17, 2019. Come have a drink and poke at some new toys; see what fun projects people are working on. We’ve got an Internet-enabled train layout, and will let you control the office Spotify playlist with Bolt, our orchestration tool. What does all this even mean? Come hang out and see!

We'll have a few stations set up for you to explore and get your hands dirty with our Open Source projects. We'll have people sharing their own home DIY projects. And we'll have table spots for community members to showcase their own projects. Do you have something shiny to share?

Maybe most importantly, finger food, beer, and non-alcoholic refreshments will be provided. Come chill with us. We'd love to see you and hear what exciting things you've got going on.

Let us know if you plan to come so we can make sure to have plenty of food on hand.

Women Who Code Portland is hosting a Software Engineering Interview Preparation Workshop. This event is geared towards helping women prepare for technical interviews, but we welcome everyone who supports our mission of inspiring women to excel in technology careers and follows our code of conduct. The goal of the workshop is to provide people with the opportunity to gain experience with a technical interview format.

This workshop is broken into two sections: - Interview Best Practices - Mock Interviews & Whiteboarding

In the morning, we'll cover an introduction to solving algorithms. Participants will have the chance to see common interview algorithms, and approach how to solve them under pressure.

In the afternoon, we will break into groups for mock interviews. This will help participants get a feel for what a technical interview might be like. Whiteboarding can be much different than writing on paper, especially in front of others. Participants will have the chance to practice answers to common questions, thinking out loud while solving a problem and practice techniques for how to move forward when stumped.

AGENDA

• 9:30 - Doors Open
• 10:00 - Introductions, interview prep, and algorithm practice
• 12:00 - Lunch
• 1:00 - Break into groups for mock interviews
• 4:30 - Finish

EVENT COST

The event cost is $10 for participants and includes lunch. Scholarships: If you are a student, under-employed, or in need of financial assistance, we have full scholarships available for this event. Please submit an application using this google form.

There will be no refunds for this event. If you cannot attend, you can email us to transfer the ticket to another attendee, or we can add it to our scholarship pool.

CODE OF CONDUCT

By coming to this event, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct.

Women Who Code (WWCode) is dedicated to providing an empowering experience for everyone who participates in or supports our community, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, socioeconomic status, caste, or creed. Our events are intended to inspire women to excel in technology careers, and anyone who is there for this purpose is welcome. Because we value the safety and security of our members and strive to have an inclusive community, we do not tolerate harassment of members or event participants in any form.

Our Code of Conduct applies to all events run by Women Who Code, Inc. If you would like to report an incident or contact our leadership team, please reach out to one of our volunteers or submit an incident report form.

Registration through Eventbrite [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pdx-women-in-tech-pdxwit-february-happy-hour-tickets-54657448901] is required to gain entry to this event

Join us for February Happy Hour at Puppet!

PDXWIT is looking forward to seeing you at our February Happy Hour at Puppet! Most of us procrastinate from time to time, but maybe that is not such a bad thing. The theme of the evening is Overcoming Procrastination, and we will discuss how that last minute pressure can often help us crank out some great work. The conversation starter to keep the networking flowing will be “What helps you focus when you need to get work done?”

While the event is primarily intended for networking, we will have a short segment at 5:30 to share important announcements and showcase some individuals in our community.

• An employee of Puppet will provide an introduction to the company and share open job opportunities

• Rebecca Snyder will talk about how improv can help us in business

• A local engineering leader will present “A Nerd’s Guide to Debugging Procrastination”

During the event, we’ll have more to do than free-form networking:

• An Activity Table where people can get creative. This is a fantastic way to meet others if large groups are not your thing. If you have trouble finding it, look for Meg Aul, our Event Activities Director.

• Table Topics to help break the ice.

• A section for job seekers and our sponsors who are hiring, to ensure people get connected.

Agenda:

4:30 p.m. - Doors open

5:30 p.m. - Introductions, announcements + lightning speakers

6:30 p.m. - Event ends

Event FAQ:

Q: Will there be gender neutral restrooms? A: No.

Q: Is the space ADA accessible? A: Yes

Q: Will there be food and drink at this event? A: Yes

Q: What is the parking situation? A: There is usually plenty of metered street parking and pay-to-park parking lots.

Q: Is there any special information that might help me find the entrance? A: We will have signs in the lobby directing people to the 5th floor.

Q: Is there secured bike parking? A: No.

Q: Should I consider using public transportation? A: Yes - MAX runs right in front of our building so it is really convenient. The bus lines are just a couple blocks away.

Q: Can I bring my dog? A: No, please leave your furry friends at home. There are dogs in the building during work hours.

Purpose:

PDXWIT is a community-based non-profit organization. Our purpose is to strengthen the Portland women in tech community by offering educational programs, partnerships, mentorships, resources and opportunities. We are unifying a supportive environment for current and potential women in tech, all of whom are committed to helping each other. Our goal is to bring together and empower women in tech and to encourage others to pursue tech careers. This is our step towards reducing the gender imbalance in the industry and addressing the current negative effects of that imbalance on women.

Our events are inclusive. ALL people who support our purpose are welcome.

Code Switching or Soul Switching

Our panel will seek to give thought to the complex role of power in constructing and maintaining discursive and societal claims of identity through “code switching.” or what some call "soul switching" which refers to the actions of a particular person and/or group that is assumed to break from their own “natural” practices to perform codes “not their own” for the purposes of fitting in, acquiring capital, and accessing spaces not easily afforded.

Panelists include:

• Dr. Mona-Lisa Pinkney - Sr. Director, Cybersecurity @Nike
• Dr. Alisha Moreland-Capuia - Asst. Professor School of Medicine & Executive Director Avel Gordly Center of Healing @ OHSU
• Lakecia Gunter - VP Programmable Solutions Group @ Intel
• Grace Andrews - Senior Solutions Engineer @ New Relic

Moderator:

Deena Pierott - Diversity Strategist and BWiSTEM Co-Founder

Please RSVP on our Meetup page to receive the latest updates: https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/257718370/

Join us for "Lean Pizza" (not calorically lean) and agile-inspired discussions as we reflect on 2018 and look forward to 2019. We will use a lean coffee-style self-organizing agenda. The first few minutes will be spent gathering discussion ideas and then we'll roll into the smooth, easy cadence of lively discussion!

While this evening is not meant to be a retrospective, feel free to share what went well for you or your Agile community, and where you want to see improvements, both personally and as an Agile community member.

Join us for the We Code Hackathon for Women and Friends!

This is the 4th Annual Hackathon hosted by Nike and Puppet and we're excited to help our non-profit partners address challenges with technical solutions.

Web designers and software developers of all levels are invited to work on a fun project in small teams at this creative and collaborative coding event. You will have an opportunity to meet and work with other talented people, develop your skills, and help non-profits. T-shirts, prizes, and great food will be provided.

EVENT DETAILS When: January 11-12

REGISTRATION: http://wecodeforgoodhackathon.splashthat.com

Please RSVP on our Meetup page to receive the latest updates: https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/256753403/

Scientific thinking is a life skill that forms the basis for creativity at work and the successful pursuit of seemingly unattainable goals. The Improvement Kata (IK) is a four-step scientific striving pattern that is practiced in many business organizations. It makes scientific thinking a teachable skill that anyone can learn.

This fun, high-energy, simulation uses a simple hands-on activity to step participants through the Improvement Kata pattern. Working in a 5 person team, you'll follow the Improvement Kata pattern to (1) face a challenge, (2) measure where you are, (3) establish a next goal and (4) experiment toward that goal in three-minute iterations.

Together, we'll discover new insights for improving agile practices. As an individual you'll learn a fun activity you can repeat with your own teams in under an hour. And, there may be prizes for members of the winning team!

Adam Light's Bio:

Adam Light helps leaders deliver results and improve their organizations by combining scientific thinking with lean and agile methods. He is an experienced consultant, teacher, and coach who drives systemic transformation through a focus on leadership capabilities and practical skills. Adam began his career as a software developer before becoming a manager of projects and people; he has more than 25 years of software industry experience. Since 2009 Adam has led SoTech, a consultancy providing customized improvement solutions for organizations worldwide.

Notice: This meeting may be recorded. Also, we will not hold the event during icy or snowy conditions. Cancellations will be posted on MeetUp and Calagator 3 hours before event time.

For a few years, I've been trying to create UIs that have a consistency, tangibility, and predictability akin to that of physical objects. I think this results in software that is easy for the average person to use and understand.

The only way I know how to describe the kinds of behaviors that result in the physicality I seek is with state machines. I've built a library called Plastic that lets me define state machines composed of pure functions triggered by DOM events. This allows me to express the behaviors making up the UI in almost exactly the same way I design them with pen and paper, all the while hiding mutation in the implementation in fine Clojurian fashion.

In this talk I'll describe my philosophy of UI design in more detail, provide some examples of the physicality I'm aiming for, and show how one is implemented using Plastic. If time and enthusiasm allows, we can collaboratively define another simple software object using Plastic on the fly, to get a bottom-up perspective in addition to the top-down perspective of the scripted talk.

I hope to see you there.

-DLP

P.S. I am amused to be delivering a talk in defense of objects, but these are strange times we live in.

Note: Register here for the pizza and pop headcount, please: https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/255230595/

Ever had a project go very, very badly? Ever had a team completely fall apart? Ever suddenly discover that the underlying assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, and aspirations of the group weren't what you thought?

Rest assured, you're not alone. Welcome to the world of complex systems. Every one of these things (and more) have happened to the presenter of this talk. Join Michael as he shares his own journeys and the journeys of other adventurers, in an attempt to devise better tools for managing our (mis)adventures.

Speaker Bio:

Michael is a veteran of numerous software development adventures. He's built software for power companies and banks, for the trucking industry and education, for internet start-ups and established companies. Some have been spectacular successes...others, not so much. He's currently delving into the intersection of complexity theory and cognitive science, as seen through the lens of wilderness adventuring, in an attempt to improve our chances of survival. (See: https://survival.intuitious.com/)

Hack the Dot is a hackathon where code school students, working developers, marketing and design professionals, and anyone else interested in the Web come together to build ideas. Use your skills in web development, storytelling, and creative ideation to build a humorous (maybe even functional!) product, while meeting people in your tech/startup community. This quarter we're teaming up with pdxFLIT and Puppet Labs. Join us!

How does it work?

At a domain-driven hackathon, all of the teams are given a single premium domain name at the beginning of the event. All teams then have two hours to come up with a product inspired by that domain, fueled by food and beverage. Whichever team builds and pitches the most creative and funny idea for the domain wins!

Prizes include the premium domain name itself, plus swag from our sponsors!

Timeline

6:00 - Meet with teams, get food and drink

6:15 - MC introductions, reveal the night's domain name!

6:30 - Start hacking!

8:30 - Stop hacking, team presentations

9:15 - End presentations, announce winner

Do I need to bring a team?

Nope! Teams are formed randomly at the beginning.

Do you have a Code of Conduct for this event?

We sure do! Make sure you read and agree before signing up!

Note: Register here for the pizza and pop headcount, please: https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/252527226/

Learn about an experiment in using Open Space as a way to dynamically form teams around work. The group meets every two days and holds a marketplace to decide what needs to happen next. People sign up for the story where they feel they can add the most value.

It's like a continuous hackathon! Not only is it working, people love it.

Ron Quartel will tell you his life purpose is to "unleash the human spirit in the workplace." He loves all things software and nurturing--business/development harmony in particular.

The end of August means that Fall is around the corner. Are you switching careers this season? Are you looking to get into the tech industry for the first time? This month, pdxFLIT is taking a break from presentations to host a special workshop about professional development! We'll be partnering with our friends from Intel to provide a two-hour event featuring a variety of activities. There will be opportunities to turn strengths into interview stories, participate in resume reviews, practice elevator pitches, and practice answering tricky behavioral interview questions. If you're searching for a job, take a night off to work on these valuable skills!

Workshop events will begin at 6 PM. Our event facilitators will cover introductions and elevator pitches, resumés, authentic interviewing, the STAR method, and more! There will be a variety of activities to help you practice these skills so that you can put your best foot forward when you land an interview at your dream company. If you have any questions about various aspects of this event, please contact Masen or Katie via Meetup, Twitter, email, or Slack.

This event will be fully catered thanks to our awesome sponsors at Thinkful. Pizza will be served and there will be vegan and gluten-free options available. Thinkful is an online coding bootcamp that is helping the next generation of software developers transition into the tech industry. They host a variety of events in Portland and are always accepting new students. If you're interested in learning more, be sure to check out their site at https://www.thinkful.com/.

Are you interested in speaking at a future pdxFLIT event? We're always looking for speakers - no experience is necessary! If you're interested in giving a talk, please contact Katie at [email protected].

We kindly ask that you abide by our Code of Conduct and Puppet's Code of Conduct when attending this event. They can be found at the following destinations:

Puppet: https://puppet.com/community/community-guidelines#event-code-of-conduct

pdxFLIT: https://www.meetup.com/pdxFLIT-Portland-Future-Leaders-In-Tech/photos/28737494/471776346/

Note: Register here for the pizza and pop headcount, please: https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/252527226/

How is your knowledge of Agile Engineering Practices? New CSM and A-CSM learning objectives ask Scrum Masters to be able to list and explain the benefits of engineering practices that help teams succeed with Scrum and Agile. This talk provides an overview of both the mechanics and value of practices including Pair Programming, Test-Driven Development, and Continuous Integration.

Want a quick taste of the material, try out the matching exercise at:

http://www.technicallyagile.com/technicalpractices

Daniel has been developing software for nearly two decades and has been working in agile teams for the last 10 years. More recently, he has worked with agile42 coaching teams on the adoption of agile practices both in code and across the organization, but his passion is still in writing great software and helping others do the same.

In addition to writing software and coaching, Daniel maintains a podcast of short 5-minute topics of agile problems that impact the team at technicallyagile.com .

July has a reputation for scorching hot temperatures - especially in the afternoons and early evenings. Luckily, you can beat the heat by spending your Wednesday evening with pdxFLIT! This month, our event will revolve around diversity and inclusivity. It will feature a few all-star speakers and some time to mingle and interact outside of speaking time. This month, you'll have a chance to see the following presentations:

Tiberius Hefflin - "The Monster On the Project". Tiberius works for Go Boldly. She will be speaking about working and dealing with toxic coworkers.

Perry Eising - "This Is the Signal You've Been Waiting For: Diversity, Economy, and Messaging". Perry is a former faculty lead from Epicodus. They have contributed a wealth of knowledge to the Portland tech community. Perry's latest Medium article is about making tech events more gender inclusive. You can find it here: https://blog.usejournal.com/gender-inclusive-tech-events-a-hands-on-how-to-guide-ec93ee477035

Marcus Carter - 'Diversity and Inclusion In the Workforce: Themes, Trends, and What We Might Do Differently". Marcus is a recruiter at Cloudability.

This month's event is generously being sponsored by Puppet. Food and drinks will be provided at this event. We're always looking for sponsors to help provide refreshments, catering, and other resources for future events. If you are interested in helping us with this in the future, please contact Masen at [email protected].

pdxFLIT is also looking for volunteers! If you're interested in volunteering with us, there will be information about it at this event. Information about these opportunities will also be coming via Meetup and other online forums (Twitter, Slack) in the coming weeks.

Doors open at 5 30 PM and talks will happen at roughly 6 PM. There will be time for mingling, conversation, and networking outside of the speaking times. If you need to come a bit later, don't worry about getting locked out! Just post on this page and somebody can come downstairs and let you in. This event will be happening at Puppet Labs on SW 2nd Avenue.

Are you interested in speaking at a future pdxFLIT event? We're always looking for speakers - no experience is necessary! If you're interested in giving a talk, please contact Katie at [email protected].

We kindly ask that you abide by our Code of Conduct and Puppet's Code of Conduct when attending this event. They can be found at the following destinations:

Puppet: https://puppet.com/community/community-guidelines#event-code-of-conduct

pdxFLIT: https://www.meetup.com/pdxFLIT-Portland-Future-Leaders-In-Tech/photos/28737494/471776346/

Note: Register here for the pizza and pop headcount, please: https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/252388669/

The AgilePDX mission statement is: Create a vibrant and successful Agile community of practice in the greater Portland metropolitan area by sharing real-world experience, distilled wisdom, and innovative ideas for Agile done well.

The vision statement is: We see Portland as a world-class leader technology, business agility, and the broader creative economy. By “World Class” we mean profitable, sustainable, and joyful.

What does this mean to you? Do we have it right? Are we as a community and in our organizations fulfilling our mission and vision?

Come learn about Lean Coffee from skilled facilitators, explore the mission and vision, and talk with colleagues about what Portland could be like as a leading Agile community in the nation.

This event will be led by our new Lean Coffee in the North facilitator, Neal Peterson!

Join us as we kick off OSCON with this fireside chat community event (open to all, no need to be an OSCON attendee!) with Kelsey Hightower and Nate Taggart.

Nate and Kelsey will be exploring the impact, trends, and future of serverless from the perspective of both cloud providers and the developer community. This is an event you won't want to miss!

Come join us in an evening of stimulating discussion where we explore an approach in developing an event-sourced, CQRS-based real time system. We’ll look at the reframe inspired events system on the server side, as well as how the interceptor pattern can be used to achieve a clean implementation.

Presenters:

Jesse Sherlock Startup veteran, incredibly broad and deep. https://github.com/infracanophile

Fenton Travers Organizer of the Vancouver Clojure meetup. 10 years experience at Oracle before drinking the Clojure kool-aid. https://github.com/ftravers

Paul Lucas Deeply involved at the intersection of music and functional programming. Has been booked for live coding gigs in UK and Japan. Front-end focus. https://github.com/paullucas

Gargoyle Software specializes in Clojure software development for the cannabis industry. We believe in mutualism, questioning assumptions, and honoring craftsmanship. We're located in Vancouver, BC and have a median of 9 years experience. We offer full-service project management or staff augmentation and in-house design. We are about to release our first Clojure open source contribution.

Note: Register here for the pizza and pop headcount, please: https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/250826458/

Agile methods such as Scrum and eXtreme Programming have been effective for single-team companies, but guidance and experience about how to scale them has been mixed. In this session, Michael James examines patterns seen in dozens of organizations and whether or not they have been effective.

Michael James's Bio: I help businesses learn to develop software effectively, without the usual pain and anxiety. I train you and your employees through fun group activities (and little or no PowerPoint), then facilitate small and large group discussions to resolve organizational impediments. My work is quoted in several bestselling Agile books, my articles have been translated by enthusiastic volunteers into Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Portuguese, and Vietnamese. Thousands of people use my animated e-learning modules each day. Fun fact: I have 100+ recommendations from Clients on my LinkedIn profile.

Portland has a fairly lively Clojure ecosystem -- how can we leverage that base and become a hub of Clojure culture?

The biggest opportunity appears to be in helping newcomers connect the dots. The language was designed to be clear, consistent, practical, and empowering -- this talk will explore how we can apply those principles to support the local scene and create an onboarding model other groups can use.

Bring your gripes and ideas.

Bio: New to the language and somewhat obsessed, Tom has worked as a writer, editor, and programmer. He hosts the Tuesday night Clojure Study Crew, and is currently building what he hopes will be the next best Clojure documentation tool.

Note: Register here for the pizza and pop headcount, please: https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/250147486/

Why maps? Conceptual maps allow for visual strategic analysis: for executives, managers, PMs, consultants - and anyone seeking situational awareness for better decision making. Join us to hear Scott Henderson introduce the concept of Wardley Mapping, created by Simon Wardley. A community is growing around the use and understanding of this tool. Scott hopes by sharing his understanding with us, more can add their voices and insights to the conversation.

Simon Wardley is a researcher with Leading Edge Forum and creator of Wardley mapping. He developed the tool to address his concern about his strategic initiatives. Since 2005, he's used it in government, police, pharmaceuticals, high speed rail, immigration... but the benefits are best introduced in his own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G9dK55wpvw

Scott Henderson is a senior agile coach and has previously served as CIO, Director of Operations, Director of Client Services, and Senior Program Manager. An advocate for community engagement, he’s founded a co-working space based on the agile manifesto, hosted StartUp Weekends here and abroad, Laid Off Camp for older workers and Coder’s dojo for kids. He’s spoken to groups on Open Source, Education, Entrepreneurship, and Enterprise Lean product flow. While grateful for all he learned at Ohio State University, the University of Philippines, and Musicians Institute, it’s his perspective as orphan, exchange student and up-close observer of revolutions which has led to a varied and nuanced understanding of the power dynamics of the world. He's enthusiastic about complex ideas but when asked, he’d say he’s pretty simple himself and aspires to be a good dad and husband.

Office hours are a great place to chat with other developers and help or get help with any questions that come up.

Everyone is always welcomed regardless of skill or experience. If you are curious come on out.

Curious about Clojure? Have questions about Emacs or Cursive or Vim or Spacemacs or anything else? Come on out and we'll help.

This event is listed on Meetup, please RSVP there if you can: https://www.meetup.com/Cloud-Native-PDX/events/249368520/

First, Chris Foster will share his tips for Security Docker on the Cheap. Better Docker security doesn't have to use expensive tools to achieve. Following a few security practices and using DE built-in features, along with some free, open source tools, can significantly raise the standard. We'll take a look at some things that can bring higher security without breaking the budget.

Next, Eric Ernst will demo KataContainers, a way to combine hardware virtualization with Kubernetes containers for more isolated, secure services without sacrificing startup times. In this talk he'll provide some background on the Kata Containers project and describe how Kata Containers works with CRI-O and Kubernetes. Then, he'll walk you through creating a K8S configuration which uses a mix of runc and Kata containers to secure workloads with varying levels of trust.

Have you ever wondered how Scrum might be applied to something other than software development? Join us to hear Kris Dobelstein share insights, takeaways, and practical examples from his life-changing journey to Scrum during one of his employer’s most pivotal product development efforts during the last decade.

This is a highly interactive session where we open up the conversation and use a Lean Coffee format to let participants explore insights, share thoughts, and pose follow-up questions. If you're new to Lean Coffee, you can learn more at leancoffee.org. If you're not, you know how much fun this self-organizing discussion format is!

Bio: Kris Dobelstein is currently a project manager and principal hardware development engineer at Dynon Avionics in Canby, Oregon. He has worked in avionics for his entire professional career and has fulfilled the roles of engineer, functional manager, Scrum Master, and Product Owner. Kris firmly believes that technology serves two purposes: 1) to make the human experience better and 2) to enable personal and professional growth through the development of said technology. He strongly prefers using Agile methodologies because they align so well with these beliefs. He is a native of the Pacific Northwest and is constantly learning about technology, experimenting with different leadership strategies, and is raising four tiny human beings.

Register here for the pizza and pop headcount, please: https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/248749185/

Much has been said about building re-frame applications in the small, but how well do these same techniques perform building large applications? In practice, our team found traditional approaches to events and state management led to highly-coupled code that was difficult to maintain and test.

In this talk we'll explore why this happens and some simple techniques you can use to create more re-usable re-frame code without boilerplate or any 3rd party libraries.

Biography Ryan is a Clojure developer, author, and founder of Homegrown Labs (http://homegrownlabs.ca ), a consultancy and education company based in Winnipeg, Canada.

Since April 2017, Ryan & Homegrown have been working with Funding Circle building rich admin applications using ClojureScript & re-frame.

Beyond consulting, Ryan organizes Clojure Remote (http://clojureremote.com )–an online conference focussed on remote Clojure & ClojureScript developers. Keep an eye out for ClojureScript Days coming Summer of 2018.

Is your Agile implementation going slow, failing, or not sustaining? April Mills, author of Everyone is a Change Agent, will describe several common mistakes made in implementations and outline techniques you can use right away to get your implementation back on track.

Examples of the common mistakes include: trying to force people to be Agile, keeping the goal of becoming Agile vague, and not protecting the Agile people and behaviors from the status quo. Improving your Agile implementation is more within your control than you think.

April is an expert change agent and author of “Everyone is a Change Agent”. She blogs at engine-for-change.com and tweets as @engineforchange.

April will have copies of her book available for $10. Feel free to stick around after her presentation and get your book signed.

Datalog is a powerful recursive query language that can be implemented in a few hundred lines of Clojure. It's a great introduction to logic programming and it can be used to solve real problems. It is also the basis for Datomic's query language.

Apache Beam is a data processing library that runs on Google Dataflow, a serverless distributed computing service.

In this presentation, I will explain Datalog, how it is used in Datomic, and how my team is using Datalog (in Clojure) to build flexible programs that transform large amounts of interdependent data in minutes with Apache Beam.

Bio: Austin is a senior engineer at Healthsparq, where he uses Clojure to transform healthcare data. He has been programming in Clojure for about 7 years. His interests include Logic Programming, Automated Planning, and Game Development.

For a long time, folks (Rob included) misinterpreted Behavior Driven Development (BDD) as “Test-Driven Development done right,” as Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) with better tools, or as an umbrella term embracing both TDD and ATDD. So, how is BDD really done, and where does TDD fit in, if at all? It turns out that the real problem may lie in trying to pin down rigorous definitions for these terms, and trying to determine when to do which style of testing. Rob coaches teams to be prepared to use the BDD cycle and the TDD cycle when appropriate, and to be willing to move fluidly between these two intertwined cycles on a daily basis. Rob has witnessed significantly improved levels of communication, alignment, quality, and enthusiasm on teams -- and just in mere days, when BDD is embraced as the central activity of the whole team.

You’ll help explore why, when, and how to use both TDD and BDD together to build the most valuable and maintainable software possible.

Rob Myers is principle instructor and coach at Agile for All. He has over 30 years of professional experience with software development teams, and has been training and coaching organizations in Agile engineering practices since 1998. His courses blend fun, practical hands-on labs, "Training From the Back of the Room” learning techniques, and relevant first-person stories from both successful and not-so-successful Agile implementations. His clients have included many start-ups as well as Fortune 100 multinationals. Rob is currently working on his first technical book, Essential Test-Driven Development.

Have you been wondering how to deploy multi-pod, multi-software applications on Kubernetes? This is what Helm is for! Come watch Scott Sumner of CoreOS demonstrate deploying a full data collection & search platform including Elastic Search, Kibana and Fluentd using Helm.

This event is in coordination with the Helm Summit (https://helmsummitpdx-feb2018.splashthat.com/), and the meetup is sponsored by CoreOS (https://coreos.com/).

This meetup is hosted by Puppet Labs (https://puppet.com/)

PLEASE RSVP ON THE MEETUP PAGE IF YOU CAN so that we can get an accurate headcount. Thanks!

This month we'll have member provided lighting talks. We have two scheduled so far and room for more. Get in touch if you want to do one also.

First we have John Skilbeck talking about converting a traditional Clojure project meant to be run on a server or on docker into a AWS Lambda runtime, while leaving the original project's source code intact. He'll provide a brief background on AWS Lambda and how that works, and then a walkthrough of the project.

Then we'll have JR Heard's talk: An Introduction to Specter

Specter is a library that allows you to elegantly and performantly manipulate Clojure/Script data structures. In this sure-to-be-compelling lightning talk, we'll learn why Specter exists, how to use it, and how to write our own Specter "navigators".

How do we combat the “out of sight, out of mind” mentality in virtual teams? How do we cultivate a virtual team dynamic which nourishes engaged collaboration and equitable dialog among all voices? As organizations continue to grow flatter and increasingly become more global, remote teams need to acquire new skills to build trust with one another and overcome the perceived distance in the virtual team environment. In this talk Line Mørkbak and her online colleague Sarika Kharbanda share some of their insights and tips on how to ensure that we engage all voices in our online collaboration. They will explore various tools and techniques to increase a sense of team and bring back the “human” interaction. Line and Sarika will look at the latest research on virtual collaboration, exploring the mindset needed to create a nourishing virtual work environment, and will share tools to support fluid collaboration for online teams.

Line Mørkbak is constantly exploring new methods to engage learners and develop team approaches that empower f2f and virtual collaboration. Dynamic participation, interactivity, and engagement are keywords for her workshops and learning designs. As a Global Collaboration Facilitator she divides her time between European and North American clients and her work often takes place in a virtual global environment. Line is constantly exploring and experimenting with ways to enhance the way we collaborate with our colleagues when we are not in the same physical location. As a global citizen, Line has lived and worked internationally for the past 19 years and is now based in Portland, OR. http://www.gleapconsult.com/

Sarika Kharbanda is an accomplished Lean and Agile practitioner who has worked with enterprises and diverse cultures in Poland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Singapore, India, China, Hong Kong and the United States. Her work as an Agile Coach has enabled her clients to experience greater business agility across geographies with on-site innovative games, training, coaching and mentoring.

Mob programming can be used to help increase team cohesiveness, efficiently train new team members, reduce bugs, and save time in code review and testing. Expanding on the principles of pair programming, mob programming uses an entire team to create well designed and implemented code. Alexander will be going over both the good parts and bad parts of mob programming that he's come across in the last 3 years of implementation with his team. We'll discuss what everyone's role is in mob programming, when it's best to attempt it with your team, and when you might end up experiencing more headache than benefit.

Bio: Alexander Clifford found his way into programming through a somewhat circuitous route. With a background in science and cooking he discovered his love of programming almost by accident while searching for his next learning project. Seven years later he now leads the UI Apps development team on Oracle's Infinity product line as a Principle Software Engineer. When he's not programming for work, he's programming for fun by attempting to create Skynet, running around in nature pretending to be a native Northwesterner, or moving about his kitchen in an attempt to not forget all of his prior chef skills. He can be reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderclifford/ or by using just the right sequence of smoke signals.

Justin Smith will present his library, poirot, and explain why it was needed and demonstrate how it is used to simplify debugging and writing regression tests.

Bio:

Justin is a full time Clojure programmer and maker of weird music. He's remarkably active on #clojure IRC and the clojurians slack channel.

Join us for the We Code for Good Hackathon for Women and Friends on December 1-2! This is the 3rd We Code hackathon hosted by Nike and Puppet, and we’re excited to partner with non-profits and help them address challenges with technical solutions. Details about the non-profits we will be working with will be shared soon.

Web designers and software developers of all levels are invited to work on a fun project in small teams at this creative and collaborative coding event. You will have an opportunity to meet and work with other talented people, develop your skills, and help non-profits. T-shirts, prizes, and great food will be provided.

This is AgilePDX's second webinar speaker. Web conferencing is allowing us to bring in speakers doing cutting edge work around the world. Come join us for this innovative discussion.

Today companies need Agile throughout. But how can they go beyond software to include even board and basic legal structure? Share and comment on the journey Jutta Eckstein and I are on to answer that question. We first generalize the Manifesto to values of: self-organization, transparency, constant customer focus, and continuous learning. Then, deepen these values by adding Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy. A new organigram emerges that synthesizes board, inspiration, resource support, and value center perspectives and focuses them on the customer. Finally, use Cynefin to implement company-wide Agility, and then dance!

Format: The presentation will cycle between presenting ideas, posing questions audience small groups, and providing brief moments for sharing and reflection.

Bio:

John Buck lives near Washington, DC, USA, and is a division director for The Sociocracy Group, an international foundation headquartered in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

John has led dozens of sociocracy implementation projects for a variety of organizations around the globe, ranging from schools and neighborhoods to NGOs and for-profit manufacturers and IT companies using Agile. He believes that such basic values as equality, effectivness, and transparency can make our work places dramatically more elegant and sustainable. He excels in customizing sociocracy principles to each organization’s particular concerns, work schedules, and professional areas.

John was the first person outside of The Netherlands to receive consultant certification from The Sociocracy Group in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He has translated numerous documents from the original Dutch and is coauthor (with Sharon Villines) of We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy, 2007 & updated 2017. Another book, Company-Wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, and Sociocracy, coauthored with Jutta Eckstein, is 70% complete in LeanPub.com. He also is part of a joint project with Fujitsu's Advanced Software Lab to create an app called Weaver to support meetings in-person, online, and offline.

Education and credentials

-- Master of Science degree in Quantitative Sociology, The George Washington University

-- Certified Sociocratic Consultant

This month I am happy to announce we will have a remote presentation from Zach Tellman. I've heard Zach speak several times and every time have learned a lot and been impressed by the breadth and depth of his knowledge and thinking.

He will share with us a discussion of what an abstractions are, what makes them fail, and how to make them better.

Zach is the author of Elements of Clojure https://leanpub.com/elementsofclojure , and a number of open source libraries.

We've all seen or heard of "unit" test suites that all pass but the resulting project doesn't actually work. Behavior Driven Development (BDD) can provide a higher level of confidence in a project by testing at a higher level: the project's input and output level.

In this presentation we'll look at examples of BDD implemented in cucumber, show how it can catch errors other tests can't, how it can be used not only for improving confidence in deployments but verifying deployments as well. Specifically focused on backend web services, the concepts in the presentation can be applied to other domains as well.

If you're looking for a presentation with code, but not too much, this is for you!

Bio: Matthew Mayer is an agile enthusiast, a cloud-native software engineer but mostly wishes he had more time to ride his motorcycles.

Facebook's Javascript-based cross-platform mobile solution React Native has been rapidly gaining mindshare recently, and for good reason: it's a tasteful, flexible, understandable way to build performant mobile applications by repurposing your web stack knowledge.

And since it's Javascript-based, Clojurescript is an ideal functional language to equip your mobile development environment with space-age benefits like immutable data, pure functions, and best-of-all, REPL-driven UIs.

Come learn how to bootstrap a mobile environment with React Native, Clojurescript, and re-frame, and how to incorporate native code for functionality not yet handled by React Native.

About Josh Miller

Josh Miller has been building software professionally for over a decade, in fields ranging from Erlang-backed Twitter crawlers to Objective-C iOS apps, but his heart belongs to Clojure. Josh is a software consultant living in Portland, OR.

We'll be discussing Cory Lebson's recent book, The UX Careers Handbook.

The author will join the discussion for Q+A, remotely, around 6:00. (This is earlier than usual, so please try not to be late!)

You can purchase a copy of the book at Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/UX-Careers-Handbook-Cory-Lebson/dp/1138901067/) or CRC Press (https://www.crcpress.com/The-UX-Careers-Handbook/Lebson/p/book/9781138901063).

About the book:

The UX Careers Handbook offers an insider’s look at how to be a successful User Experience (UX) professional from comprehensive career pathways to learning, personal branding, networking skills, building of resumes and portfolios, and actually landing a UX job.

This book goes in-depth to explain what it takes to get into and succeed in a UX career, be it as a designer, information architect, strategist, user researcher, or in a variety of other UX career specialities. It presents a wealth of resources designed to help readers develop and take control of their UX career success including perspectives and advice from experts in the field.

About the author:

Cory Lebson has been a UX consultant for over two decades. He is the Principal and Owner of a small UX consultancy, a builder of UX community, and a past president of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA). Not only a practitioner of UX, Cory teaches and mentors to help professionals grow their UX skills, and conducts regular talks and workshops on topics related to both UX skills and career development.

All participants must read and abide by Puppet Labs' Event Code of Conduct below:

Event Code of Conduct

Exhibitors, speakers, sponsors, staff and all other attendees at events organized by Puppet Labs (PuppetConf, Puppet Camps, training classes, and others) or held at Puppet Labs facilities are subject to these Community Guidelines and Code of Conduct. We are dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, and we do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

We ask you to be considerate of others and behave professionally and respectfully to all other participants. Remember that sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any event venue, including talks. Participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the event without a refund at the discretion of the organizers or Puppet Labs staff members.

Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, sexual images in public spaces, real or implied violence, intimidation, oppression, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention. Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the event organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the event with no refund. If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of the event staff immediately.

Event staff will be happy to help participants address concerns. All reports will be treated as confidential. We strongly encourage you to address your issues privately with any of our staff members who are organizing the event. We encourage you to avoid disclosing information about the incident until the staff have had sufficient time in which to address the situation. Please also keep in mind that public shaming can be counter-productive to building a strong community. We do not condone nor participate in such actions.

We value your attendance. If you cannot find a member of the event staff or are not comfortable contacting one of the staff, you can alternatively contact [email protected], Kara Sowles (kara at puppetlabs.com) or Nathan Rawlins (503-806-2992 or nathan.rawlins at puppetlabs.com).

We expect all participants to follow these rules at all event venues and related social events.

The Thermodynamics of Emotion gives us a fresh view of the human behavior we see around us. The emotions we experience create the results we get as we form teams, solve problems, and struggle for equity. Through the lens of complexity science and flow system physics, we find new tools to understand and influence the patterns of emotion that create our relationships and organizations.

http://thermodynamicsofemotion.com

Willem Larsen is the founder of Language Hunters (a non-profit organization that trains communities in the techniques of accelerated learning to revitalize endangered languages), host of the Thermodynamics of Emotion Symposium, author (and co-author) of several books including the Five Rules of Accelerated Learning, a wildlife tracker and Search and Rescue tracker, and a software engineer at Hunter Industries, home of "mob" programming, where he recently designed the Mob Programming Role-Playing game to help accelerate on-boarding and support the practice at other organizations.

ClojureScript's React.JS wrappers have been around a while, and fighweel has really made the development experience shine. When I first started playing around with ClojureScript I really wanted to make browser games more than web apps and this got me thinking. Can a library exist which allows for creating and manipulating any object model similarly to how React interacts with the DOM? This talk is about a pair of libraries I've began writing which makes an attempt at proving this out.

Do you have a burning question? Do you need a little group consultation? Do you have a nut you just can’t crack in your processes or team dynamics?

Taking a break from speakers this month to encourage you to take the stage! The ever-popular Lean Coffee agile group discussion format has been a consistent hit in the past so we’re flying the Lean Coffee flag again. To learn more about the format, read here: http://leancoffee.org/

Come bring your friends and your questions. The bigger the turnout the more tables we’ll have going simultaneously.

Pizza and pop generously provided by PNSQC (pnsqc.org). RSVP's appreciated, but not required, at [email protected] .

Have you ever wondered why some Agile concepts work well in one context and not so well in other contexts? With so many tools, techniques, models, methods, practices, and principles available, how do you decide which ones are appropriate for a given situation?

Agile methods, practices, and principles are successful primarily because they are effective heuristics. Heuristics are anything that provide a plausible aid or direction in the solution of a problem. All heuristics work by exploiting the structure of an environment, so heuristics work well in some environments and less well (or not at all) in others. We need to understand why and where Agile methods and practices work - and where they don’t - in order to adopt, tailor, use, and improve them.

Cynefin is a sensemaking framework that helps people understand their context or situation in order to take appropriate action. The Cynefin framework can be used to select Agile heuristics appropriate for the environment (e.g. use Scrum here, and Kanban there) rather than defaulting to a single, recipe-based approach for all situations. Agile heuristics are especially important and useful for complex and complicated environments, where practitioners must work continuously to understand their context, and then respond quickly and flexibly to meet rapidly-changing needs.

Agile in Context helps practitioners understand not only how, but also why Agile methods and practices work across different contexts. Understanding Agile in context increases the chances for successful adoptions and highlights areas where new methods need to be developed or repurposed from other disciplines. Treating Agile as a set of heuristics will also reduce recipe-based, dogmatic approaches that are fairly pervasive in the community at large today.

Learning Outcomes: By the end of the session, participants should be able to: -- describe what heuristics are and why they work -- describe the Cynefin Framework -- use the Cynefin framework to identify and select heuristics to improve Agile development -- find additional information for continued learning

Optional Pre-Work: A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making

About the Speaker:

Dan Walsh is a Founder and Principal of nuCognitive (www.nuCognitive.com). He has over a decade of expertise in accelerating product development, driving culture change, and transforming organizations. As a recognized leader in Lean Startup, org transformations, and complex adaptive systems, Walsh helps clients to resolve complex, intractable problems resistant to traditional methods. He is an advocate for the integration of learning with work, the cultivation of cultures where people thrive, and the application of heuristics to deliver holistic solutions to customer problems.

Dan Walsh has a BS and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M. He also has an MS in Systems Engineering and an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At AgilePDX Downtown in June, Paul Wynia is facilitating a fun interactive workshop with us!

Teams are tricky things, they get even trickier when a team fails to come together as a cohesive group of individuals. One of the steps to getting through the Forming/Storming phases and onto the Performing stage is creating a set of team values and defining how those values translate to behaviors. In this fun, interactive session we'll explore team values with LEGO Serious Play. Using these methodologies, we ensure that all team members are engaged, have a voice, and can influence the final outcome while at the same time reducing the stress and conflict that can occur.

Speaker Paul Wynia is an Agile Coach, Consultant, and Trainer with 20 years of software industry experience. Paul is also a Licensed Trainer of the Lego® Serious Play® methodologies http://www.strategicplay.com/ and uses Agile Games and simulations to incorporate collaboration, creativity, and innovation into teamwork. He is co-host of the http://agilegamespodcast.com/ and co-chair of the annual http://agilegameswest.com/ conference.

The Scaled Agile Framework has become a strong force among enterprises pursuing agility. And with it have come strong opinions—in some cases, almost armed camps. This makes no sense. So, in the pursuit of sense, AgilePDX will host a panel of four experienced agilists all with different perspectives on SAFe, from the relatively naïve, to the roundly and soundly certified, to the confirmed skeptic. Come join us. This ought to be a ball!

Come prepared to hear four distinct viewpoints and bring your questions. We have experts!

Jean Richardson (panel facilitator), like many of our panelists, is a member of the AgilePDX Coordinating Committee. She is a coach providing support and guidance for agile-aspiring organizations and leaders in transition grappling with models that function to support agility and navigate complexity. Her background includes depth in traditional and agile project management, formal mediation, and training. Her client list ranges from large (Intel, State of Oregon, City of Portland, Portland General Electric, and Cambia Health Systems) to small (Idealist and Thug Interactive) organizations. Her background in SAFe includes many years of observation and some training (SAFe Agilist certification) with a dip in the pool to test the pH. She was a reviewer on the Enterprise Agile track for the Agile Alliance 2017 conference.

Dave Gipp is currently supporting agile teams on a large SAFe transformation in Portland as a part of the agile coaching cohort at Slalom consulting. Over ten years ago, he began his agile journey dealing with issues of scaling while with Laika Animation Studios as the lead agile coach for their software R&D division. Since that time Dave has worked with dozens of large organizations, such as Cisco, DreamWorks, Marvel, Lattice, and Nike, helping them build and scale their agile fluency. Dave is a SAFe Program Consultant (SPC4), Certified Facilitator/Coach (icAgile ATF), Certified Scrum Practitioner (CSP) and Certified Scrum Master (CSM). Dave is also fluent in organizational transformation and is Prosci® Change Management certified.

Lorie Gordon has a background in Software Engineering, leading teams for the past 10 years in a three-fold role of Software Development Manager, Scrum Master, and Project Manager. Working for four global organizations, Lorie has led several distributed teams with members in North America, APAC, EMEA, and Armenia. Her first team lead a successful grassroots initiative to bring Agile-scrum into the software development practice and across the organization. Once the framework was proven, she guided the continued adoption of Agile-scrum partnering and reducing silos within co-located offices and across the globe.

Lorie focuses on coaching and practicing scrum within a team-oriented framework as a dedicated Scrum Master. Her recent introduction to SAFe is teaching her a formal enterprise level planning method that is partially implemented in teams she works with. She volunteers with AgilePDX and attends local gatherings including AONW, ProductCamp, and PNSQC.

Adam Light helps technology leaders use Lean and Agile methods to deliver results and build innovative high-performing organizations. As a consultant to enterprise clients, Adam focuses on pragmatic techniques that increase organizational capacity by improving leadership capability. Adam has more than 20 years of technology experience. He began his career as a software developer before becoming a manager of projects and people. Adam first experienced the power of Lean and Agile methods when he implemented them as Director of Planning and Program Management at TransUnion and has run his own consulting practice since 2008.

Adam is a founding member of the Agile Fluency Project, which helps coaches, consultants, and change agents put the insights of the Agile Fluency Model into practice. The Agile Fluency Project envisions a world where Agile is done well in every organization, where all teams practice effectively to sustain continuous improvement, and where each team performs at a level of fluent proficiency that is fit to purpose.

Rhea Stadick applies leading edge techniques to accelerate business results across complex, global organizations. She's driven by the need to do the right things right and ensure healthy workplaces that support diversity of thought and encourage continuous improvement and learning. Over the last 10 years she's led grassroots efforts and initiatives to establish improved ways of working that focus on fast value delivery and sustainable development. As one of the early adopters of Agile at Intel Corporation, Rhea helped to foster other change agents in this space and cleared a path to enable Agile to be an accepted and embraced way of working across 100,000+ people and over 60 countries. As a systems engineer, she has developed an expertise in Complex Adaptive Systems and applying practical methods to work in dynamic contexts. Rhea is a TEDx speaker and keynoter on topics including new approaches for modern business and thriving in changing environments. She currently consults on large Agile transformations.

Deep learning (DL) has become an important topic in the AI and machine learning world. New advances in algorithms, hardware and software have made it a critical part of self driving cars, language translation, image understanding, medical analysis, and many other fields. Though DL systems are commonly written in Python (wrapping C/C++ libraries) we want to explore options available to Clojure developers.

We'll have a 2 part meeting with myself (Julio) and JR leading extended lightning-talk style presentations.

First, Julio will guide us through a discussion on:

• the basics of deep learning and the common tools and libraries • Java and Clojure options (DeepLearning4J and Cortex) and when they may be applicable.

In the second part JR will discuss his experiences while taking a deep learning for self driving cars course.

JR Says: Neural networks are just plain spooky. In just the past few years, they've gotten so good at classifying images (is this a cat or a dog? is this tissue cancerous or non-cancerous?) that they're often better at their task than humans are. In this talk, you'll see how to use a neural network - the same one used by comma.ai, a real-life self-driving car company - to drive a simulated car better than JR can.

website

The tech industry has a contentious relationship with diversity. Despite years of highly publicized initiatives aiming to improve diversity in our field, reports show only marginal improvement in the most well-intentioned workplaces. On the contrary, the recent news is full with fresh accounts of issues in tech companies. So, if we care so much about diversity, what’s holding us back from making real progress? Why do we often have such homogeneous teams, and where does this selection start? And what actually makes up a diverse team?

Drawing from his experience as a hiring manager, Dennis explores the biases hidden inside our own hiring practices that can screen out high-quality job candidates. Covering case studies, he shares what the building blocks are for a diverse team, and why we would want to strive to create (or join) one. Dennis’ own non-traditional background made him aware how valuable diverse teams can be, where people with different perspectives collaborate in unique ways to generate novel solutions.

Come bring your questions and an open mind, and join this important discussion. All of us are responsible to recognize where people are marginalized and excluded, especially in the current climate. Being agile means finding better ways to implement things. Let’s be agile about diversity.

BIO: Dennis, a native Portlander, began his career in L.A. working in Film and TV. Four years ago he returned to Portland and joined the software development world, migrating through the different levels to management and agile coach. His focus now is on hiring and coaching successful (and diverse) development teams.

Let's follow the life cycle of an accessibility bug. Joe Watkins will guide us on a developer-oriented exploration of how these bugs hatch, mature, multiply, and — most importantly — how these pesky critters can be squashed. Come join in the moderated Q&A.

We will begin the evening with social time and then the presentation at 6:30 so there is plenty of time for Q&A, discussion and a bit of networking/wrap-up at the end.

Presenter: Joe Watkins is an Accessibility Consultant with Simply Accessible. Joe has a passion for the web and working with others to make it more usable for everyone.

Moderator: Bruce Elgort is an instructor in the web development program at Clark College. He emphasizes accessibility from day 1 in all of his classes. Bruce is also a low vision user who himself relies on accessibility with his day-to-day activities.

UX Book Club is back! Without a book...

Instead, please bring a few of your favorite UX-related resources (blogs / blog posts / articles / papers / podcasts / books / etc) to share with the group.

They can be your all-time favorites, or just something helpful or remarkable you've come across recently.

Be prepared to discuss what blogs / people / podcasts / etc you follow to keep up with the latest in UX and UX-related news.

We'll also discuss what book(s) we should read in the coming months.

Hope to see you there!

We’ve always known the art and craft of software development was frustratingly fun, potently world-driving, and part of an ever-expanding set of skills important to living in the modern world. But, now, there’s a field of study and experimentation that appears to show that the consciousness of the teams that develop software inform the software itself.

And, there is software that is designed to heighten our consciousness. What if we used software to heighten the consciousness of software developers to build better products? And why do agilists care? Well: throughput, quality, humane work environments—and things like that. Our panelists will speak to these and related issues of interest to the co-hacking community.

Jean Richardson is a member of the AgilePDX Coordinating Committee, an Agile coach and consultant, developer of the Pervasive Leadership theory, and co-author of “Technical Practices as a Hack on Consciousness: Why to Hack Yourself” published on InfoQ on September 1, 2016. In the course of her nearly 30 years in software development she has progressed through the software development specialties of user and technical documentation, field-based ethnographic usability research, testing, instructional design, business analysis, project management, and spent a stint as the Director of Customer Learning for a small healthcare company. Her client lists include such local luminaries as Cambia Health Systems, Portland General Electric, the City of Portland, the Oregon Department of Human Services and Oregon Health Authority, Intel, and Tripwire. azuregate.net @JeanAtAzureGate

Julie Nelligan is a personal development coach and psychologist in North Portland. Julie started her career as a coder in the early 90’s focusing primarily on managing large databases before transitioning into coaching. She is also the founder of the Portland Chapter of Consciousness Hacking, a new movement to explore the use of technology in facilitating the process of elevating consciousness. Julie brings a scientific, analytical approach to considering the interface between technology and consciousness. Her work with entrepreneurs combines neurofeedback and coaching to empower them to achieve their goals and aspirations as business owners and individuals. cohack.life eeginfo.com

Aaron Vannatter works as a senior software development consultant with Axian Inc. near Portland, OR. With a decade of professional experience, Aaron has found his niche in full stack .NET web development. He is passionate about championing Purpose-Driven Development, an emerging way of developing software that seeks to be more integrated and life-affirming and to foster the human spirit within the domain of information technology. This work is inspired by Aaron's transformational experiences after a decade of training in the tools, practices and techniques offered by The Way of the Heart™, an international organization dedicated to empowering personal and collective life mission. purposedrivendevelopment.org aaronvannatter.com thewayoftheheart.com

Part I: Eager to Process

A key innovation in Clojure (versus earlier Lisps) is the abstraction of sequence processing functions away from the list type, to the more general sequence interface. This polymorphic abstraction lets what would otherwise be a large library of functions operating on a single collection type (list), grow in power to operate over more collection types, including maps, sets, vectors, and many others.

The clojure.core sequence processing facilities borrow great ideas from earlier Lisps and Haskell too. Conversely, ClojureScript’s collections library can be viewed as a successor to Clojure’s own. By exploring a little bit of this surrounding terrain, we gain a much clearer understanding of Clojure’s elegant and powerful collection processing.

In this first 45-minute presentation, we’ll introduce a toy problem and we’ll solve it a few different ways at the REPL. From very basic beginnings, we’ll introduce sequence processing and collection-sequence duality. We’ll progress smoothly to higher-order functions and beyond (I don’t want to ruin the surprise mkay?) Along the way we’ll meet a number of foundational Clojure functions and forms.

If you’ve read a Clojure book (mainly the first few chapters) and you’ve written some code, you have everything you need to understand this talk. Intermediate Clojurists, may also come away with some new insights.

Bio:

Bill Burcham has earned his living for almost three decades now, making software. He’s liked Lisp best for even longer than that. As many have pointed out: Lisp feels like something discovered—not something invented. There is something essential in Lisp.

When he’s not engaged in a media fast, Bill can be reached @billburcham

PDXAUX learns from Angel Chesimet and other blind end users while they demonstrate how they use every day technology, including websites, phones, apps, etc. They will discuss what works for them and what doesn't.

Demonstrations of use of screen readers, braille display, texting, gps, apps, OCR readers and applications, and everyday uses.

We will begin the evening with social time and then the presentation at 7pm so there is plenty of time for Q&A, discussion and a bit of networking/wrap-up at the end.

Bridging the gap between higher-level application development and embedded device deployments is all the rage these days. As is the case with the much of the rest of the Elixir ecosystem, there's a project to help make such ambitions a lot more friendly and inviting to work with (http://nerves-project.org/). This month we'll be taking a look at this project, explore a handful of similar alternative approaches to the same problem, and see if we can get some simple distributed Elixir applications running and communicating as Nerves apps.

If you have any of the supported hardware (referenced below), then by all means bring it with you and we'll see if we can get things working on real hardware. All the organizer's embedded SBCs are Odroid C2's, which aren't Nerves-compatible, so we won't be able to supply hardware for the whole group, but for those that don't have hardware to deploy to we can still build QEMU ARM images and run them in an emulated VM environment.

Supported Hardware:

https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/targets.html

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to our friends at Puppet, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

Katherine Radeka walks us through how the Rapid Learning Cycles framework has emerged as a repeatable method for adopting Agile Development practices for tangible products. It overcomes many of the challenges that companies have had when they have tried to adopt Agile Development, by addressing the mismatches between the software / IT development environment and the challenges faced by scientists and engineers when the product involves physics, chemistry and/or biology.

The Rapid Learning Cycles framework is a synthesis of Agile Development and Lean Product Development practices that works within a company's existing phase gate PDP. It is concrete and actionable for program managers, technical leads and their sponsors so that they can use the framework with confidence after a small amount of training and coaching.

Teams that use the Rapid Learning Cycles framework exhibit the desired changes that people want from Agile Development: fast cycles of development, early engagement from customers and other stakeholders, the ability to respond to change in a dynamic environment, and adapt as new information develops.

They also build scientific knowledge to make better decisions instead of running through build-test-fix loops, capture knowledge real-time instead of reinventing solutions, and make better decisions up front instead of getting stuck with late-found defects and schedule delays.

Session Learning Objectives:

1) What the Rapid Learning Cycles framework is, and how it fits in with Agile Development.

2) What practices from Agile Development get used in the Rapid Learning Cycles framework.

3) What makes the Rapid Learning Cycles framework spread within a product development organization, even one that is resistant to Agile, or seems to be a poor fit.

Bio:

Katherine Radeka has a rare combination of business acumen, scientific depth and ability to untangle the organizational knots to remove the barriers to change. Since 2005, Whittier Consulting Group, Inc. has helped some of the world's leading companies get their products to market faster. She currently supports more than 100 active implementations of the Rapid Learning Cycles framework through the Rapid Learning Cycles Institute (rapidlearningcycles.com)

Katherine is the author of two books. Her first book, The Mastery of Innovation: A Field Guide to Lean Product Development won the Shingo Research Award in 2014. This book contains 19 case studies of companies who have used lean product development to get their ideas to market faster.

Katherine's second book is The Shortest Distance Between You and Your New Product: How Innovators Use Rapid Learning Cycles to Get Their Best Ideas to Market Faster. This book summarizes Katherine's ground-breaking work to integrate Agile Development and Lean Product Development into the Rapid Learning Cycles Framework, a proven method for accelerating innovation.

Katherine has climbed seven of the tallest peaks in the Cascade Mountains and spent ten days alone on the Pacific Crest Trail until an encounter with a bear convinced her that she needed a change in strategic direction.

GraphQL is a way to expose your services and data to your clients in a uniform, efficient, and client-driven way.It sidesteps much of the confusion and clutter of a REST solution, and provides clear solutionsto scalability, documentation, and updates to your data and services. We've been having great successwith GraphQL at Walmart, and are soon to release an open-source Clojure implementation.

Winter is coming, let the Agile Games begin! There are some REALLY fun games out there that increase agile understanding, enhance teamwork, and more. Come play some games with fellow agilists to learn new things and take new ideas back to your own teams!

Did someone say Cards Against Agility and Agile Paper Airplanes?

Yes, there's pizza, pop, beer . . . and surplus holiday cookies are really appreciated!

Curious about Clojure? Have questions about Emacs or Cursive or Vim or Spacemacs or anything else? Come on out and we'll help.

Office hours are a great place to chat with other developers and help or get help with any questions that come up.

Everyone is always welcomed regardless of skill or experience. If you are curious come on out.

Many developers are probably familiar with unit-testing, and probably a few even rigorously utilize it, but software validation exists on a spectrum ranging from formal verification to nothing at all. Unit-testing tends to reside a lot closer to the empty abyss side of that spectrum in-practice, so what methods and tools can we use to start inching (centimetering, for the internationally inclined) closer to the other side? To get to a point where we're brimming with confidence about our design and implementation? Property-Based Testing can be the next step on that journey, and this month we'll take a look at one of Elixir's PBT frameworks and use it to validate a bit of code.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to our friends at Puppet, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

"[T]he most powerful thing a leader can do to foster effective collaboration is to create conditions that help members competently manage themselves. The second most powerful thing is to launch the team well.” J. Richard Hackman, “Six Common Misperceptions about Teamwork,” Harvard Business Review, June 07, 2011.

Resource staffing isn’t enough. New product development and operations teams need effective Liftoffs to accelerate their start and put them on the trajectory toward success. It's an unexplored, often ignored, yet critical, Agile practice. Through Liftoff, business sponsors, product managers, and product owners, inform, inspire, and initiate their teams. Team members align their work and make a great beginning.

In this talk, Diana Larsen describes ways you can accomplish Liftoff, including Agile Chartering, with real-life stories about effective teams, teamwork, and delivery.

BIO

Diana Larsen is author of Liftoff 2nd ed.: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams; Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great; Five Rules for Accelerated Learning; and co-originator of the Agile Fluency(TM) Model. A founding partner of FutureWorks Consulting, she leads the practice area for Agile software development, team leadership, and Agile transitions. Diana delivers inspiring conference keynote talks and has contributed as a leader with Agile Alliance, Organization Design Forum, and the Agile Open Initiative.

Nike and Puppet are collaborating to host the 2nd We Code Hackathon for women and friends. Web designers and developers of all levels are invited to work on a fun project in small teams at this creative and collaborative coding event. You’ll have an opportunity to meet and work with other talented people, develop your skills, and create new applications. T-shirts, prizes, and great food from local restaurants will be provided.

Learn more and RSVP at: https://wecode-nov2016s.splashthat.com.

This talk will show you how to use Clojure and the new spec library to write programs that behave as expected, meet operational requirements, and have the flexibility to accommodate change. We will also discuss how developing with spec is declarative, predicative, layered and robust.

This is a live remote, interactive presentation where we will have time for questions.

Elixir and Erlang make tremendous tools for integrating between different kinds of interfaces. In fact there's arguably no better system for quickly constructing reliable and fault-tolerant control planes available today. However, in order to do that in a rich ecosystem of technologies it is a requirement that we be able to interact with and orchestrate various kinds of external processes. So for this meetup session we're going to learn about exactly how to do that.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to our friends at Puppet, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

To test our ability to bring in Agilists from around the world, this month AgilePDX is sponsoring a live videoconference with Agile Manifesto signer Andy Hunt, who will be talking with us about the GROWS method, which he developed with Jared Richardson.

Everyone claims they are "agile"; but are you and your team actually effective?

Learn the three important steps to creating a truly effective agile team: 1) Lower your risk on software implementation, scalability, usability and more using Tracer Bullet Development; 2) Make accurate decisions and corrections with rapid, real-time feedback using the Continuous Paradigm; and 3) Converge on success with quick, inexpensive GROWS Method Experiments. You and your teams won't need to guess; you'll know.

Pizza and pop are sponsored by the Pacific Northwest Quality Conference.

BIO

Andy started in the do-it-yourself days of CP/M and the S100 bus, of Heathkits and Radio Electronics. Andy wrote his first real program, a combination text editor and database manager, for an Ohio Scientific Challenger 4P. It was a great era for tinkering. Andy started hacking in 6502 assembler, modifying operating systems, and wrote his first commercial program (a Manufacturing Resources Planning system) in 1981. He taught himself Unix and C, and began to design and architect larger, more connected systems.

Andy joined up with Dave Thomas and they wrote the seminal software development book, The Pragmatic Programmer, followed a year later by the original Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide, which introduced the Western world to this new language from Japan. Together they founded The Pragmatic Programmers and are well known as founders of the agile movement and authors of the Agile Manifesto, as well as proponents of Ruby and more flexible programming paradigms. They founded the Pragmatic Bookshelf publishing business in 2003, helping keep developers at the top of their game.

Andy is a founder of the Pragmatic Programmers, founder of the Agile Alliance and one of the 17 authors of the Agile Manifesto, and author of nine books. He is an active musician and woodworker, and continues looking for new areas where he can stir things up.

We'll have two talks this month.

Making Games in Clojure(script) with the DEVS Modeling Formalism

In this talk, Austin Haas will discuss why games are difficult to make and how DEVS, a popular simulation modeling formalism, can help. This talk may be relevant to anyone interested in game development, systems theory, actors, agents, or FRP.

Regex derivatives: the functional pearl inside core.spec

The new spec library in Clojure 1.9 uses an old but elegant method for recognizing sequences. We'll develop an implementation of this algorithm in Clojure.

Bio: Russell writes Clojure at Puppet. He's into guitars and separating his functions from his data.

This month we're going to take a look at the architecture of a couple open source Elixir libraries, talk about them, how they fit with OTP principles that Elixir inherits from the Erlang ecosystem, and devise a strategy for how to bring the existing design into line with a more OTP-y way of doing things. We'll also discuss why that's valuable or desirable and start to iterate on making those changes together.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to my friend Jeff Weiss and Puppet, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

Software and product development are being considered a strategic business process, and it's evident now more than ever before that all teams need quantitative goals. Discover the hard-won lessons of how to measure the right things over time and some of the secrets of the most productive teams.

Presenter: Dave Shanley Co-Founder, CEO, Notion

Data changes the conversation. Good teams can become great teams. Dave wants all teams to have the tools they need for making the best decisions. Dave brings his experience growing a company from his apartment through acquisition to IPO (CrowdCompass, acquired by Cvent, NYSE:CVT) and years building technology for the Fortune 500 (Syclo, acquired by SAP). When Dave isn't digging in to the latest numbers, he's dreaming of sailing trips with the Notion team.

Please join us for a night of conversation on self tracking and monitoring where you share ideas, tools and experiments with the Portland Quantified Self community.

This is a special meeting for we will be joined by Gary Wolf, the co-founder of Quantified Self and Sara Riggare, a QS community member from Sweden and person with Parkinson's.

This event is occurring just before the World Parkinson Congress, which we are lucky to be having in Portland this year. To kick it off, Sara is having her own event on Sunday , 9/18) focused specifically on using QS to manage Parkinson's.

If you are self tracking in any way – life logging, biometrics, athletic performance, mood, sleep, medical symptoms, happiness, energy, etc. – come and share your methods, results and insight.

Here's our agenda:

•Informal Social Time - Starting at 6pm
Come early to socialize with other QSers and share what hardware, apps, and other technologies you are currently finding useful.

•Intro and Announcements - 6:15 sharp!
We'll have a round of introductions, and Gary Wolf will kick off the evening.

•Presentations - 6:30 to 7:30

    • Lillian Karabaic - My Quantified Self Zine

    • Sara Riggare - Using Data to Manage Parkinson's

    • Hobson Lane - NLP Sentiment Analysis of My Daily Journal

    • Steven Jonas - Learning to Like New Music With Spaced Repetition

•Post-talks Social Time - 7:30 to 8 pm
After some amazing presentations, we will have some time to converse with those around us.

*Where our talks come from: Our talks come from you! Do you have a personal self-tracking story to share? Please let us know in your RSVP. You can let the three prime questions guide your presentation: What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn?

Here are some examples from previous Quantified Self events: http://vimeo.com/groups/quantifiedself/videos/27380858 http://vimeo.com/28734230

Our thanks to Kyoko and Kaitlynn at Puppet and for lending us this space.

Join us for an evening in two parts:

1. Discussion/presentation by Elise and John Keith, founders of Lucid Meetings. Lucid Meetings is a Portland tech company that specializes in online meeting services, virtual team support and professional meeting software. They were asked in 2013 by ICANN to improve the accessibility of their platform. After doing 75% of the work themselves, Lucid hired Simply Accessible to guide them through the remainder of the process. They will share how the process went for them.

2. A work in progress documentary screening (director, Chris Higgins, in attendance for Q&A)

This short film "Imagine If: A Story of Accessibility" follows Cory Klatik, a user experience designer and social media manager, as he navigates the world with his guide dog, Vine, along with a variety of computers, mobile devices, and assistive technology. The film is designed to show makers how people with disabilities access culture and technology, and offers guidance on how to build accessibility into their daily practice. Director Chris Higgins will be available for a Q&A after the film.

Agenda -

• 6:30-7- Meet and mix

• 7-7:30- John and Elise talk with the group

• 7:30-8:15- screening and Q&A for Chris, John & Elise

• 8:15- 8:30- mix and depart

Soft drinks provided by Puppet Labs.

Using Clojure greenfield project is great but what about legacy projects full of toxic decay and code zombies lurking the repo?

Clojure is your post apocalyptic weapon. You don't have to re-write the whole monolith; by switching key parts of the infrastructure we can reduced the number of servers and costs.

Get bragging rights with your managers and higher ups by introducing Clojure and Clojure community practices in large legacy apps. In this installment we’ll explore how to reduce the high IO costs of large scale email processing with Clojure.

Bio: Paco is a developer in Portland Oregon and can be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/kidpollo

We've looked at Supervision trees in the past, but we've often glossed over how to best use them to your advantage. It's quite easy to accidentally use these fault-tolerance primitives to, somewhat ironically, make your applications less fault-tolerant. This month we'll take a look at design and implementation practices to help make sure you're using these incredible tools to your best advantage.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to my friend Jeff Weiss and Puppet, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

If you've ever had to interrupt a series of operations with ugly nested branching logic and thought, "there should be a better way", you're not alone. I'll show you how to use some basic category theory abstractions from funcool's cats library to write declarative code that's easier to read and reason about, and how to integrate it with their promesa library for declarative asynchronous programming.

Cats:

http://funcool.github.io/cats/latest

Promesa:

http://funcool.github.io/promesa/latest/

Bio: Matthew Lyon helps humans and computers communicate.

We will have Ryan Whitehurst and Corey Osman discussing puppet functions for 3.x, 4.x and the new native function capability in puppet 4.1+. Puppet functions are usually a natural progression when learning the puppet language and can help manipulate data, the catalog or trigger some remote service.

We will talk about how to create and test functions, differences between all the function types and how to properly document them so that you can go back and write some of your own. This will be an interactive session so bring your laptops to follow along.

We will also using puppet-retrospec for function generation and the puppet-repl for live function demos so please install these tools before hand so we don't clog the network.

The Elixir language and standard library is always in a state of diligent improvement, and in accordance with that trend GenStage was recently added. GenStage is a core generic behavior designed to provide a way of coordinating communication between processes with built-in back-pressure. This month we'll take a closer look at what this is, what problems its intended to solve, and exercise the functionality a bit to see how to use it for real-world-shaped problems.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to my friend Jeff Weiss and Puppet, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

Have you heard of the OpenStack Innovation Center (aka OSIC https://osic.org/)? It's a joint effort between Rackspace and Intel designed to ultimately consist of about 2,000 physical nodes deployed at two data centers in Texas and California, OSIC is expected to further accelerate the development of OpenStack capabilities and their adoption in the enterprise.

Sonu Sreenivasan and David Brown will join us on July 21st to talk about everything under the OSIC umbrella - including how developers can request access for their testing and development, and some of the use cases they've seen deployed in the environment.

We will also be celebrating OpenStack's 6th birthday this month, so please come help us honor six years of incredible growth and progress in the OpenStack world!

About our presenters this month: Sonu Sreenivasan is a Program Manager at the OpenSource Technoloy Center at Intel. He also oversees the engineering execution for the OSIC partnership. He brings with him about 18 years of industry experience spread across, software design & development, IT Operations, program management, and cross-geo software delivery management across various business verticals. He has been with Intel for over 15 years and was based across multiple geographies. Sonu has a Bachelors in Physics and a Masters in Computer Science

David Brown is the director of the Data Center SW Planning team, primarily focused on driving Intel's OpenStack strategy. Prior to joining Intel, David was Vice President of Professional Services at Sequent Computers where his focus was to manage a global consulting operation.

Have you ever wanted to extend your Clojure talents to the desktop? Turned off at the thought of digging into Swing or building native shims around your beautiful functional code? Then look no further than Github's Electron, a cross-platform toolkit for desktop apps using familiar Javascript techniques, which of course we can make much more fun and powerful with Clojurescript. Learn how to build desktop apps with all the custom menus, system notifications, and badges you've come to expect, right from your REPL.

About Josh Miller

Josh Miller has been building software professionally for over a decade, in fields ranging from Erlang-backed Twitter crawlers to Objective-C iOS apps, but his heart belongs to Clojure. Josh is a software consultant living in Portland, OR.

We will have talks by Adrian Cockroft from Battery Ventures and Mike Coleman from Docker!

Agenda:

6:30 - Welcome, networking, food and drinks

7:00 - Mike Coleman: DockerCon Recap

Mike is responsible for creating technical content to help customers come up to speed on Docker and its related components. Prior to joining Docker this summer he spent about 15 months at Puppet Labs working in product management. And, before all that he spent time at VMware, Microsoft, Intel, and HP in both product management / marketing as well as IT engineering. Outside of work Mike enjoys riding his motorcycles around Oregon's backroads, spending time with his wife and kids, and supporting the Portland Timbers (that's a soccer team). You can find him on Twitter as @mikegcoleman.

7:45 - Adrian Cockroft: Microservices: What's Missing

Discussion of techniques to solve common problems that people run into when microservices are in production and being updated continuously in large organizations.

Adrian Cockcroft has had a long career working at the leading edge of technology. He’s always been fascinated by what comes next, and he writes and speaks extensively on a range of subjects. At Battery, he advises the firm and its portfolio companies about technology issues and also assists with deal sourcing and due diligence.

Before joining Battery, Adrian helped lead Netflix’s migration to a large scale, highly available public-cloud architecture and the open sourcing of the cloud-native NetflixOSS platform. Prior to that at Netflix he managed a team working on personalization algorithms and service-oriented refactoring.

Adrian was a founding member of eBay Research Labs, developing advanced mobile applications and even building his own homebrew phone, years before iPhone and Android launched. As a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems he wrote the best-selling “Sun Performance and Tuning” book and was chief architect for High Performance Technical Computing.

He graduated from The City University, London with a Bsc in Applied Physics and Electronics, and was named one of the top leaders in Cloud Computing in 2011 and 2012 by SearchCloudComputing magazine. He can usually be found on Twitter @adrianco.

8:40 - Wrap up and networking

Special thanks to Puppet for space and Century Link for food and drinks!

Elixir inherits a tremendous suite of debugging, tracing, and monitoring facilities from its Erlang pedigree, where the use case was something shaped like, "Be able to attach to, live trace, muck with, and live zero-down-time upgrade this service running on a thing dangling from a 10m pole in the backwoods of Siberia." In this month's meetup we'll take a look at some of these tools and use them to poke around some running services.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to my friend Jeff Weiss and Puppet, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

Join us this week while Cody Herriges (from Puppet Labs) leads a presentation and conversation around using Puppet to put OpenStack control-plane components into Docker containers!

In September of 2015 the Agile Alliance held a community Open Space meeting in Portland and one of our community facilitated a topic on Agile as a context for improved workplace experience for women. Twelve to fifteen people attended her topic—and split pro and con right down the middle with men and women on both sides. Over the last few months, software-related Meetups all over Portland have held discussions focused on women in STEM and women in software development. Now AgilePDX invites you into an Agile-focused discussion on gender dynamics on Agile teams.

What do you think? Has Agile improved, hindered, or left the issue of gender dynamics completely untouched? Does self-organization mean women have more of a voice? When men and women speak up about gender dynamics on teams is anyone left out? What about “gamergate?” Do the Agile Manifesto and Principles imply anything about gender dynamics on teams? And, if so, what is that? Or, is there something additional in the Agile “secret sauce” that improves (or hinders) how men and women work and play together on Agile teams? Would you want your son or daughter on an Agile team?

This month, AgilePDX gathers a panel of two men and two women to consider the state of Agile and gender diversity.

To follow the conversation before the event, join the AgilePDX Slack.

Panelists:

Megan Bigelow -- a connector and tech community leader, having co-founded Portland Women in Tech (PDXWIT) and continues to serve as its President. In this role she's created a platform to connect tech women to companies, mentors and practical skills. PDXWIT is 2000 strong and includes the support of 30+ tech companies. Above all, Megan has a commitment to building community to solve issues. In her day job, she is the Manager of Customer Support at Jama Software.

Erick Banks -- Sr. Quality Assurance Engineer at Puppet. Hosted the discussion on gender inequality in tech at Agile Open Northwest (http://aonw2015.blogspot.com/2015/02/gender-inequality-in-tech.html). My first degree was in physics, my second in computer science, two of the most male-dominated majors. Incidentally I'm single. Interested in gender equality at work largely for selfish reasons. My hope is for my nieces to feel comfortable entering technical fields like mine without the burden of those fields being so gender imbalanced. I try to keep current on issues concerning gender in the workplace by reading (preferably data driven) articles online, a collection of some of them can be found here: https://github.com/ThoughtCrhyme/TechAndGender

Matt Plavcan -- an Agile and Technical Practices Coach with Intel’s Emergent Systems team. He assists teams within the company adopt Agile practices and build their technical capabilities. His career includes verification of desktop microprocessors and teaching Intel architecture at the University of Illinois. Matt is the founder of the Code Dojo and Coderetreat program at Intel, which uses dedicated practice to hone professional programming skills. He runs similar events for the Portland community, and is a coordinator for the 2016 Global Day of Coderetreat. He posts his coaching and development musings on Twitter (@mplavcan)

Kathryn Gruenefeldt -- Sr. Director of Backend Engineering at Simple, where she leads the team focused on services that reliably manage customers' financial transactions and adds homegrown Simple goodness on top, such as Goals and Safe-to-Spend. Simple is a technology company that’s changing the way people bank and think about their money. Kathryn has spent over 20 years in variety of engineering roles, ranging from Database and Middleware development to Healthcare and Energy Conservation applications. Kathryn has a BA in Computer Science, Finance, and Management from University of Oregon, and a MS degree in Computer Science from University of California, Davis.

Join us this month for an informal hack night. Bring your questions, your modules, your ideas, your tools and lets work together on something fun and exciting.

We will split into small teams based on suggestions from you and either hack on something or just discuss the topic at hand. Think of this as an extreme pair programming experience. At the end of the meeting each group will give a brief summary of what they hacked on.

Agenda:

6:00-6:30 Pizza & salad, including vegan & gluten free options

6:30-6:45 News and Announcements

6:45-8:15 Break into small groups, hack, discuss, and learn

8:15-8:45 Lightning presentations from breakout groups

Please RSVP so we can know how much pizza to order:http://www.meetup.com/Portland-Puppet-User-Group/events/231018672/

Extra Details: The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of SW Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office

NOTE: Please RSVP via the meetup.com website, it helps for food and beverage planning.

Last month we had a really varied mix of experience levels in attendance, and so this month we'll cover a subject that will be useful to audiences and participants of all shapes and sizes... Dialyzer & TypeSpecs. Elixir isn't a statically typed language, but thanks to TypeSpecs and Dialyzer we can do static type analysis and avoid whole horrible classes of runtime errors by checking our code at compile-time.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to my friend Jeff Weiss and Puppet Labs, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

Our next get together will be in May with David Stewart from Intel! He is joining us to talk about "doubling performance in Swift with no code changes"

All interpreted languages come to the point in their evolution where a radical turn is needed to optimize performance and a Just In Time (JIT) compilation is the direction they have all turned. We would argue that now is the time for Python. In perhaps an extreme case, Swift’s performance is greatly affected by the latency of Python’s default CPython interpreter. Recently Swift throughput was improved 111% on a 15 node storage cluster and response time was boosted 87%. This was achieved by using PyPy, the JIT version of Python. This talk will describe a proof-of-concept study using PyPy in production with Swift, offer a roadmap for broad adoption of PyPy in the Python world, and provide clear steps for implementing PyPy in Swift.

Bio: David Stewart is the manager of the Server Language Optimization Team in the Data Center Software Technology group at Intel where he helped launch the effort. David has been an operating systems development expert for his whole career, starting out with Unix in 1980. David serves on various boards including the Yocto Project Advisory Board and the CE Linux Working Group, both part of the Linux Foundation. Before the formation of his current team, David held a variety of management positions in Intel’s Software and Services Group and in Intel’s Desktop Boards and Systems division.

Where does value come from, and how do you know when you've got it? Show your backlog you mean business by using common methods to set and track delivered value. Using lessons from the consulting world, and even slime mold, learn how to find and reinforce the directions that bring value to your efforts.

Our presenter Dave Gipp is currently an Agile Coach at DreamWorks Animation and Lattice Semiconductor.  As a Master Practitioner with North Highland Consulting, he specializes in Agile approaches to help Creative, Software R&D, and IT groups deliver at peak performance

Our scheduled speaker had to cancel unexpectedly so we'll have lighting talks and office hours.

The talks don't need to be formal at all. Just take 5-15 minutes sharing something you've learned or are working on.

To get the ball rolling I'll do:

"What I've learned about React Native and ClojureScript"

So what have you been working on? Don't be shy. Your group needs you.

And as for the office hours ... just come with your questions, problems and challenges and we'll try to help.

Thanks.

Julio

Please join us for an evening of Puppet talks!

We hope you'll join us for the next Puppet User Group meeting. We'll have a talk a special security addition this month with Puppet engineers Ben Ford and Adrien Thebo.

Agenda:

• 6:00-6:30 Pizza & salad, including vegan & gluten free options

• 6:30-7:15 Talk on configuring and using hiera-yaml and node_encrypt by Ben Ford, Software Engineer (Puppet)

• 7:15-7:45 Discussion with Ben, Software Engineer (Puppet) and Adrien, Software Engineer (Puppet)

• 7:45-8:15 Mingle & plan for the next meeting

Extra Details: The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of SW Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office

This month we'll be continuing down the path of analyzing and modifying a production-grade open source project. Last month many people who attended were able to discover where in erl-dns our custom zone-file handling code should go. This month we'll drive toward a real replacement implementation to take the next step toward being able to make incremental zone updates and pave the way toward DNS-SD functionality.

This month we'll continue the games format, but instead of a contrived problem we'll continue down this path of modifying and contributing to an open source project.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided. There will also be small desk fodder prizes for the winning team.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to my friend Jeff Weiss and Puppet Labs, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

Last month we learned from Phyllis Thompson and David Whitlock about "Open Space", a facilitation technique for group learning and problem solving, and how they've used it in their workplaces. This month we're going to give you a chance to try out the power of an Open Space un-conference yourself. We will be taking the group through a lightning quick 70 minute open space format, where you will help set the agenda and drive the discussions alongside your fellow Agile

PDXers. Come see what value can emerge out of an unplanned and loosely structured conference format. As usual, pizza and pop are sponsored by the good folks at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC).

Please make sure to RSVP on the meetup page! Thanks.

This month we have two great talks by Carl Caum from Puppet Labs and Mike Coleman from Docker!

Agenda: 6:30 - Welcome, networking, food and drinks thanks to Intel and Sumo Logic 7:00 - Carl Caum: Adopting Docker in today's IT As IT teams plan to deploy Docker, they are often looking for the shortest path to get from where they are today to where they want to be with Docker. One challenge is getting the Docker runtime deployed on operating systems already approved by IT and part of existing deployment processes. Once the runtime is deployed, teams need to quickly start managing their container apps across the available cluster nodes. Finally, teams need a clear path to integrate Docker management technologies like Docker Universal Control Plane into existing change management and delivery processes.

This talk will cover:

Using configuration management tools to deploy the docker runtime, sync Docker images, and ensure containers are running where desired with the desired runtime configuration. Using configuration management practices of identification, control, status accounting, and verification/audit to manage Docker infrastructure over time Build Docker infrastructure change management processes leveraging infrastructure as code to enable continuous peer review, audit, and replication.

Carl Caum is a technical marketing manager at Puppet Labs with a background in systems administration, software development, and product management. He specializes in IT cultures with a focus on how tools can be leveraged to enforce cultural change in otherwise stagnant IT organizations to increase collaboration and job satisfaction. He tweets at @ccaum.

7:45 - Mike Coleman: Docker Announcement Docker has an announcement and Mike is going to review the newest features of the Docker platform. This will be updated with more information after the public release.

Mike Coleman is a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at Docker. He tweets at @mikegcoleman.

8:30 - Wrap up and networking

Special thanks to Puppet Labs for space and Intel and Sumo Logic for food and drinks!

The Untangled web framework is a ClojureScript web framework that blends various web development libraries together with a good bit of glue code to make single-page webapps a breeze.

Untangled leverages a lot of things that were pioneered in Om 1.0 by David Nolen, and adds it's own layers of simplification and opinion.

It is a full-stack environment, but you can pick and choose the pieces you wish to use.

We'll discuss the basic idea of the bits you need to develop an Om.Next app and cover how Untangled provides a lot of that for you.

You may want to checkout this overview, companion video as well as the Om.Next quick start and the Untangled tutorial.

Bio: Tony Kay works at NAVIS in Bend. He's been doing software development since the mid-80s in most of the common suspects: C, C++, Java, Scala, Clojure, Javascript. Tony is currently the technical lead on new software development, where he's driven the adoption of Clojure/Clojurescript and worked as the lead on the Untangled Web Framework project, which they use to develop our production software. His interests include fermenting random things for gluten-free sourdough bread, cooking, making software engineering better as a profession, and barefoot hiking.

We parted ways from the normal format of this meetup last time, and instead of working on the problem stated, we ended up working on trying to get a relatively complex Erlang project (erl-dns) to build using only Elixir's build chain as well as added an Elixir module to the project to ensure that we could attempt to extend the project using only Elixir code.

This month we'll continue the games format, but instead of a contrived problem we'll continue down this path of modifying and contributing to an open source project.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided. There will also be small desk fodder prizes for the winning team.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to my friend Jeff Weiss and Puppet Labs, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

OpenStack at Puppet Labs and Dark Horse Comics - Join us this month to hear all about deploying and maintaining highly available OpenStack environments from two engineers who have actually done it! Cody Herriges and James Beedy will lead an interactive meeting where they'll talk about how they are handling their OpenStack clouds with plenty of opportunity for questions about the real-world engineering challenges they face.

We'll have tacos from Los Gorditos and plenty of tasty beverages next week - hope you can join us!

Our speakers this month: Cody Herriges - Operations Engineer and Systems Team Lead at Puppet Labs (in addition to being a co-organizer of this very meetup!).

James Beedy - Hailing from Portland Oregon, I specialize in cloud systems design, automation, and open source software development. Since 2014, I've been building and maintaining the infrastructure that keeps my company running, working as a Cloud Engineer for Dark Horse Comics.

Are you not sure how to start solving the tough problems that you and your organization face? Do you ever wish that you could leverage the combined knowledge of your coworkers to innovate? Have you ever wanted to cross-pollinate practices across your company without having to plan a conference without PowerPoint and speakers and did I mention PowerPoint? Then Open Space might be right for you. Open Space is a facilitation technique that empowers large groups to leverage the shared knowledge of the attendees to self-organize to understand and ultimately solve problems (large and small) facing individuals, teams, and organizations. Open Space Technology has been used by corporations, non-profits, and community organizations to share knowledge, work through problems, and determine how to take action. At this month’s AgilePDX, we’ll learn how two Portland companies, ShiftWise and Tripwire, use Open Space to spread knowledge across team silos, identify organizational impediments, and guide change from the bottom up, while injecting some fun and teambuilding.

The discussion leaders:

Phyllis Thompson is the Agile Process Coach at ShiftWise, where she is has participated in the company’s agile adoption since 2012. Phyllis has worked with agile teams for nearly 10 years in a variety of roles: Scrum Master, Agile Project Manager, Product Owner, and as the manager of a PMO that rolled out an “Agile PLC” and Scrum/Agile training to more than 100 engineering team members at Serena Software, which used Scrum to develop an agile project management tool.

David began his career as a software engineer hacking on the Java Virtual Machine. After realizing that the challenges of leading people were just as exciting as crafting software that delights its users, he turned his attention to working with others to help grow individuals and Teams within the context of a larger organization. He feels that listening and communication are fundamental to understanding others and understanding yourself. By day, David is a member of Tripwire’s Agility Enablement Team. By night, he is an adjunct lecturer in the Computer Science Department at Portland State University. David likes watching things grown whether they are Teams, companies, his students, his family, or the vegetables in his garden.

As usual, pizza and pop are sponsored by the good folks at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC).

Please join us for an evening of Puppet talks!

We hope you'll join us for the next Puppet User Group meeting. We'll have a talk on Upgrading Puppet Agents with Less Magic (puppetlabs-puppet_agent).

More about the talk: Upgrading the version of a Puppet agent can be simple: create a package resource with the desired version. However, that only works with a few package managers, and you have to find the package repositories hosting those packages. Then there’s Puppet 4; upgrading to Puppet 4 comes with a lot of changes. It can be daunting to find the changes necessary to ensure your agent will talk to your Puppet master after upgrading to Puppet 4. The puppetlabs-puppet_agent module aims to address those problems and makes use of many new language features in Puppet 4 while doing so. This talk will walk through how it works.

Speaker Bio: Michael Smith has been writing software in C++ for 10 years, with an obsession for avoiding preventable mistakes. He’s currently a Sr. Software Engineer on the Open Source Client team at Puppet Labs. https://github.com/MikaelSmith

Agenda:

• 6:00-6:30 Pizza & salad, including vegan & gluten free options

• 6:30-7:15 Upgrading Puppet Agents with Less Magic - Michael Smith, Puppet Labs

• 7:15-7:45 Discussion about challenges that you've experienced upgrading

• 7:45-8:15 Mingle & plan for the next meeting

Extra Details: The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of SW Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office

ClojureScript has the best client side work flow available. Beating out JS (even with modern tooling), and other compile to JS languages. With ClojureScript and figwheel we have hot code reloading, stable application state across reloads, & an interactive browser connected REPL. You can develop your client side app as if you where inside the browser. In this short presentation we will go over what figwheel does, how to set it up, and demo what it is like to build an SPA in ClojureScript + Om.

Jordan Schatz is a polyglot software engineer, working in Clojure, ClojureScript, Python, Javascript, Racket, PHP among other languages to build and scale systems for the last 10 years. He has a particular love of functional programming, dev ops & NoSQL/new data stores. Outside of computer science he pursues interests in alternative energy systems, alternative architecture and the life sciences.

For our February meetup, Lance Albertson (Director of OSU's Open Source Labs) will join us to talk about their adventures in deploying, maintaining and contributing to OpenStack.

Lance Albertson became OSL director in early 2013. He has managed all of the hosting activities that the OSL provides for more than 160 high-profile open source projects since joining the lab as lead systems administrator and architect in 2007. Lance’s involvement in the open source community began in 2003, when he became a developer and package maintainer with Gentoo Linux.

Test-driven development, refactoring, evolutionary design… these Agile engineering techniques have long been established for back-end code. But what about the front-end? For too many teams, it's dismissed with a "JavaScript sucks!" and unreliable, brittle code.

In this session, we look at what it takes to bring the best of Agile development to front-end code. Test-drive your JavaScript and refactor your CSS.

James Shore teaches, writes, and consults on Agile development processes. He is a recipient of the Agile Alliance's Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice, co-author of /The Art of Agile Development/, and host of "Let's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript." In 2012, InfoQ named him one of the "most influential people in Agile." You can find his screencasts at letscodejavascript.com and essays at jamesshore.com.

Clojure on AWS Lambda is like the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of the functional programming world. Lambda gives you an easy way to run your functions in the cloud without needing to provision or manage any servers. It's also really cheap and extremely scalable. In this short presentation we'll walk through building and deploying a Clojure microservice using only AWS Lambda and API Gateway. We'll also discuss ways that your Lambda functions could support larger applications in an AWS environment.

Bio:

Dan Anolik has been doing a mix of software development and solutions architecture in the Portland area for over 19 years. He has worked as a consultant for building cloud native applications and is a fairly recent convert to Clojure. Away from the keyboard Dan plays mandolin in a bluegrass band and has been a long-time wilderness search and rescue volunteer.

Please join us for an evening of Puppet talks!

We'll have Ryan Whitehurst, SysOps Engineer to talk about what he learned from the recent move of our internal Puppet deployment from PE 3.2 (Puppet 3.4.3) to PE 2015.2 (Puppet 4.2). He'll cover the successes, troubles, and tricks we used to make this transition. Ryan works on the SysOps team at Puppet Labs. His current primary responsibility is the development and maintenance of our internal Puppet Enterprise deployment.

Agenda:

• 6:00-6:30 Pizza & salad, including vegan & gluten free options

• 6:30-7:15 Moving from Puppet 3 to Puppet 4 - Ryan Whitehurst, Puppet Labs

• 7:15-7:45 Discussion about challenges that you've experienced moving your Puppet deployments

• 7:45-8:15 Mingle & plan for the next meeting

Extra Details: The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of SW Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office

We'll try to keep our table manners civil, but food encoded in Erlang External Term Format is going to sail through the air at nearly the speed of light.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided. There will also be small desk fodder prizes for the winning team.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to my friends Jeff Weiss, Russell Mull and Puppet Labs, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

"Do you or someone you know suffer from multi-tasking? Does your company value and promote multi-tasking as a critical key to success? Do your Agile teams have difficulty reconciling their organization’s longstanding culture of multi-tasking with Agile’s emphasis on limiting WIP (“Work In Process”)?

Craig Carrington has observed and coached numerous Agile teams and organizations, all of whom have been challenged in some way by multi-tasking (a.k.a. context-switching) during their Agile journey.

In this session, Craig will describe some of his recent experiences working with clients in this context, and invites everyone to bring their own experiences and thoughts to participate in a conversation about this topic.

He will also facilitate an interactive game that explores the effectiveness of multi-tasking (versus limiting WIP), which you could take and try with your own teams and organizations.

Craig has been an Agile practitioner since 2007, with experience in Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe. He is currently serving as an Agile Coach with SolutionsIQ. He has coached at a number of clients around the country, spanning industries including consumer electronics, internet security, networking equipment, IT, insurance, healthcare, energy, and automotive."

Recently we at Little Bird had a series of issues trying to get another Clojure distributed computation library working in production. Learning from the frustrations involved in that process clarified exactly what we wanted out of a distributed computation system, and soon after Ibis was born. The goal was to simplify everything and leave the hard problems of synchronization to battle tested libraries that already do it well, namely Zookeeper and Kafka. Built on this solid foundation, Ibis was a natural expression of our intent when designing a distributed system. Providing seamless distribution in the face of adding and removing nodes on the fly, streaming, scheduling and unique tasks, Ibis is already serving us well in production and we consider it a great success.

Please join us for an evening of Puppet talks!

We'll have Ryan Whitehurst, SysOps Engineer to talk about what he learned from the recent move of our internal Puppet deployment from PE 3.2 (Puppet 3.4.3) to PE 2015.2 (Puppet 4.2). He'll cover the successes, troubles, and tricks we used to make this transition. Ryan works on the SysOps team at Puppet Labs. His current primary responsibility is the development and maintenance of our internal Puppet Enterprise deployment.

Agenda:

• 6:00-6:30 Pizza & salad, including vegan & gluten free options

• 6:30-7:15 Moving from Puppet 3 to Puppet 4 - Ryan Whitehurst, Puppet Labs

• 7:15-7:45 Discussion about challenges that you've experienced moving your Puppet deployments

• 7:45-8:15 Mingle & plan for the next meeting

Extra Details: The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of SW Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office

Agilists, what's ailing you lately? Broken practices, dysfunctional teams, intractable impediments? Whatever it is, come join us at AgilePDX for an Agile Clinic where we'll crowd-source an agenda of your maladies and engage in an interactive round-table discussion to help you uncover remedies from each other. Come to find healing, come to share your favorite Agile medicine, or just come for the pizza, beer and good company.

Join us for an evening of talks about Puppet!

We'll have Rich Burroughs from Yesmail Interactive speaking about how to use Gareth Rushgrove's Module Skeleton. Rich works on developing automation as part of an Operations team, mainly using Puppet. He's lead on the efforts to roll out a new greenfield Puppet Enterprise deployment.

We'll also have Puppet Labs engineer, Ethan Brown here to speak about Managing Windows with Puppet. Ethan is the technical lead for the Puppet Windows team, devoted to improving the Puppet Windows experience. Prior to joining the Puppet team, he spent 15+ years building and architecting applications using a wide range of Microsoft technology from the desktop to the web and everything in between.

Agenda:

• 6:00-6:30 pm Pizza and salad (vegan, vegetarian and gluten free options)

• 6:30- 7:15 pm Managing Windows with Puppet, PowerShell and DSC - Ethan Brown, Puppet Labs

• 7:15-7:45 pm Using Gareth's Module Skeleton - Rich Burroughs, Operations Engineer, Yesmail Interactive.

• 7:45-8:15 pm Plan for next time and mingle

Extra Details: The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of SW Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office

Save the Date for the Women + Tech Holiday party hosted by Puppet Labs! The ladies of Puppet Labs will be doing "raise your voice" talks. Speakers will include Pamela Ju (Sr Analyst), Hailee Kenney (Software Engineer), and Grace Andrews (Associate Technical Solutions Engineer).

Expect an amazing night of networking and learning!

Join us for an evening of talks about Puppet!

We'll have Rich Burroughs from Yesmail Interactive speaking about how to use Gareth Rushgrove's Module Skeleton. Rich works on developing automation as part of an Operations team, mainly using Puppet. He's lead on the efforts to roll out a new greenfield Puppet Enterprise deployment.

We'll also have Puppet Labs engineer, Ethan Brown here to speak about Managing Windows with Puppet. Ethan is the technical lead for the Puppet Windows team, devoted to improving the Puppet Windows experience. Prior to joining the Puppet team, he spent 15+ years building and architecting applications using a wide range of Microsoft technology from the desktop to the web and everything in between.

Agenda:

• 6:00-6:30 pm Pizza and salad (vegan, vegetarian and gluten free options)

• 6:30- 7:15 pm Managing Windows with Puppet, PowerShell and DSC - Ethan Brown, Puppet Labs

• 7:15-7:45 pm Using Gareth's Module Skeleton - Rich Burroughs, Operations Engineer, Yesmail Interactive.

• 7:45-8:15 pm Plan for next time and mingle

Extra Details: The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of SW Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office

Office hours are a great place to chat with other developers and help or get help with any questions that come up.

Everyone is always welcomed regardless of skill or experience. If you curious come on out.

This month we'll have a special newcomers focus where we'll start with introductions, have lighting talks, discuss somethings we like about clojure and some things we find confusing and help each other install a dev environment.

Curious about Clojure? Have questions about Emacs or Cursive or Vim or Spacemacs or anything else? Come on out and we'll help.

Considering it's the day before Thanksgiving I'm not expecting a huge turnout, but despite that I want to make sure we do something useful. In the spirit of people distributing themselves all over the place for the holidays I thought it would be appropriate to dig into the core distribution functionality in Elixir provided on the back of Distributed Erlang.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided. There will also be small desk fodder prizes for the winning team.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to my friends Jeff Weiss, Russell Mull and Puppet Labs, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

This month Lance Albertson (Director of OSU's Open Source Labs) will join us to talk about their adventures in deploying, maintaining and contributing to OpenStack.

Lance Albertson became OSL director in early 2013. He has managed all of the hosting activities that the OSL provides for more than 160 high-profile open source projects since joining the lab as lead systems administrator and architect in 2007. Lance’s involvement in the open source community began in 2003, when he became a developer and package maintainer with Gentoo Linux.

It's time to check in with you, the Agile Community, again about how you would like AgilePDX to serve you. Come share your ideas for kinds and formats for events, people you'd like to hear from, learning experiences you'd like to co-create, and stories you'd like us to bring with you. This evening will be an informal pizza and beer discussion facilitated by our organizing committee to learn from you and build connections among those who show up. Come share in this possible turning point in AgilePDX's history.

Didn't make it to part I? That is ok - come along anyway! At our September meetup, we started our open-source accessibility planning guide, using Gitbooks. We defined the goal of the book as a concise guide for decision-makers in companies making software applications. We roughed out chapters and each took one (see book for details on page one of each chapter).

Our first milestone will be a chapter draft from each of us by the November meetup, when we will work on it more. Gitbooks enables anyone to write and design lovely books with as much public collaboration as they wish.

The Portland Accessibility and User Experience Meetup will address how to incorporate accessibility and universal design principles into project planning, user research, and UX evaluation. The purpose of this meet up is to host an ongoing conversation about how to design and build tools that are inclusive to the greatest number of people possible - meaning those with and without (dis)abilities.

We intend to discuss topics related to accessibility policy and regulations, incorporating people with disabilities into an iterative project lifecycle, how to conduct UX research with diverse populations, automated and manual tools for UX evaluation, building accessibility into company policy and practice, and much more!

A UX Universal and Inclusive Design meet up is timely as we see the Dept. of Justice handing down ruling after ruling requiring digital products and services to be accessible (i.e. Netflix, Redbox, Target, etc...). This meet up will provide a much needed resource for Portland based companies and individuals interested in accessibility, universal design, and inclusive design.

Join us for an evening of talks about Puppet! 

Agenda:

6:00-6:30 pm Pizza and salad (vegan, vegetarian and gluten free options)  

6:30- 7:45 pm Let's get together and talk about challenges you're experiencing using Puppet. We'll have a short lightning talk round where you can throw out problems and gather into discussion groups. Puppet SysOps engineers, Daniel Dreier and Eric Zhounes will be here to answer questions and talk through issues.

7:45-8:15 pm Plan next meeting and mingle 

Extra Details: The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of SW Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office

We've struggled a bit for the last couple months to fully tackle supervision and GenServer patterns, but we're going to stick with it until we emerge victorious, or until we reach our retry limit and permanently timeout. So, this month we'll be at it again. In fact we'll use the same premise as last month. Take a look here https://github.com/elixir-pdx/pang if you want a refresher if you were with us last month, or to get up to speed if you weren't able to make it.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided. There will also be small desk fodder prizes for the winning team.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to my friends Jeff Weiss, Russell Mull and Puppet Labs, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

Join us at Puppet Labs for a presentation by Gian Wild on how to make your mobile sites accessible. You want to make sure your desktop site is fully accessible but now it is perhaps more important to make sure your mobile site or responsive web site is fully accessible to people with with disabilities. Many people with disabilities prefer using a mobile device to the desktop. WCAG2 was written before mobile devices were ubiquitous, and there are some accessibility issues unique to the mobile format, such as lack of keyboard, lack of mouse hover and reduced screen size. Gian will be talking about the most common problems and how you can avoid them.

More about Gian Wild:

Gian Wild is the CEO of AccessibilityOz an Australian company that is expanding into the U.S. Market. Gian has worked in the accessibility industry since 1998 and consulted on the development of the first Level AAA accessible web site in Australia. She ran the accessibility consultancy PurpleTop from 2000 to 2005 and built the accessibility tool, PurpleCop. Gian Wild spent seven years on the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group and contributed to the W3C Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group and the W3C Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. She spent six years contributing to the development of WCAG2. In addition to her accessibility work, Gian is often asked to judge the accessibility aspect of web awards, having previously judged the Web Directions McFarlane Award, been the Accessibility Judge for FullCodePress (build a web site in a day) twice and has been the Accessibility Judge for the Australian Web Awards three years running.

Soft drinks provided by Puppet Labs.

The Portland Accessibility and User Experience Meetup will address how to incorporate accessibility and universal design principles into project planning, user research, and UX evaluation. The purpose of this meet up is to host an ongoing conversation about how to design and build tools that are inclusive to the greatest number of people possible - meaning those with and without (dis)abilities.

We intend to discuss topics related to accessibility policy and regulations, incorporating people with disabilities into an iterative project lifecycle, how to conduct UX research with diverse populations, automated and manual tools for UX evaluation, building accessibility into company policy and practice, and much more!

A UX Universal and Inclusive Design meet up is timely as we see the Dept. of Justice handing down ruling after ruling requiring digital products and services to be accessible (i.e. Netflix, Redbox, Target, etc...). This meet up will provide a much needed resource for Portland based companies and individuals interested in accessibility, universal design, and inclusive design.

Matthew Mayer shares a field guide for how to get a delivery team started down the path to agile development.

A slightly more technical focus than the usual AgilePDX fare, this talk provides guidance to take a team from traditional to an agile-enabled one, providing business value to customers faster. Aimed at agile coaches, manager and technical managers, it provides guidelines, stories and other tools to help enable teams to implement agile in their environment.

Culture changes, patterns and anti-patterns are covered, giving a holistic approach to helping a delivery team reach their potential.

Didn't make it to part I? That is ok - come along anyway! At our September meetup, we started our open-source accessibility planning guide, using Gitbooks. We defined the goal of the book as a concise guide for decision-makers in companies making software applications. We roughed out chapters and each took one (see book for details on page one of each chapter).

Our first milestone will be a chapter draft from each of us by the November meetup, when we will work on it more. Gitbooks enables anyone to write and design lovely books with as much public collaboration as they wish.

This September we will host speakers from three leading open source SDN solutions that work beautifully with OpenStack - Midonet, Akanda and OpenDaylight

Each speaker will get a little time to cover their platform architecture, followed by a moderated panel discussion including questions from attendees.

Join us for a Lean Coffee discussion about Agile beyond the frameworks. We'll start with some definition of topic boundaries then jump right into Lean Coffee discussion.

Following up on the topics that emerged among attendees at the “State of Agile” discussion at Puppet Labs gathering on 6/17, we’ll dig into what we think it means to be Agile disregarding the constraints and supports of the three most common frameworks currently in use. In some quarters, the term “agile” is being deprecated in favor of “nimble;” in others, the term “business agility” is increasingly favored. The case was made on 6/17 that Agile as we know it doesn’t speak to the needs of the enterprise outside of IT or engineering, and, especially, senior business leaders do not show up as what we often think of as agilists.

So, what’s under Scrum, XP, and Kanban? What about the manifesto and principles can we grasp as tools to operationalize agility wherever we are—without spouting Scrumese or Agile cuteness. How do we both grow ourselves as agilists and as a community and support our colleagues toward a more mature grasp of Agile and Lean. Or, is Agile passe and do only the consultants and behemoth enterprises not know that, yet?

Pizza and pop provided by PNSQC and beer provided by Puppet Labs, as usual.

Looking forward to seeing you all soon! Note: we'll meet one week later than normal due to Labor Day. Enjoy your long weekend!

• 6:00-6:30 pm Pizza and salad (vegan, vegetarian and gluten free options)
• 6:30 - 7:15 pm Are you on Windows? Want to develop for Puppet Modules? This talk will cover how to get up and running with developing Puppet on Windows, include IDE and Ruby setup - Travis Fields, Puppet Labs Engineer
• 7:15-7:45 pm Puppet Community CI service. This is a service, outside of Travis, that runs testing for all Puppet modules in the puppet-community organization. You can see it live at http://ci.puppet.community and it's source code is on GitHub if you would like to contribute - Spencer Krum, Automation Engineer
• 7:45-8:15 pm Plan next meeting and mingle

Extra Details: The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of SW Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office

Clojure's test.check library for generative testing is something that a lot of people talk about, but relatively few actually use. Lots of people, myself included, find that test.check's Haskell origins make it more than a bit alienating at first, and dealing with that unfamiliarity while adopting a new testing paradigm is a lot to ask.

In this short talk, I'll discuss ways of approaching generative testing in Clojure and show how generators are composed of small, simple parts. I'll also demonstrate my own library based on test.check, jen, which makes it even easier to write generators for typical Clojure data types.

Bio: Justin Holguín is a full-time Clojure developer at Puppet Labs who enjoys experimenting with new ways to write, find, and fix bugs.

Unlicensed Elixir Distribution: the Isreference Pusch Story

We safely escaped the wonders and horrors of metaprogramming with Elixir Macros last month.

This month we'll be looking at another core feature of Elixir that comes from its Erlang underpinnings... Distributed applications/systems. We'll take a look at some of the patterns we've used in past meetups and how we can rework and refactor them to run efficiently on multiple machines rather than just a single host.

Side note: Afterward there will also be a small karaoke caravan to Chopsticks on E Burnside to get in a few last crowd-pleasers before Chopsticks closes for good.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided. There will also be small desk fodder prizes for the winning team.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to my friends Jeff Weiss, Russell Mull and Puppet Labs, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

There is no need to step back into the closet at work in order to save your job or appease your bigoted co-workers or employer. Learn how to take a few simple steps and to cleverly protect your legal rights while working so if you are harassed, discriminated against, passed over for jobs or promotions, you can laugh and be gay all the way to the bank.

We've spent a little time over the last few sessions covering some basics of OTP (the Open Telecom Platform). The standard library and set of patterns that Elixir inherits from Erlang.

This time around we'll dive into something a bit more unique and powerful about Elixir itself. Macros! Macros, macros everywhere.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided. There will also be small desk fodder prizes for the winning team.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to my friends Jeff Weiss, Russell Mull and Puppet Labs, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

Looking forward to seeing you all on Monday!

We'll have Puppet Labs engineer, Daniel Dreier here to chat about a project that he's been working on.

Other folks - we'd love to see what you're doing with Puppet, so feel free to step up at the meeting and show us! It's a great chance to practice any talks that you're working or demo what you're working on - any length talk accepted :-)!

• 6:00-6:30 pm Pizza and salad (vegan, vegetarian and gluten free options)
• 6:30 -7:00 pm Demo of new Certificate Autosign Tooling, Daniel Dreier, Puppet Labs
• 7:00 -7:20 pm Managing Puppet Environments and Canary Testing in PE
• 7:15 -7:45 pm Open Discussion/talks
• 7:45 - 8:15 pm Plan next meeting and mingle

Extra Details: The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of SW Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office.

WOMEN'S HACKATHON HOSTED BY NIKE & PUPPET LABS

Web designers and developers of all levels are invited to work on a fun project in small teams at this creative and collaborative coding event for women in tech. The event is open to the public. T-shirts, prizes, and food will be provided.

This will be our biggest meetup yet! We will be celebrating OpenStack's 5th birthday (they grow up so quick!), and our guest speaker will be Mike Perez of Datera - current Cinder PTL! We will eat cake and shoot off fireworks while Mike talks all about block storage; this is going to be a meetup to remember!

A little more about our honored guest:

Mike Perez has been an active contributor to the OpenStack project since 2010, and is the Program Technical Lead for the OpenStack block storage project Cinder. Mike is a senior developer for Datera, based in Mountain View, California. Prior to this, he was a senior developer at DreamHost, a Web hosting provider based in Los Angeles.

Register here: http://www.meetup.com/Navigate-IT-a-Skills-Lab-for-Portland-Women-in-Tech/events/223250275/

Ayla Lewis, the Director of Operations at Happy Brain Science is going to lead us in an informative StrengthsFinder session.

In this session we will focus on three strengths areas: - Examining your beliefs about strengths - Discovering your strengths and the strengths of your team - Applying your strengths to increase productivity, creativity and engagement.

In Examine Your Beliefs you will learn about the three strengths myths, as well as their opposing truths. This will help you to modify your beliefs about strengths in ways that will benefit you and your team.

In Discover Strengths, you will participate in a guided self-exploration of your own strengths, weaknesses, and learned behaviors. You will also learn strategies for identifying strengths in others.

In the final portion of the workshop, Act on Strengths, you will learn immediately actionable tips, strategies and steps for using more of your strengths, and the strengths of your team, everyday on the job.

6:00-6:30 food and networking 6:30-8:00 presentation and discussion

This meeting is for women only - Allies please join us for the Sept 17 - Champagne Brunch Launch with Allies

Looking forward to seeing you all soon!

We'll have Puppet Labs engineer, Adrien Thebo, here to chat about r10k.

Other folks - we'd love to see what you're doing with Puppet, so feel free to step up at the meeting and show us! It's a great chance to practice any talks that you're working or demo what you're working on - any length talk accepted :-)!

• 6:00-6:30 pm Pizza and salad (vegan, vegetarian and gluten free options)
• 6:30 - 7:15 pm The Past, Present, and Future of r10k, Adrien Thebo, Puppet Labs
• 7:15 - 7:45 pm Open discussion
• 7:45-8:15 Plan next meeting and mingle

Extra Details: The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of SW Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office.

Intersted in learning more about Clojure? Have questions or need help with a set up, library or Clojure/Functional Programming concept?

Come by the Office Hours meeting this month.

Bring any questions you may have or topics on your mind and we'll see how others can help.

Last time we looked at Supervisor hierarchies, and unintentionally on my part almost everyone picked up the GenServer behavior as a component of their solution. Damnable misleading documentation! However that prompted a further conversation about GenServers and other components of OTP (the Open Telecom Platform). In the spirit of learning and disambiguating things we'll take a deeper look at some of these architectural patterns in Elixir and how they can help us better organize our projects and design better systems.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided. There will also be small desk fodder prizes for the winning team.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to my friends Jeff Weiss and Puppet Labs, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

In June our two presentations will again have something for everyone!

Greg Haynes will talk about diskimage-builder, a project that started off as a tool for OpenStack deployments and has since become a highly efficient general purpose image building utility.

Following that, Christopher Aedo will demonstrate how to use those images with Heat or Murano to deploy apps on OpenStack.

Frank D'Andrea and John Halberstadt will be discussing the 9th annual State of Agile survey.

This survey is the largest, broadest and most consistent annual public survey on agile adoption internationally. It provides an interesting look into which types of organizations are using agile and lean approaches, why, what is working for them and what is not. Everything from usage of specific frameworks and methodologies, to team practices to measurement techniques to software tools, and more, are part of this survey.

More than just a review of this survey, Frank and John will lead the dialogue - and potentially a friendly debate - with the Agile PDX audience to suggest "bigger picture" learnings and cautionary tales, as well as to collaborate on how those of us in the agile community can use this information to help within our organizations to further our processes and practices.

John Halberstadt is a Managing Agile Consultant, Coach and Trainer for LitheSpeed, an Agile and Lean-focused training and consulting organization. John has 20 years of diverse, senior-level technology leadership and experience throughout the SDLC, having led, grown and built teams including software engineers, quality assurance, product, program and project management, user experience and IT operations. John is a self-described "excessively pragmatic, lowercase 'a' agilist". He is a firm believer in agile's founding philosophy, principles and its potential to help build happy teams who deliver exceptional products.

Frank D’Andrea, a veteran of multiple Tech Ignite’s and the TAO Agile Smackdown is also Vice President of Software and Business Development at DADO Labs, connects clients, their brands, and their products to the Internet of Things (IoT). DADO’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides best-in-class hardware and software solutions for white-label, turn-key solution for a number of Internet of Things (IoT) clients whose products will be appearing in market over the next 6-12 months. He listens to clients and asks them thoughtful questions regarding direct product management, product direction, and product roadmap across social, mobile, SaaS, cloud, BigData in the IoT space, and identify how DADO can achieve their goals. He leads an experienced, multi-faceted engineering organization with both a software development team and product team of award-winning professionals.

Debugging Impostor Syndrome

Navigate IT is a monthly meetup and skills lab for women in tech.

As a woman in tech, you’re a minority in a culture that desperately needs your voice but often won’t listen. Navigate IT was created to change that! We are creating a supportive community for learning and practicing the skills that get you recognized in your workplace without taking on more work.

We are kicking it off on June 16th with the popular break-out session “Debugging Impostor Syndrome” from the ACT-W conferences in both Portland and Seattle. Impostor Syndrome holds many people back in their careers and affects women more than men. Come learn how to debug your impostor syndrome and get people to take you seriously. In this dynamic and interactive workshop you will:

• Understand the science behind Impostor Syndrome and why it affects women more than men.
• Get mind-body tools to overcome Impostor Syndrome.
• Have the opportunity to join an “Impostor No More” Challenge with other women in tech.

Beverages and refreshments provided

Registration $10 at http://meetu.ps/2JShXG

We're going to have two talks this month. First Russell Mull will present:

Logic Programming from the Inside Out

Description: Learn about the guts of miniKanren and core.logic, obtaining a deeper understanding of the fundamental truths of logic programming. (And also some neat functional programming tricks)

Then I'll lead a workshop on:

Single Page Apps with ClojureScript, Figwheel, Reagent, etc.

Description: We'll do a quick high-level workshop to introduce using ClojureScript with Reagent to create a very simple web app. I'll show a work flow using Figwheel and we'll discuss some architectural decisions as time allows.

If you've been meaning to look into ClojureScript this is a great way to start and if you're experienced come and share your thoughts and help others.

Bring your laptop with leinengen installed or team up with others at the meeting.

Until now we haven't focused much at all on a huge part of what makes Elixir great... seamless access to Erlang OTP. OTP, or Open Telecom Platform, is a set of frameworks and tools that make it relatively easy to build robust, fault-tolerant, and scalable applications. In this Elixir Games we're going to focus specifically on the Supervisor. Well-defined supervision strategies are the bedrock of all exceptional Elixir software (Erlang and LFE too).

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided. There will also be small desk fodder prizes for the winning team.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Special thanks to my friends Russell Mull, Jeff Weiss and Puppet Labs, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

Please join us!

For those of you who are curious about Puppet Server and Passenger, Jeff McCune, engineer on the Puppet Server development team, will be here to answer your questions and we'll have a Jordan Olshevski, Puppet Labs Professional Services Engineer, to chat about scaling your Puppet infrastructure. Corey Osman will show us how he uses Docker for Module Development.

Other folks - we'd love to see what you're doing with Puppet, so feel free to step up at the meeting and show us! It's a great chance to practice any talks that you're working or demo what you're working on - any length talk accepted :-)!

• 6:00-6:30 pm Pizza and salad (vegan, vegetarian and gluten free options)
• 6:30 - 7:15 pm How to scale an orthodox Puppet infrastructure - Jordan Olshevski, Puppet Labs
• 7:15 - 7:45 pm Q & A on Passenger and Puppet Server with Jeff McCune, Puppet Labs
• 7:45-8:10pm Leveraging Docker for Puppet Module Development - Corey Osman
• 8:10-8:15 pm Plan next meeting and mingle

This month we're teaming up with Pyladies!

Presentations: [put presentations here]

Amy Boyle - Open source tools for scientific research

ATTENDANCE NOTES

Our goal is to support local women hackers (and aspiring hackers) by providing a safe, welcoming environment in which you can connect with and learn from each other.

Women Who Hack is a women-focused group. For this meeting all self-identified women and genderqueer persons are invited to attend and participate, and men are welcome as the guest of a female participant.

Please, no fragrances (perfumes, scented lotions, etc.), to make our meetings welcoming to those with chemical sensitivities.

In today's volatile business environment, it's vitally important to create an Agile environment that enables the benefits realization of our Agile development practices and engages and empowers each of us with the autonomy to create value and pursue mastery. Many of our organizations HR processes and people management systems are doing the exact opposite and creating an enterprise blocker to effective agile adoption and increasing individuals frustration, disengagement and attrition.

This calls for new ways of thinking and new ways of approaching performance and people management.

Please join us for an interactive evening where we will review some drivers and catalysts behind some new performance management practices emerging from organizations like Adobe and Microsoft and explore new evidence from the field of neuroscience as well as share ideas on how we can build a case for change in our organizations. We'll explore practical approaches as well as some simple tools for crafting our personal career strategy and creating support structures with career circles.

Pat Reed is an experienced Agile executive, coach, transformational leader and trainer with proven success transforming large Agile organizations and developing world class Business Agility processes and practices. Pat has deep domain expertise in enterprise Agile Accounting, PMO, Portfolio Management, Dev Ops, Change, Compliance, Performance Management and Adaptive career processes and practices. She has a proven track record of leading and coaching teams that have transformed Fortune 500 companies. Pat excels in leveraging cutting edge technology, delivery and project management methods to solve challenging business problems with impressive results across a wide range of industries including her work as Executive Director for 15 years at the Walt Disney Company, 5 years at Universal Studios / GE and 8 years at Gap Inc. Pat is passionate about creating healthy, high performing and learning teams. She designed, co-created and currently teaches the Agile Management Certificate program for UC Berkeley extension and has over 30 years of experience in teaching technical and business process improvement at the undergraduate, graduate and extension level as an adjunct professor. She is a popular speaker with numerous keynotes and Agile Conference sessions and workshops; and co-founded the Agile Alliance Executive Forum with Jim Highsmith. Pat is equally passionate about advancing agile practices and serves at the PMI Agile Community of Practice Council Leader with over 32,000 global members; and as a Director on the Agile Alliance Board where she directs the Agile Accounting Program and co-developed the Agile Alliance Value Model. Pat graduated with honors from the University of Illinois with a B.S. in Behavioral and Clinical Psychology and an MBA from Woodbury University and is authoring a book on "Making Value Visible" and "Making Sense of Agile Accounting".

Let's discuss the latest in Clojure and what we've learned and experienced at ClojureWest.

We'll have a series of short presentations from members so be sure to think about what you'd like to share and let me know.

Thanks.

Can you build a data processing pipeline that might one day help save humanity? For this next meetup we'll be looking at one of Elixir's features that sets it distinctly apart from its older Erlang sibling.... the Pipeline Operator.

In the previous two Elixir Games PDX meetups we've looked at how to solve some simple problems in a functional programming style, and we've also taken a look at Elixir's concurrency and parallelism paradigm. We'll be partially combining some of those principles and practices to mine some critical data.

For the newcomers, the "Games" format is designed to create a bit of friendly competition and is accessible for all ranges of experience; beginners and pros alike.

Early in this series we'll be focusing mostly on solving problems in a functional paradigm, and as the series continues over time we'll move more and more toward Elixir's differentiators; Erlang interop, hygienic macros, & OTP patterns.

If all that read like gibberish to you, don't worry you don't have to know any of that jargon, and by the time you do everything will already make sense. Because we'll introduce ideas and concepts in a way that will help you understand those things conceptually before you ever need a weird name for them.

Food and drinks will be provided. There will also be small desk fodder prizes for the winning team.

Please make sure you come with a computer to work on and have Elixir pre-installed locally or in a VM and ready to go.

http://elixir-lang.org/install.html

If you'd like to take a look at the previous sessions' exercises feel free to check them out here: https://github.com/elixir-pdx/, some submitted solutions are available on non-master branches.

Special thanks to my friends Russell Mull, Jeff Weiss and Puppet Labs, ‘the leader in IT automation’, for hosting us.

Did you miss the IxDA Interaction15 conference in February? IxDA Portland is hosting a conference redux to recap the conference, share insights, and celebrate!

Get a free ticket here:
https://ixdapdx15redux.eventbrite.com

Agenda
Doors open at 6:30pm.
6:30-7pm: Snacks and drinks, sponsored by Filter Talent.
7-8:30pm: Event talks

Speakers

• This was not Liz Bacon’s first IxDA rodeo – not by a long shot. Liz does a “highly idiosyncratic” reading of the conference as a whole.
• Mike Monteiro said designers destroyed the world. Elena Moon weighs in on the size of the destruction.
• Is Big Tech missing the point with tech workers who are (or want to be) parents? Melissa Casburn reports on research by Rachel Abrams.
• UX has come a long way. Rikki Teeters discusses Leah Buley’s take on the modern UX organization.
• Leo Frishberg taught a half-day workshop on Presumptive Design. He’ll fill us in on the basics – in a bit less time.
• What happens in San Francisco? It doesn’t stay in San Francisco. Jos Vaught took notes.

Snacks and drinks are provided, thanks to our generous sponsors at Filter Talent.

This free workshop will be hosted by Puppet Labs and Simple in Portland, Oregon. This workshop is open to anyone who identifies as a woman, genderqueer, genderfluid, or genderfree regardless of gender presentation or assigned sex at birth. It is suitable for complete beginner to intermediate programmers who have no previous experience of the Clojure programming language.

In this workshop, we'll take you through building a sample app using Clojure. We'll meet up Friday night at the Simple offices in the Pearl to install all of the software you need, and then spend Saturday at the Puppet Labs offices in SW learning and writing code. There will be dinner provided at the Friday installfest, and breakfast and lunch provided at the Saturday workshop. Each participant needs to bring their own computer with fairly recent Mac, Linux or Windows installation. If you have questions about your hardware, email one of the organizers before the event!

Our first official meeting with the new user group includes something for everyone! For those new to OpenStack we'll have an intro-level presentation from HP's Spencer Krum, after which we'll get into the (API) weeds with Bernard Sanders from CloudBolt Software

Using OpenStack Nova (Spencer Krum)

In this brief talk I will talk about how I use an OpenStack cloud (HP Cloud) to boot up virtual machines for interactive testing. This workflow has replaced vagrant in my life. I will show a script I made called 'hodor' to boot vms and log into them. This is targeted at the absolute beginner and will be very basic.

Spencer Krum is an OpenStack hacker working for HP. He coordinates the PdxDevOps user group and is active in the puppet community.

Hybrid cloud and catalyzing OpenStack adoption (Bernard Sanders)

It's tough to convince people to put all their eggs in one basket, and that reluctance keeps some folks from going all-in on building an OpenStack cloud. Until they're ready, solutions providing easy access to multiple clouds can smooth that transition. Bernard Sanders (CTO at CloudBolt Software) joins us to talk about how their cloud management platform interfaces with OpenStack, and the good, bad and ugly of integrating with one of the fastest growing open source projects in history.

Prior to CloudBolt, Bernard has worked for NASA/JPL, Loudcloud, Opsware, HP, holding roles in development, systems engineering, and product management. He's a puzzle/game enthusiast, a juggler, a nordic skier, and an ex-quadrapeligic. He will answer questions about automation, riccochet robots, crater lake, spinal cord injury, and maybe even OpenStack.

Please join us for Portland's monthly Fail Talks meetup. FailPDX meets the second Monday of every month.

FailPDX was created out of direct response to a lot of the meetups and conferences that seemed to be focused on all of the good things about being part of startup and taking chances. The truth is, success is a unicorn. FailPDX was created to remind people that failure is inevitable. This group is a place where everyone can come together to listen and share their failure stories.

If you are interested in speaking at or sponsoring one of our events, please email [email protected].

Schedule:

6:00 PM: Beer and Networking
6:30 PM: First Speaker and Discussion (Mat Ellis, Founder & CEO of Cloudability)
6:45 PM: Second Speaker and Discussion (TBD)
7:15 PM: Clear out and head over to Rock Bottom Brewery for Crappy Hour!

This month we have duelling Howards! Two Howards enter, one Howard leaves.

First Howard Abrams will give us a short talk on

1) How to Host a Mini Workshop

and then

2) A Mini workshop on Yesql

Then Howard M. Lewis Ship will present 3) Exceptional Feedback in Clojure

You're in the flow: writing code, experimenting in the REPL, running tests ... and then it happens: an exception. Clojure approaches a kind of ideal coding environment, right up until something goes wrong. Clojure stack traces are notoriously challenging: hard to read, lots of noise, and limited in context. Fortunately, we have the tools to fix this! We'll describe Pretty: a library that presents exceptions ordered and formatted for readability, and Tracker: a library to provide context to exceptions that goes beyond the stack trace.

4) Sane, smart, fast, Clojure web services with Rook Rook (the name is a play on Bishop) is a library that fits into Ring as a straight-forward, easy way to build web services. In essence, Rook is a mapping between web resources and specific Clojure namespaces.Rook leverages conventions, metadata, and a few strong opinions to make it fast and easy to build well structured web services, following the REST pattern ... and goes beyond just request dispatching, providing some much needed infrastructure that helps you build code that is concise, efficient, testable, and maintainable..

OpenStack Jumpstart - Getting up to speed in OpenStack can be challenging. Whether you're just getting involved or trying to find the deepest details on a given project, where to start is not obvious. Vern Hart (Director of Delivery at Solinea) will cover the landscape of training options available, as well providing a roundup of the best sources of OpenStack information out there. He'll also give some guidance on interacting with the community and how best to leverage the knowledge of the thousands of brilliant developers available via mailing list or IRC.

Getting up to speed in OpenStack can be challenging. Whether you're just getting involved or trying to find the deepest details on a given project, where to start is not obvious. Vern Hart (Director of Delivery at Solinea) will cover the landscape of training options available, as well providing a roundup of the best sources of OpenStack information out there. He'll also give some guidance on interacting with the community and how best to leverage the knowledge of the thousands of brilliant developers available via mailing list or IRC.

Vern Hart is the Director of Delivery at Solinea. He is a proven consultant specializing in open infrastructure and helping customers adopting new infrastructure architectures and solutions. Vern has over 20 years of systems administration experience. Prior to Solinea, He was CTO at three separate companies including his own which eventually merged with their largest competitor. Most recently Vern was Director of Support Operations and Training at Morphlabs where he was instrumental in the migration of Morphlabs onto OpenStack from Eucalyptus. He has proven success in both systems development and engineering roles.

Dinner & drinks provided.

Please note our gracious hosts code of conduct: https://docs.puppetlabs.com/community/community_guidelines.html#event-code-of-conduct

Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches know the critical importance of fostering a continuous improvement ethos within our teams and we have a number of practices that we implement to that end. But often times we find that this only allows our teams to grow to a local optimum, as they are quickly impeded by the organization they work within, and it's lack of mature inspect and adapt mechanisms. How do we as front line coaches or managers effectively influence the organization around us to thrash this impediment for our teams?

This interactive talk will explore the peaks and pitfalls of coaching an organization towards continuous improvement, sharing real world examples of goal setting, alignment, and accountability mechanisms. We will also discuss effective and ineffective ways to measure an organization, and finally we will identify where are we likely to run into resistance and how it can be overcome.

Bio: For the past two years Andy Whaples and his merry band of acronyms (CSP, CSM, PMI-ACP, SPC, PMP, MBA) have been helping Tripwire adopt and master Agile Practices within it's software development organization. Before Tripwire, Andy experienced the many challenges of large scale software development at AT&T and as a consultant for Accenture. These challenges led him to embrace Agile and Lean's focus on delivering incremental customer value through highly motivated, supported and performing teams of crafts-men and women. His focus of late has been on extending his experience in building continuously improving teams to influencing the overall organization in which they work.

We will be discussing some different graph and network algorithms and exploring how best to implement them in Clojure. Focus will be on functionality, efficiency and generalizability. And joy.

Bio: Ryan Spangler is currently Lead Developer at Little Bird, a social network analysis software startup in Portland OR. He has been contributing to open source Clojure for going on 4 years now, and he has been a lisp enthusiast in some form or another since he saw his first parenthesis.

We meet on the 1st Monday of every month. All are invited to join!

Agenda for March 2nd:

• 6 - 6:30pm: Eat pizza and chat with other Puppet users
• 6:30 - 7:15: "How Fuel Uses Puppet to Deploy OpenStack" - Christopher Aedo, Mirantis
• 7:15 - 8:00 "Advanced Metrics in PE Puppet Server" - Chris Price, Puppet Labs
• 8:00 - 8:15 Plan next meeting and mingle

"How Fuel Uses Puppet to Deploy OpenStack" - Christopher Aedo

Master or masterless, sequencing solutions, giant catalogs, getting in sync with upstream community manifests, and more - Christopher Aedo (from Mirantis) will talk about the lessons learned while building Fuel, the open source OpenStack deployment and management tool.

"Advanced Metrics in PE Puppet Server" - Chris Price

In this talk we take a look at some of the advanced metrics that are tracked inside of Puppet Server in Puppet Enterprise. We'll look at some settings, tools, and scripts that you can use to get detailed information about how your server is performing, what operations are taking the most CPU time, etc. We'll also get a sneak peak at some of the improvements that will be coming in a new PE release in the very near future.

Get in touch with meg@ puppetlabs.com if you're interested in talking (even briefly!) about how you're using Puppet. Also, let us know if you'd like to be on the schedule next month! You don't need to be an expert to speak - we love to hear about what folks are doing with Puppet.

If you have an idea for what you would like to see presented, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group.

Meat, veggie, gluten-free, and vegan pizza will be available. The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office.

The smallest unit of work in an Agile organization is produced by the team. Creating an environment of communication and collaboration in which highly productive teams emerge is not trivial, however. This talk takes a closer look at what it means to be on an Agile team. It outlines concrete behaviors, techniques and practices to help groups deal with transitioning from siloed, functional teams and organizations to becoming cross-functional, high performing teams.

Collin Fagan is a Technical Coach with the Agile Transformation Team at Intel Security . Prior to joining Intel, Collin was a Lead Engineer at Nokia in the Here maps division. Collin holds a BS in Computer Science from the Rochester Institute of Technology and is an avid collector of fine guitars.

Docker and Linux Containers are the next generation of technology for developers and sysadmins.

Let's get together to discuss all things container related:

• Docker
• Rocket
• CoreOS
• etc.

The evening will include presentations about container projects by folks in the area. Presentations are TBD still (We'll post updates here), and if you have a presentation that you'd like to make, please feel free to contact us to let us know!

Food and drink (alcoholic and non) will be provided.

FailPDX was created out of direct response to a lot of the meetups and conferences that seemed to be focused on all of the good things about being part of startup and taking chances. The truth is, success is a unicorn. FailPDX was created to remind people that failure is inevitable. This group is a place where everyone can come together to listen and share their failure stories.

Come talk and ask/answer questions about Clojure ClojureScript and related topics.

Successful strategies for the self-organizing Clojure meetup:

http://blog.factual.com/clojure-office-hours

Please also review the Puppet Code of Conduct. As we reside in their space, we abide by their rules.

https://docs.puppetlabs.com/community/community_guidelines.html#event-code-of-conduct

We meet on the 1st Monday of every month. Join us on February 2nd! Remember we meet at the new Puppet office in downtown Portland.

This month at the Portland Puppet User Group, Kylo Ginsberg, software engineer at Puppet Labs, will be talking about where our client side technology is going titled "Puppet Client: Puppet 4 and Beyond". Daryll DeCoster, front end engineer at Puppet Labs, will talk about prototyping at Puppet and Hailee Kenney, software engineer at Puppet Labs, will be demoing Puppet Strings, our new doc tool. Should be an excellent meeting!

Agenda for February 2nd:

• 6:00 - 6:30: Eat pizza / salads and talk to other Puppet users
• 6:30 - 7:15: Puppet Client: Puppet 4 and Beyond - Kylo Ginsberg
• 7:15 - 7:45: Prototyping at Puppet - Daryll DeCoster
• 7:45 - 8:00 Puppet Strings demo (the new doc tool) - Hailee Kenney
• 8:00 - 8:15: Plan next agenda

Get in touch with meg@ puppetlabs.com if you're interested in talking (even briefly!) about how you're using Puppet. Also, let us know if you'd like to be on the schedule next month! You don't need to be an expert to speak - we love to hear about what folks are doing with Puppet.

If you have an idea for what you would like to see presented, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group.

Meat, veggie, gluten-free, and vegan pizza will be available. The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office.

We will have two talks tonight:

Scott Brinkmeyer will talk about how code of different types flows through his organization.

Spencer Krum will give a practice version of his talk 'Config managment versus Golden Images' which will be presented at Config Mgmt Camp in Belgium.

pdxdevops is a Portland, Oregon user group that explores the glorious intersection of software development and systems operations, and shares practical advice on working effectively in an era of agile infrastructure, server automation and cloud computing. The group welcomes participants interested in any related products, technologies and methodologies. The group has been meeting regularly since August 2010 for presentations, demos and discussions applicable to all skill levels, from newbies and experts. Every month 15-35 people come together to share their knowledge, projects and enthusiasm for devops – join us!

This is a meetup for community managers and leaders who are interested in discussion about all topics related to nurturing and running online communities. This month is simply a short meeting w/o a presentation!

Agenda for January

• 6:00 - 7:00 - Chat about community; discussion; support :)

Interested in giving a short talk or presentation on a topic related to community management? Email [masked]. We meet most months and are always looking for speakers.

The market environment today is challenging: Teams need to deliver working, high-quality code in an increasingly short time frame. We hear echoes of this in leadership’s implorations to “go faster”. To succeed, engineering teams need the flexibility to alter our course multiple times during product development. The practices to accomplish this are well-established, yet teams continually encounter difficulty changing their behavior. Matt will discuss the challenges a team faces in adopting new techniques, and an approach for achieving sustained excellence.

Matt Plavcan is a Technical Practices Coach with the Intel Emergent Systems and Coaching team. He is a 17-year Intel veteran; his previous efforts include validation of the Pentium 4 and Core microprocessors and teaching Intel architecture at the University of Illinois. Matt is the founder of the Code Dojo and Coderetreat program at Intel, which uses dedicated practice to hone professional programming skills. He runs similar events for the Portland programming community.

This month, Aashish Vaidya will be reprising his well attended PNSQC 2014 talk and providing additional content his time slot at the conference did not allow him to cover.

Organizations, large and small, that are experimenting and succeeding in using agile practices at team level, face their next challenge in scaling these practices across the enterprise. This challenge can come from expanding pilot programs from handful of teams to more teams; or, it comes from agile teams working with non-agile parts of the organization. The process inevitably creates confusion as teams employing different methods interface with each other. Are there large scale practices that work in easing the interaction between agile teams, and other non-agile, semi-agile business units? While scaling, can an organization get too process heavy and risk losing the original intent of transitioning to agile practices? There are primarily three scaling frameworks that try to address scaling agile practices: Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Each of these frameworks draws from variety of agile and lean practices. However, an organization’s context matters most in deciding whether to embrace particular framework or only select practices to obtain desired results. In most cases, an organization has to make informed, pragmatic choices and experiment with various practices.

Cambia Health Solutions has for over three years rolled out Scrum and other agile practices across more than 40 development oriented teams. For Cambia, scaling practices, articulated in scaling frameworks, such as enterprise-wide synchronized Sprints, multi-program Quarterly Release Planning, Scrum of Scrums and Communities of Practices, have been effective in organizing our work. Many of these practices can prove useful not only to larger, but also to smaller ones, who are looking to improve and refine their adaption of agile practices.

Aashish Vaidya is a Staff Consultant at Cambia Health Solutions, parent company of The Regence Group, a not-for-profit, Health Insurance Company. He works on large portfolio projects, and serves as an internal Agile and Quality coach. He is a founding member of Cambia’s Enterprise Transition Community, Agile Best Practices Exchange and the Software Quality Best Practices Exchange. Aashish has over 20+ years of industry experience working in various leadership and management positions for companies such as Compaq, Intel, Kronos Incorporation, and other IT companies. Aashish has been a presenter and a panelist for Technology Association of Oregon, AgilePDX, RoseCity SPIN and PNSQC. He has been practicing Agile for over 7 years and holds Scrum Practitioner and ScrumMaster certifications. He is a co-author of 2 articles on AgileAtlas.org on Scrum common practices and he maintains an infrequent blog on Agile and Management topics at agilesutra.wordpress.com. Aashish holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University.

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group.

Important note: This group meets on the 1st Monday of every month. Because of Thanksgiving, we pushed this meeting out an extra week.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

Agenda for December 8

• 6:00 - 6:30: Eat pizza / salads, talk to other Puppet users
• 6:30 - 7:15 "The Module Spectrum" - Spencer Krum, HP
• 7:15 - 7:40 "Proof-of-concept on a lightweight approach to Puppet orchestration" - Daniel Dreier
• 7:40 - 8:00 Surprise talk or a discussion
• 8:00 - 8:15: Plan next agenda & chat

If you have an idea for what you would like to see or if you want to volunteer to present a talk, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

This is a meetup for community managers and leaders who are interested in discussion about all topics related to nurturing and running online communities. We will be meeting on the fourth Thursday of most months at Puppet Labs! 

Agenda for November:

• 6:00 - 6:30 -- Welcome and introductions 

• 6:30 - 7:30 -- Discussion on metrics and measuring community growth and success (or failure). If you feel comfortable presenting to the group your experiences with this, we'd love to hear from you!

We understand that not everyone can make it from work to a meetup by 6pm, so please keep in mind that presentations don't start until 6:30, and you're welcome to drop by at any point during the meeting. We're a small, informal group!

Interested in giving a short talk or presentation on a topic related to community management? Email [email protected]. We meet most months and are always looking for speakers.

We'll have non-alcoholic beverages and a few light snacks available.

As organizations expand agility into the enterprise it quickly becomes clear that traditional approaches such as Scrum of Scrums and Release Trains are not sufficient. How do you move away from a fixed financial budget to create a lean and Agile product portfolio? Can you empower self-organizing teams when individually-focused Management By Objectives (MBOs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) rule the way the organizations measure progress?

Beyond Budgeting is a way of thinking that aligns with Agile and provides enterprises with the language, subject matter context and concrete detail necessary to address these dilemmas and complement the Agile mindset found in software and product development.

Created as part of Agile Alliance's "Supporting Agile Adoption" workshop, this talk will define Beyond Budgeting, highlight how it aligns with Agile as well as describe where it differs and propose an approach to taking advantage of both lines of thinking to create a holistic approach to enterprise agility.

Bio: Jorgen Hesselberg is the Director of Agile Enterprise Transformation at Intel Security. He has more than fifteen years of experience in creating organizational environments that generate end-to-end business value and is passionate about making the world a better place to work through agile, Lean and complex systems thinking. Prior to Intel Security, Jorgen was heading the enterprise transformation efforts at NAVTEQ, Nokia and Nokia Xpress. He is a frequent speaker at international conferences, author of several white papers and the Director of Agile Alliance’s Supporting Agile Adoption program.

We're mixing things up this month :) This next Meetup will be hosted at the swanky Puppet Labs office, before their big move next month!

RSVPs will open on September 29th and you DO need to RSVP to attend this event. Please note that this will be a dry meetup: no alcohol in the Puppet space. We'll have our usual food and non-alcoholic beverages though, and as a consollation, dessert :)

Schedule

6:30pm - 7:00pm: Check-In, Networking and Food 
7:00pm - 7:30pm: Testing an Ember App, from the Guides to the Real World, by Lindsey Smith
7:30pm - 7:40pm: Break 
7:40pm - 8:10pm: TBD, Tim Woods
8:10pm - 8:40pm: Networking

Program

Testing an Ember App, from the Guides to the Real World, by Lindsey Smith

Lindsey's talk will run through Ember's testing utilities and ember-qunit to get the basics of testing. Next, he'll discover and work through some pain points that surface when testing a real Ember application.

Second talk TBA.

Sponsors

Puppet Labs

HealthSparq

Join us for the next Docker Portland Meetup! This event will be hosted by Puppet Labs.  

Schedule

6:00 to 6:30 Social / Food & Drinks

6:30 to 6:45 "Automating Docker Containers with Puppet" by Kylo Ginsberg of Puppet Labs

6:45 to 7:00  "How to use Docker as a Presentation Tool" by Britt Gresham of Puppet Labs

7:00 to 7:15 "Linking containers: a look under the hood" by Brandon Sanders of Serene Machine

7:15 to 7:30 Lightning Talk/Demo 

7:30 to 8:00 Social / Food & Drinks 

If you are interested in giving a lightning talk, please contact us at [gone now]

We look forward to seeing you there! Please see the Event Code of Conduct at Puppet Labs here: https://docs.puppetlabs.com/community/community_guidelines.html#event-code-of-conduct

About Docker

Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. Consisting of Docker Engine, a portable, lightweight runtime and packaging tool, and Docker Hub, a cloud service for sharing applications and automating workflows, Docker enables apps to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between development, QA, and production environments. Read more

Puppet Labs, based in Portland, Oregon, develops automation software that frees IT professionals from mundane tasks, giving them time to develop innovative technology strategies that help their companies grow. 

Flagship product Puppet Enterprise provides a quick and easy way for system administrators to manage computing, networking and storage needs, without having to know how to install packages, create users, mount filesystems, or change a user’s password on every operating system out there. Puppet Enterprise allows the sysadmin to concentrate on providing the resources a business needs, when it needs them. Read more

This month Rian van der Merwe will be giving a talk entitled "Getting back into the (right) deliverables business"

I feel a little bad for the static wireframe. It's had a bad year. In fact, UX deliverables in general have had a bad couple of years. There's a growing skepticism about the value of Personas and other traditional UX artefacts, as well as an onslaught of "get out of the deliverables business" refrains from Lean methodologies.

All of this led me to lots of introspection about deliverables, and if it’s actually possible to create deliverables that are useful to help create better products.

In this talk I’ll tell our story. How we stripped down all our deliverables to almost nothing, and then started building it all up again slowly by asking ourselves, “What is absolutely necessary for us to do a great job?” I’ll discuss some of the deliverables we’ve since created (such as Expanded Journey Maps and Content Slice Diagrams), how they’re useful to us, and how you might be able to use them in your design process as well.

We’ve come to realise that not all UX deliverables are bad. Only bad deliverables are bad.

About Rian

Rian is passionate about designing and building software that people love to use. After spending several years working in Silicon Valley, he is currently Director of User Experience at consultancy Flow Interactive in South Africa. He also writes regularly about design, technology, and software development for Smashing Magazine and his own site, Elezea.

Art of Articulation with Lee Fain, Electrolux

Products, services and technology have a political gauntlet to conquer before they make their first appearance in the marketplace. Often the first line of defense in a corporate environment is the internal audience and invested key stakeholders.

Developing the solution is not enough. How you communicate the idea is just as important as the solution itself. Communicating your approach at the right time with the right mediums, and using the right level of fidelity to motivate the audience into action is an art. One needs to be an effective persuader. One needs to be a provocateur.

About the Speaker Lee Fain (@houseoffain) leverages the process of design provocation to develop compelling stories of technology while building deeper relationships within 3M’s culture of innovation. He currently leads design-centric initiatives for 3M’s Electronics & Energy Business Group based in Saint Paul, MN. His expertise is in contextualizing material science solutions through the tools of design and articulating big stories of innovation with high fidelity video productions.

Before this role, Lee was a strategic designer within 3M’s Consumer Business Group where he developed product design strategies for brands including Post-it and Scotch. His experience over the past 10 years ranged from website development for the US Air Force in Aviano, Italy to appliance design for General Electric to expanding intellectual property claims on emerging technologies. Most recently his design thinking was highlighted in a book titled: Solving Problems with Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works (Columbia University Press).

Lee Fain received a Master of Fine Arts in Industrial Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design and a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from Campbell University in North Carolina. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota enjoying its tropical climate with his wife and two children.

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group, which meets on the 1st Monday of every month .

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

This month at the Portland Puppet User Group, Spencer Krum, Cloud Engineer at HP, will be premiering a new talk on different kinds of modules for different uses, titled "The Module Spectrum". Eric Zounes, a technical operations engineer at Puppet Labs, will talk about "Deploying and Managing Elasticsearch with Puppet." Should be an excellent meeting!

Agenda for October 6th:

• 6:00 - 6:30: Eat pizza / salads and talk to other Puppet users

• 6:30 - 7:10: "Deploying and Managing Elasticsearch with Puppet" - Eric Zounes

• 7:10 - 7:55: "The Module Spectrum" - Spencer Krum

• 7:55 - 8:15: Chat and Plan next agenda

Get in touch with kara @ puppetlabs.com if you're interested in talking (even briefly!) about how you're using Puppet. Also, let us know if you'd like to be on the schedule next month! You don't need to be an expert to speak - we love to hear about what folks are doing with Puppet.

If you have an idea for what you would like to see presented, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

Meat, veggie, gluten-free, and vegan pizza will be available. The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking inside the office, so bring your bikes in! Parking is available in the garage across the street.

Successful strategies for the self-organizing Clojure meetup: http://blog.factual.com/clojure-office-hours

Please also review the Puppet Code of Conduct. As we reside in their space, we abide by their rules. https://docs.puppetlabs.com/community/community_guidelines.html#event-code-of-conduct

This month's topic is "Momentum: What to do in between the big events," a question that has come up many times at our meetings recently!

This is a meetup for community managers and leaders who are interested in discussion about all topics related to nurturing and running online communities. We will be meeting on the fourth Thursday of most months at Puppet Labs.

Agenda:

• 6:00 - 6:30 -- Welcome and introductions 

• 6:30 - 7:00 -- John Smith will be covering a series of cases on what to do in between big events to keep communities active.

• 7:00 - 7:30 -- Discussion; brainstorm future agenda topics.

We understand that not everyone can make it from work to a meetup by 6pm, so please keep in mind that presentations don't start until 6:30, and you're welcome to drop by at any point during the meeting. We're a small, informal group!

Interested in giving a short talk or presentation on a topic related to community management? Email [masked]. 

In the face of unpredictable business conditions, ever changing customer needs, and rapidly evolving technologies, the only sustainable advantage comes from your organization's ability to adapt and continuously improve.

In response to this modern reality, Agile methods have changed technology management by shifting the focus of production away from the individual contributor and toward the self-organizing team. But supervisors and managers have sometimes struggled to exert their influence without sacrificing the benefits of self-organization even as teams have struggled to fully situate themselves in the context of business value.

When they reflect at regular intervals by conducting retrospectives, Agile teams embody the most basic element of continuous improvement. But, lacking a defined mechanism for understanding the organizational system outside their own boundary, teams are frequently unable to sustain the pace of improvement over time.

The Improvement Kata is a basic pattern of practice for continuous improvement that aligns tightly focused improvement experiments across the breadth and depth of the organization using teachable coaching protocols. Profound in its simplicity, the Improvement Kata embodies truly scientific management!

Attend this talk to learn more about what the Improvement Kata is, to understand where it came from and how it operates, and to appreciate what can be gained by combining the Improvement Kata with selected Lean and Agile ideas and practices.

Adam Light is Management Consultant and Principal at SoTech Advisors where he helps technology leaders apply Lean and Agile methods to deliver increased customer value, enhance organizational capability, and improve the lives of their employees.

Adam has more than 20 years of technology experience. He began his career as an application developer before becoming a manager of projects and people. Adam first experienced the power of Lean and Agile methods when he adopted them as Director of Planning and Program Management at TransUnion. That initial knowledge led him to found SoTech Advisors and he has built his consulting practice steadily by seeking knowledge of new and better management methods at every opportunity. Working with enterprise clients to adopt, integrate, and adapt Lean and Agile practices, Adam helps people learn to think and act differently by deepening their understanding. He focuses on pragmatic techniques that increase organizational capacity by improving leadership capability.

Ladies and Gentleman,

It's that time again for another Thing Tuesday. I hope your summer breaks have been restful and it's now time to get back into the grove of the Internet of Things :-)

So set your reminders for Tuesday Sept 16th - 2 weeks from today. We will start at the usual time of 6:30 pm at the offices of our super generous hosts - Puppet Labs. We'd love to see old and new faces, we have over 500 members now, so clearly there is still interest in the area :-)

Please note that due to restrictions we will no longer serve alcohol.... that's okay though, there are pubs within crawling distance for those of you who like to talk tech over pints.

So, who have we speaking? 

Paresh Patel - Nailing it with Payrange  - "My plan was to sell 10,000 units in the first year. In the first 15 hours we sold 33,000 and had to pause." I am thrilled to have Paresh come and talk and tell us how he created a hardware proposition that is simply FLYING off the shelves and how he created "Square for inanimate objects."

Tyler Phillipi - All about Cargo.ai - Tyler is the entreprenuer's entreprenuer. Together with some kickass technical co-founders he has dove straight into the world of IoT with Cargo.ai, Portland's newly minted startup that will create a visionary new infrastructure for cars. Tyler will go over the proposition and the company and what they will be doing next. Truly exciting stuff and with Tyler delivering it, not one to be missed.

Bryon Moyer - IoT Engineers need new resources - Bryon is a writer for EE Journal and other fine publications on the things that make up key parts of IoT - chips, modules, wireless etc . Recently has been researching into some of the issues and hurdles that engineers face when creating IoT solutions. In this talk he covers some of the key issues faced by engineers with IoT specifically.

Also a BIG HUGE THANK YOU TO JEWEL MINARIK who is sponsoring the Pizza that night!!! Thank you :-)

So register now and see you in two weeks. Bring a buddy into the world of IoT... and remember, it's a networking event - go out of your comfort zone to meet new people and ideas, great new things should start in Portland :-)

Potential Pizza sponsors - reach out to me, we are still looking.... You have been awesome to the group. Thank you.

All the best,

Surj.

Today, with CSS preprocessing, icon fonts, Grunt workflows, Pattern Libraries and Javascript MVCs, the Front-end workspace is anything but simple. It deserves as much attention as Content Strategy, migration planning or server configuration.

The role of the Front-end Architect aims to give these important decisions the attention they deserve, at the stage of the project where they need to be decided.

There will be a short talk about Regular Expressions, what they are and why they are useful to pretty much anyone who deals with code or text!

Hack Nights are general project nights. Bring your own project or bring some knowledge and help out a fellow WWCer! If you would like help with a project or a problem, post in the comments below. If no one has a project we will continue work on our awesome website!

Pizza and Salad with Gluten Free/Vegan options will be provided by our awesome hosts Puppet Labs.

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group, which meets on the 1st Monday of every month - except this month, since that's Labor Day! Instead, we're meeting Sept. 8th.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

Agenda for September 8th

• 6:00 - 6:30: Eat pizza / salads, talk to other Puppet users, take the IT Puppet personality quiz :)
• 6:30 - 7:00 "Continuously Testing Infrastructure" - Gareth Rushgrove, Puppet Labs
• 7:00 - 7:15 "The Life and Times of Puppet at Portland State University" - Elliot Schlegelmilch, PSU
• 7:15 - 7:30 Spencer Krum demos a new experimental tool, "Puppet Analytics"
• 7:30 - 8:00: Plan next agenda & chat

At this month's meeting, we'll have a fun addition from the folks on our User Experience team: Want to know more about your IT personality? Take our "Which Puppet are you" quiz debuting at this month's PUG.

We're still looking for a short third talk, so get in touch with kara @ puppetlabs.com if you're interested in talking (even briefly!) about how you're using Puppet. Also, let us know if you'd like to be on the schedule next month! You don't need to be an expert to speak - we love to hear about what folks are doing with Puppet.

If you have an idea for what you would like to see presented, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

Meat, veggie, gluten-free, and vegan pizza will be available. The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking inside the office, so bring your bikes in! Parking is available in the garage across the street.

(Please arrive before 6:00 pm. The building managers lock the doors at that time. Anyone who has to open the door for late arrivals will likely miss part of the presentation.)

Kristof Van Tomme will reprise his talk to the European Write The Docs '14 conference back in April. Kristof is the CEO of Pronovix and the project lead of WalkHub, both focused on Drupal-based systems. He'll be joining us remotely from Belgium, from a very early hour in his time zone. He agreed to do his talk on late notice after a change in plans. Thank you Kristof!

Here is the description of his talk from WTD EU 2014 (Budapest)

You could argue that outdated documentation is even worse than no documentation at all. It creates frustration and destroys the trust of your customers. But how do you maintain your documentation in a project with a fast release cycle?

In this talk I will explore strategies for keeping different types of documentation up to date and discuss a few tools (including WalkHub, an open source project we are working on) that can be used to automatically test or even update documentation as part of your continuous integration process.

Join the Community Leadership Meetup group if you want to get notified about future meetups.

This is a meetup for community managers and leaders who are interested in discussions related to nurturing and running online communities. We will be meeting on the fourth Thursday of most months at Puppet Labs!

Agenda:

• 6:00 - 6:30 -- Welcome and introductions
• 6:30 - 7:00 -- Aaron Wolf will talk about setting the best foundations when building a new community (specifically the innovations and challenges in the ongoing progress toward launching Snowdrift.coop)
• 7:00 - 7:30 -- Discussion; brainstorm future agenda topics.

We understand that not everyone can make it from work to a meetup by 6pm, so please keep in mind that presentations don't start until 6:30, and you're welcome to drop by at any point during the meeting. We're a small, informal group!

Next month, John Smith will be covering a series of cases on “what to do in between the big event,” so if you're interested in putting forward examples or ideas for that, let John know at this month's meeting.

Interested in giving a short talk or presentation on a topic related to community management? Email [email protected]. We meet most months and are always looking for speakers.

Our first two Meetups had so much content that we did not have much time to network. So I'd like to try an enhanced Networking Meetup, where we talk about our topics of concern.

I want us to have time to talk to each other, to find out what we do, perhaps to ask how we might address common issues.

So come to the Write The Docs Meetup on Tuesday August 5. Ask your fellow writer about any topic that you've heard during our Meetups, or more.

Suggested topics:

DITA Markdown User feedback on documents Style guides RESTful APIs Docs in a world of JIRAs Why we call ourselves “documentarians”

and of course, “be-verbs”

In addition, several of us work for companies who are hiring writers. If you want to hear about what companies look for in writers, come to the Meetup.

As before, we will have snacks provided by ForgeRock, along with the drinks / meeting room provided by Puppet Labs.

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group, which meets on the 1st Monday of every month.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

Agenda for August 4th

Charlie Sharpsteen, Open Source Support Engineer at Puppet Labs, will be talking about "Standardized Debugging Environments: Taking the Friction Out of Ticket Investigation".

In his talk, Charlie will cover the journey Puppet Labs has taken towards automating the setup of virtual sandboxes for exploration and ticket investigation.

• 6:30 - 7:00: Eat pizza / salads and talk to other Puppet users
• 7:00 - 7:45: "Standardized Debugging Environments: Taking the Friction Out of Ticket Investigation" - Charlie Sharpsteen
• 7:45 - 8:10: Talk TBA or Breakout Sessions
• 8:10 - 8:15: Plan next agenda

We're still looking for a second talk, so get in touch with kara @ puppetlabs.com if you're interested in talking (even briefly!) about how you're using Puppet. Also, let us know if you'd like to be on the schedule next month! You don't need to be an expert to speak - we love to hear about what folks are doing with Puppet.

If you have an idea for what you would like to see presented, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

This week we are going to be talking about Google's new Web Starter Kit, creating a simple Sass Style Guide and Managing Your Dev Environment with VirtualBox, Vagrant, and Puppet.

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group, which meets on the 1st Monday of every month.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

Agenda for July 7

Next Monday is our next PDX Puppet User Group meeting! Melissa Stone, Release Engineer at Puppet Labs, will be talking about using Puppet to Package Software, and Kylo Ginsberg will be giving you a glipse of the future as he discusses Puppet 4!

• 6:30 - 7:00: Eat pizza / salads and talk to other Puppet users
• 7:00 - 7:45: "Using Puppet to Package Software" (Beginner/Intermediate) - Melissa Stone
• 7:45 - 8:10: "What's New in Puppet 4" - Kylo Ginsberg
• 8:10 - 8:15: Plan next agenda

We're still looking for a second talk, so get in touch with kara @ puppetlabs.com if you're interested in talking (even briefly!) about how you're using Puppet. Also, let us know if you'd like to be on the schedule next month! You don't need to be an expert to speak - we love to hear about what folks are doing with Puppet.

If you have an idea for what you would like to see presented, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

After our first Meetup, we know that many of us have unique and useful expertise in a number of areas.

We want to hear from you. Many of you have experience in topics of concern to all of us.

We have a list of Lightning Talks on our agenda. For more information, see the announcement on the Meetup.com site http://www.meetup.com/Write-The-Docs-PDX/events/189019782/ .

If you plan to join us, please sign up on the Meetup.com site. We would like to have enough food available for you.

I’ll start the Lightning Talks with a (5 min) dry run of a talk I’m presenting at OSCON Ignite on July 20: “When a Tech Writer becomes a Systems Administrator”. (http://www.oscon.com/oscon2014/public/cfp/331)

Soren Macbeth, chief data scientist at yieldbot, will discuss machine learning techniques using cascalog, storm, and spark.

The session will begin with one or more lightning talks at 6:45pm followed by Soren's presentation at 7:00pm.

“A Matter of Survival: What Wilderness Survival Can Tell Us about Software Development.”

In a book titled Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, Lawrence Gonzales explores the qualities of individuals and groups who survive under extraordinary conditions. This presentation asserts that there are similarities between an extended trek through the woods and software development, and that the qualities that enable one to survive in the woods can help us to be more successful in our projects. Along the way, it borrows from recent research in Neuroscience, Psychology, and Systems Science to provide some understanding about how and why fostering these qualities might be helpful.

Our speaker, Michael Kelly is a veteran of numerous software development campaigns. He's built software for power companies and banks, for the trucking industry and education, for internet start-ups and established companies, for his own companies and for others. Throughout, he has worked hard to master the craft of writing software and delve into the mysteries of Agile. Currently, he is working with the excellent folks at DAT Solutions to develop the next generation of software for the trucking industry.

Details and Pizza:

This event is free. No need to RSVP. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion.

Our first Write The Docs PDX Meetup features Marcia Riefer Johnson, author of "Word Up! How to Write Powerful Sentences and Paragraphs (And Everything You Build from Them)."

She spoke at the first Write The Docs conference in 2013, helping us all “Write Tight(er)” http://conf.writethedocs.org/na/2013/video.html#marcia-riefer-johnston Marcia has shared the following description:

Documentarians who heard me at Write the Docs last year or this year know that I talk about be-verbs. For our Meetup, I'd like to do more than talk—I'd like to give attendees a chance to take action. I would like everyone to bring in an example that shows the kind of documentation they do. They don't have to, but if they do, they'll get more out of the exercise for themselves AND they'll help the rest of the group by providing me with material that attendees can relate to. Besides, I think that attendees would benefit from seeing examples of what others in the room mean by "documentation."

The Write The Docs PDX Meetup Group is sponsored by ForgeRock and Puppet Labs.

Zach Tellman wrote an interesting piece on successful strategies for the self-organizing Clojure meetup:

http://blog.factual.com/clojure-office-hours Let's try this model! There will be a whiteboard, Puppet will graciously host and those who want to learn can come to learn, those who want to hack can come and hack, and those who are willing to share their wisdom are welcome to do so.

See you at Puppet!

Epic FAIL: Takeways from the War Stories Project with Steve Portigal, Portigal Consulting

After nearly two years in gathering War Stories about the unusual, comic, tragic and otherwise astonishing things that happen in fieldwork, Portigal Consulting has amassed a compelling archive about the user research experience. While it’s common for the members of any group to share stories of their adventures, the user research community hasn’t supported this well. For a practice that feels misunderstood by others, there’s pressure to only share successes. Yet the confidence to share the honest and human messiness of this work can help develop the skill and even prestige of the community.

In this presentation, Steve will review some of the stories collected, highlight some of the patterns revealed by the stories, and suggest some of the lessons that we can take away. We’ll also feature live storytelling from a couple of local user researchers, sharing their own War Stories. Meanwhile, we invite you to contribute your own fieldwork War Story (about contextual research only, please) here.

Watch the live stream!

What this is: The monthly PDX Puppet User Group, which meets on the 1st Monday of every month, for Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

This month: We're hosting a special Puppet for Beginners session! On June 2nd, invite yourself, and friends & co-workers who've been asking "What IS that Puppet thing, anyway?" to come to our office for a special mixer and three introductory talks on Puppet.

Agenda for June 2:

• 4:00 - 6:30pm: Drinks and social [dinner and drinks provided]
• 6:30 - 7:15pm: "Beginning Puppet" - Michael Stahnke
• 7:15 - 8:00pm: "Writing and Publishing Puppet Modules" - Colleen Murphy
• 8:00 - 8:30pm: "An Introduction to Contributing" - Eric Sorenson

For more details on the Triage-a-Thon, an event for intermediate-advanced Puppet users happening earlier in the day, see: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/puppet-triage-a-thon-june-2014-tickets-11147351027

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

If you have an idea for what you would like to see or if you want to volunteer to present a talk, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group.

Interested in contributing to Puppet? Want to come hang out with fun people and do geeky things all day?

You're invited to join Puppet community members and employees for our June Triage-a-Thon! You can participate virtually from anywhere in the world, or join us in person in our office in Portland, OR.

If you've been to previous Triage-a-Thon's where we've focused on reviewing and closing tickets, you'll find that this one will be different! Our goal for this Triage-a-Thon is to focus on running tickets through to completion and fixing bugs.

This Triage-a-Thon is recommended for Puppet developers and intermediate to advanced Puppet Users who are comfortable fixing bugs and contributing code. For those who want to learn more about Puppet, but aren't comfortable triaging tickets yet, we've added a special session of the Portland Puppet User Group at Puppet Labs after the Triage-a-Thon, and livestreamed online, focused on Beginning Puppet.

If you live in Portland, Oregon: Join us in person at our office in the Pearl! We'll provide breakfast, coffee, a delicious lunch, snacks and space in our office plus a social hour with tasty beverages between the Triage-A-Thon and Puppet User Group sessions.

Please bring a laptop computer with you. You're welcome to drop in at any point - we're starting at 7am online to include those in other time zones, but we don't expect to see you that early :)

The first 200 people who help for at least 2 hours will be sent a special edition Puppet Triage-a-Thon t-shirt, and we'll have additional prizes for top participants!

Fluency is "what you can say without having to think about how to say it." "Refactoring" is a language that describes ways to make your code suck less. I want to inspire you to become more fluent in that language, so you can make your code suck less without having to think about it.

Note for Agile PDX: this presentation is in no small part an homage to, and a continuation of, "Therapeutic Refactoring" by Katrina Owen. If you have time, you might enjoy watching that talk first: http://confreaks.com/videos/1071-cascadiaruby2012-therapeutic-refactoring

About the speaker...

Sam Livingston is a developer from sunny* Portland, Oregon. Sam's been working in code since 1998, in Ruby since 2006, and at LivingSocial since 2012. He likes TDD/BDD/TATFT, pair programming, and refactoring—but finds that long walks on the beach tend to result in sandy keyboards.

• YMMV

per #clojure-pdx on irc.freenode.net on 5/12:

waynr: howdy folks

waynr: i might try to make the clojerks meetup on thursday

benkay: sweet!

benkay: i don't know what we're doing yet

benkay: do you want to talk about a thing waynr ?

waynr: maybe, i think i am going to try to help get lein-release into leiningen this week in the afterwork hours, not sure if there is much to say about that

waynr: maybe the thing at this meetup could be collaborating on getting lein-release into leiningen...technomancy mentioned in #clojure that this is a pretty big blocker for 2.4.0

waynr: i haven't delved too deeply into it but it seems like the existing plugin really does most of what technomancy mentions here:http://librelist.com/browser//leiningen/2014/5/1\release-task/

benkay: sounds great, waynr

benkay: would this be an active hacking session or...

waynr: yeah that sounds like a good use of the time

Leiningen is a very important component of the Clojurian toolchain, responsible for compilation, en-jar-ificaation, REPLs, running applications in production, many other things, and soon package release automation as well!

Please join us to hack on Leiningen this Thursday at Puppet Labs. Please also join us if you're dabbling in Clojure, want to engage in hifalutin' discourse about editors, or just want to hang out with other lispy programmery folk.

We also tend to go for food/drinks afterwards, where conversation ranges more broadly into war stories, philosophy and idle industry trend speculation.

Into the Mind of a Nerd [May 13th]:

Join us as a team of developers build, design and publish an app in 59 minutes or less while the entire process is narrated for non-technical attendees. That's correct! A full explanation of each technical option will be explained at each fork in the development path.

Developers/Presenters: The Speakers/Developers:

• Dave Shanley

• Cody Garvin

• Jackson Gariety

Award winning cartoonist turned front-end developer Rachel Nabors will change how you think about web design forever.

Learn how to make CSS do backflips to reproduce traditional animation techniques like walk cycles, scene transitions, and parallax.

Save time and energy with conservative techniques like cut outs, pioneered by Japanese studios to accelerate the animation process.

Understand the physics behind timing functions like ease-in to create subtle skeuomorphism. CSS animations and transitions are powerful new tools in the interactive design arsenal.

With these babies at your command, all new possibilities for user experiences begin to unfold.

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group, which meets on the 1st Monday of every month.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and anyone interested in learning more about Puppet. Beginners welcome.

Agenda for May 5

• 6:30 - 7:00: Eat pizza / salads and socialize
• 7:00 - 7:45: Talk on "Future Parser" - Joshua Parlow
• 7:45 - 8:15: "Trusted Facts and Policy-Based Autosigning" -Thomas Linkin
• 8:15 - 8:25: June Triage-a-Thon info and update
• 8:25 - 8:30: Brainstorm next agenda

If you have an idea for what you would like to hear a talk about, or if you want to volunteer to present a talk, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group!

This user group is governed by the Puppet Labs event code of conduct.

More information:

Joshua Parlow, Software Engineer at Puppet Labs, will be talking about the future parser.

He'll answer:

• what is it?
• how do you turn it on?
• what new features does it have?
• how does it differ from the current parser?

Come with more questions! If you want to read up on the future parser ahead of time, you can do so here: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppet/latest/reference/experiments_future.html

The Portland Puppet User Group is for those who are using Puppet, want to learn more about Puppet, or are interested in configuration management, IT, or DevOps. We meet at Puppet Labs on the first Monday of each month. To learn more about Puppet, you can visit PuppetLabs.com.

Let's play with state machines and core.logic tonight!

Join the Community Leadership Meetup group if you want to get notified about future meetups.

Agenda for April:

• 6:00 - 6:30 -- Welcome and introductions
• 6:30 - 7:00 -- Mara Zepeda (co-founder of Switchboard) will talk about Switchboard, a startup for communities. Plus, she threatens to pick your brains!
• 7:00 - 7:30 -- Discussion; brainstorm future agenda topics.

We understand that no everyone can make it from work to a meetup by 6pm, so please keep in mind that presentations don't start until 6:30, and you're welcome to drop by at any point during the meeting. We're a small, informal group!

Interested in giving a short talk or presentation on a topic related to community management? Email [email protected]. We meet most months and are always looking for speakers.

Join the Community Leadership Meetup group if you want to get notified about future meetups.

Agenda for April:

• 6:00 - 6:30 -- Welcome and introductions
• 6:30 - 7:00 -- Mara Zepeda (co-founder of Switchboard) will talk about Switchboard, a startup for communities. Plus, she threatens to pick your brains!
• 7:00 - 7:30 -- Discussion; brainstorm future agenda topics.

We understand that no everyone can make it from work to a meetup by 6pm, so please keep in mind that presentations don't start until 6:30, and you're welcome to drop by at any point during the meeting. We're a small, informal group!

Interested in giving a short talk or presentation on a topic related to community management? Email [email protected]. We meet most months and are always looking for speakers.

Now in its second year, several Portland-based organizations passionate about increasing the numbers of women in tech are organizing an evening of career-building interactive booths and breakout sessions, networking, and refreshments. Women of all levels of interest and involvement in tech are invited to attend. Whether you have a lot to learn or a bit to teach, we hope you join us!

Lightning Talks:

We are currently accepting Lighting Talk submissions - due by March 31st. Talks must be 5 minutes in length and be useful for women in tech (or related to tech), such as:

• Technology
• Women in the workforce/tech
• Career growth
• Issues underrepresented groups face in tech

Submit your talk here.

Career Booths:

• Improve your elevator pitch through effective body language
• Practice your interview skills with mock interviews with local tech recruiters
• Improve your resume with 1:1 resume review with local tech recruiters and hiring managers
• Enhance your professional presentation with style experts
• Get a professional headshot taken to use in all sorts of professional scenarios

Breakout Sessions:

• Negotiation
• Imposter Syndrome
• Sexual Harassment
• Python
• Reading HTML and CSS for non-technical people
• Getting involved in Github and open source

When: Thursday, April 17th Time: 4:15 - 8:30 PM Where: Puppet Labs, 926, NW 13th Ave., Portland, OR 97209 Price: FREE! Free to attend however registration is required

Schedule:

4:15 PM - 8:30 PM 4:15 PM - Doors Open/Check-in 4:30 PM - Pre-Conference Networking Session (Speed Networking) 5:00 PM - Opening Remarks | Opening Talk | Lightning Talks 6:00 PM - Breakout Sessions, Booths, Networking 8:15 PM - Closing Remarks 8:30 PM - Event ends/Career booths close

Some Agile software teams struggle to colocate their members so the software developers and testers can be near each other at work. What happens when development team members have the luxury of sitting together, but still want something more? We took the bold step of colocating some development teams with their end-users. We had lofty goals and some specific expectations, but ended up with some unexpected results, as well.

This presentation covers a case study and a retrospective on our company's effort to colocate development teams with their end users. It discusses reasons for moving the teams, as well as the lessons learned and the changes made to our process. The experiment caused our development organization re-examine its best practices and processes. We think these lessons are applicable to teams regardless of their industry and experience.

About the speaker...

Mary Panza is the scrum master at Parametric Portfolio Associates in Seattle, Washington. She has supported, tested and managed software for the past twenty years for various companies around the Puget Sound area. Mary’s passion has always been problem-solving and process improvement, as well as seeing the human side of software development. In her free time, she enjoys volunteering for the Seattle Mountaineers, an outdoor education non-profit.

We will have Pizza!

Thank you to Keli Foley at Symmetri

They are suppliers of parts and modules for IoT and they have been an awesome supporter of local initiatives in the space. Find her on linkedin and reach out if you need parts and modules for your IoT / M2M projects

Now our speakers!

Dennis Veatch - Industrial Design and IoT

Dennis is an experienced and well known local industrial designer. He has worked on some great local and national products and in this short talk he will share with us his views on manufacture, design and IoT.

Sce Pike - New IoT Startup / Awesome Team

Sce (pronounced SAY) is the CEO of one of the hottest IoT startup's in town at the moment, in this very short session she'll be casting her net out with Thing Tuesday to recruit new team members. Come hear, meet and chat.

George Zamanakos, CEO of Sweet Spot Diabetes

Still waiting to confirm from George, but he has recently been appointed the CEO of Portland startup Sweet Spot Diabetes, which was acquired a few years ago by Dexcom. George will talk about his views and passions around IoT and medical devices and the data they generate.

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group, which meets on the 1st Monday of every month.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

Agenda for April 7

• 6:30 - 7:00: Eat pizza / salads and talk to other Puppet users
• 7:00 - 7:45: Beaker 101: acceptance testing and more - Alice Nodelman
• 7:45 - 8:25: Module testing with Beaker - Hunter Haugen
• 8:25 - 8:30: Brainstorm next agenda

If you have an idea for what you would like to see or if you want to volunteer to present a talk, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

Join some Clojerks for an evening of hacking on things. We organize into small swarm groups and work on toy problems to understand specific parts of the stack.

The theme recently has been message passing over sockets. Who knows what we'll decide to do this round!

HubSpot is a fast growing marketing platform used by over 10,000 companies.

This talk will deep dive look into how HBase is used as the primary data store at scale. The talk will examine problems running HBase in a real time scenarios and our solutions including extensions that had to be made, as well as survey some of the interesting schema design patterns we've come up with including Hyperloglog and proper Rowkey design.

Come and join us for a special presentation from Mike Axiak, Principal Software Engineer at HubSpot, coming specially from Boston for this meetup!

Thanks to Kara @ PuppetLabs for hosting us once again!

As usual, you will be able to enjoy our delicious thin-crust pizzas & drinks!

Agenda:

5:30 - 6:00 Welcome & Networking

6:00 - 7: 30 Presentation by Mike Axiak

7:30 - 8:30 Pizzas & Discussion

Ducks, Dolls & Robots: a Genealogy of Socio-Technical Anxieties with Dr. Genevieve Bell, Intel

The introductions of new technologies are rarely seamless and silent affairs. There are the inevitable boosters and utopian dreamers who will tell us and sell us on the notion that this new technology will change our lives, in both big and small ways: we will be cleaner, safer, happier, more efficient, more productive, and of course, more modern with all that implies. The message here is everything will be different, better. There are also the equally inevitable naysayers and dystopian dreamers who worry along equally familiar but slightly different lines: we will be less social, less secure, more isolated, and more homogenous. The message here is everything will be different, but perhaps not so much better. Of course, running in between these larger conversations are the practicalities of living with new technologies—how much does it cost? where does it live? who should look after it? what will we will do with it? and, in the end, what will we do without it?

Perhaps it is no surprise then that we worry, that new technologies are frequently accompanied by anxiety, and sometimes even fear. In this talk, Genevieve traces the roots of these hopes, fears and anxieties back through our history with machines—Vaucason’s Duck, Edison’s Talking Doll, the tea-cup robots of the Edo-period in Japan, Frankenstein’s monster and Ned Ludd’s polemics are all part of this story. She takes an expansive view, crossing cultures and historical periods, to create a genealogy of our socio-technical anxieties. Ultimately, she suggests a framework for making sense of these anxieties, and in so doing, a new way of thinking about the next generation of technologies we are designing.

This panel will focus on making money from mobile apps. Two great speakers:

Clint Bowers: A designer, strategist and Founder of Stripe Marketing. Clint launched his first mobile app last month. He did it as an experiment. He gave himself one week from start to finish to get his first app published. This app now has over 200,000 downloads and Clint is making $20 a day off his app. Not bad for a first attempt. Clint wants to share his first-timer insights.

Patrick Thompson: The Founder at Inkstone Mobile and Co-founder at Phase4 Mobile. Patrick is a developer and marketer who 5 years ago started developing mobile apps full-time and has since had over 7 million app downloads. He has 13 apps on the app store including eBook Search, Audiobooks HQ, MegaReader, and QuickReader. Recently he co-founded Phase4 Mobile that will soon be launching a series of sleep-related apps. He has been living off his "App Family" for years and has some interesting mobile money making lessons to share.

Format:

6 - 6:25 Food, beer, networking

6:25 - 7:25 Panel presentations with Q&A

7:30 Launch party drinks at On Deck Sports Bar (across the street from the panel)

We are so excited for Puppet Labs to host us again! Join us for awesome people, food and drinks. See you soon!

PDX Women in Information Technology exists to celebrate professional women in the Portland-metro area who work with, manage, lead or have an interest in technology. Whether you are developing event-driven, non-blocking applications in node.js or setting technology strategy for a Fortune 500 company–or anything in between–come join us!

@PDXWiIT @puppetlabs

In this workshop, attendees will experience our Intentional Method of introducing children (ages 10+) to programming (in java) using recipes . We use Agile techniques such as pair programming, randoris, short iterations, re-factoring & test-driven development in teaching. Pair instructors model Agile practices while teaching. Learn how to teach technical processes using Agile techniques. Although we’ve mostly used our method with children, we have also successfully taught adults using similar methodologies.

Note: on Tue 18 March there is a version of this event for kids to try it out along with their peers and parents: http://calagator.org/events/1250465864

Note: There will be hands-on sections of this presentation. While not everyone will need a laptop, please bring one if you can, and set it up with the courseware & eclipse from our github account

full link: https://github.com/TeachingKidsProgramming/TeachingKidsProgramming.Java

short link: http://lfal.co/tkpjava

About the speakers...

Llewellyn Falco learned to jump horses in the 7th grade while living in France. Back in states, while studying drafting in high school, he started fire eating, sleight of hand magic, and once rode a unicycle 6 miles. After learning to juggle torches, he joined a acrobatics group in college where he specialized on the trampoline and walking a slack rope. He can calculate the cube root of any perfect cube under 1,000,000 in his head, as well as pick a standard lock. He can rollerblade down a flight of stairs, backwards. Later, he has learned to play the doumbek (a type of drum), to accompaniment a belly dancing girlfriend. Llewellyn studied Tai Chi for 2 years, can throw a knife at 20 feet, and a playing card at 50. He has taught swing dancing, and loves to salsa. He is also an accomplished speed chess player. In the last year, he has been scuba diving over 20 times, become a guitar hero, and broke his personal record of paddle balling over 200 times. Llewellyn attributes his success to the large amount of caffeine he has consumed, and enjoys computer programming in his spare time.

Lynn Langit - Big Data Architect and Educator. Former FTE at MSFT (4 years). Awards – SQL Server MVP, Google Cloud Developer Expert, MongoDB Master. Lynn has done production work with SQL Server, MongoDB, AWS and Google databases and more. Lynn has over 150 BigData screencasts on her YouTube channel (SoCalDevGal). In addition to her work with Big Data, she is also the co-founder of a non-profit, ‘Teaching Kids Programming.’

Speaking of the future… Mobile apps may soon be able to forecast trends and predict outcomes. Prototype apps (like ShakeAlert) are being developed to predict disasters before they happen and change how we respond to them. Existing technologies like GPS will also become more sophisticated and be able to predict congestion before it happens.

What else is in store? Join our panel to find out.

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group, which meets on the 1st Monday of every month.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

Agenda for March 3

• 6:30 - 7:00: Eat pizza / salads and talk to other Puppet users
• 7:00 - 7:45: Issue Prevention: When turning it off and on again fails you - Jay Wallace
• 7:45 - 8:15: Demo: Use Envpuppet To Test with Multiple Puppet Versions - Charlie Sharpsteen
• 8:15 - 8:30: Open time for show & tell

If you have an idea for what you would like to see or if you want to volunteer to present a talk, please post those ideas in the [PDX Puppet Google Group]

A discussion series to promote diversity in technology and entrepreneurship. You’ll also have the opportunity to network, and hear about local initiatives launching in 2014 to make Portland’s innovation economy more inclusive.

Guest speakers: Dwayne Edwards (Founder, Pensole Academy); Marcelino Alvarez (Founder, Uncorked Studios); Michael Gray (CTO, GlobeSherpa); Paola Moretto (Founder, Nouvola); Charlie Hales (Mayor, City of Portland)

Register: http://bit.ly/1gn0fM3

Kevin sez:

The domain problem is conceptually simple: you provide sets of images and are notified with visual diffs of changes. The motivating use case was regression testing a web data visualization product---taking screenshots is far easier and more comprehensive than unit testing JavaScript + DOM + CSS styling.

The application is about 1300 lines of code, which includes all of the (Clojure-generated) markup and styling.It's built with Clojure, ClojureScript, and Datomic. I'll touch on:

• designing an application around Stuart Sierra's "Reloaded" workflow: http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2013/06/04/clojure-workflow-reloaded

• basics (and not-so-basics) of the Ring HTTP model

• using Chas Emerick's Friend library to handle web user and API authentication

• deploying/monitoring a Clojure application in (low-stakes) production

• structuring an application around protocols so that service backends (e.g., S3) can be easily swapped between development, staging, and production

If there's anything that seems particularly interesting to you (in the above list or otherwise), please reply to this thread so I can prepare a bit of material.

I'm planning on giving a 20 minute high-level overview of the application, and then opening it up to questions and focussing on whatever topics folks are interested in.

The key to successful adoption of any development methodology is a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of each team member within that framework. As agile continues its rapid adoption, it’s essential to define the role of QA in Scrum as concretely as we’ve defined the other team roles.
Agile methodology gives QA an opportunity for broader and deeper involvement in the software development lifecycle, enabling us more effectively to ensure quality, not by finding defects, but by preventing the introduction of defects in the first place. Because quality starts with the user story, QA can drive defect prevention by asking key questions of product owners during requirements definition. We can ensure that comprehensive acceptance criteria are in place, to drive high quality development, testing, and story acceptance. We can also ask technical questions of developers. This results in more thoroughly defined user stories and prompts developers to consider additional issues, and avoid pitfalls in advance of implementation. Finally, to prevent the steady growth of technical debt, we must remind scrum masters to plan story points for fixing both known and unknown defects as part of every sprint. This presentation will teach you how to leverage Agile within your organization to see immediate improvements in the quality of your software delivery.

About the speaker... Karen Ascheim Wysopal has been in software QA for over 20 years, in roles including tester, release manager, software engineer, test automation engineer, and 8 years as QA manager. She’s spent the past five years at Hewlett Packard, and currently heads Quality & PMO in the Software and Web Services organization, overseeing HPConnected.com, ePrintcenter.com, and related HP web-connected print technologies. She was a leader in the organization’s transition to Agile last year. Karen has presented at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference. Her professional passions are building high functioning innovative teams from the ground up, defining processes that encompass a holistic approach to quality, and speaking on best practices to foster improvements across the industry. She can’t seem to stop breaking software.

February's theme will be: HABITS

Much of what interests people in QS is habit-related (changing bad habits, establishing and maintaining new habits), so it's not surprising that this topic comes up quite a bit in free-form discussions, so we decided to dedicate a meetup to it.

If you have an experience with habits and QS (if you're a Lift user, for example), come and share it!

Here's our agenda: Informal Social and Gadget Time - Starting at 6pm Come early to socialize with other QSers and share what hardware, apps, and other technologies are helping you track your life. Bring your gadgets so that we can all see them, play with them, and hear your experiences with them!

Intro and Announcements - 6:30 sharp!

Show and Tell Just like when you were in kindergarten, we encourage you to share something within the theme of the meetup. It doesn't a formal presentation, and can be as much as 10 minutes or as short as you like. Let us know in advance to guarantee your slot. Time permitting, we may watch pre-recorded presentations from other QS groups.

Discussions We'll break out into groups. You can propose a topic yourself, join someone else's, or talk to the people that shared something during Show and Tell.

Clojure hack night at Puppet!

Show up at 5.30 if you want to form a team for a focused Dojo session, or later if you want to hack on your .emacs.

Closed: Puppet is reportedly closing at 3pm today due to snow.

How does social media content, advertising and design factor into the growth of mobile communities?

Join us for this event.

Free beer and food, smart speakers, good networking.

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group, which meets on the 1st Monday of every month.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

Agenda for February 3

• 6:30 - 7:00: Eat pizza / salads and talk to other Puppet users
• 7:00 - 8:25: Show and tell. Bring your projects. Adrien Thebo (aka finch) will be available with demos of Oscar, r10k and more awesome stuff he's been working on.
• 8:25 - 8:30: Plan next agenda

If you have an idea for what you would like to see or if you want to volunteer to present a talk, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

It is a common pattern for advocates of any kind (Agile, Quality, Process Improvement methods, Waterfall, etc.) to start off banging a drum with almost religious zealotry. “This is the way to achieve quality products!” “Follow me or be cast aside!” I have certainly done this and many of the change agents and forward thinkers I respect in the industry have struggled with this as well in their careers. However, riding a train of dogmatic viewpoints and practices has, in many cases, ruined the original efforts of change agents and more tragically, created bad patterns of development. This presentation (also presented at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference earlier this year) will explore how we can clarify our intentions and work towards creating an environment where the people involved are empowered to think and experiment but still march in the same general direction. As product development becomes more and more complex, different approaches are needed to get to the right outcome and we can no longer afford to apply rigid methods that worked for a simpler environment. This presentation will help the audience think critically about where they are being too dogmatic in their efforts while introducing some new ways of thinking around complex adaptive systems and complex product development. The full paper written for this conference presentation can be found here: http://www.uploads.pnsqc.org/2013/papers/t-095_Stadick_paper.pdf

Our Speaker: Rhea Stadick is an Organizational Coach at Intel, Corp. She has spent the last eight years in software quality and development of engineering teams. Today she helps organizations across her company develop cultures and competencies to create thriving work environments that support excellence in product development. She received her B.S. in Computer Science from Oregon State University and M.B.A. from Willamette University. For the past several years she has organized the Rose City Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) in the Portland-metro area that gathers professionals in the area to learn and network.

Interested in contributing to Puppet? Want to come hang out with fun people and do geeky things all day? Come to our Triage-A-Thon on Saturday, January 11th! You can participate virtually from anywhere in the world, or join us in person in our office in Portland, OR.

Our goal is to review all the open tickets in several of our projects to: - Update and confirm that issues are still relevant - Ensure tickets are in the right status and all the right information is present to fix the problem - Close any invalid or no longer relevant tickets

We’ll assign blocks of tickets to every participant, explain what you need to do, and provide people on the ground to answer questions and help you make decisions. If you want a few more details about how you can help, you should read about the process we use to triage bugs: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/community/puppet_projects_workflow.html

If you want a t-shirt, you MUST register and you must provide a shipping address and phone number (for international shipping). Thanks!

If you live in Portland, Oregon: Join us in person at our office in the Pearl! We'll provide breakfast, coffee, a delicious lunch, snacks and space in our office. Please bring a laptop computer with you. You're welcome to drop in at any point - we're starting at 7am online to include those in other time zones, but we don't expect to see you that early :)

The first 200 people who help for at least 2 hours will be sent a special edition Puppet Triage-a-Thon t-shirt, and we'll have additional prizes for top participants!

Register at http://triagepuppetjan2014.eventbrite.com

We are a new community of Portland Front-end Engineers and Designers, gathering monthly to talk about the things that move us (chiefly among them, Sass).

We meet on the 2nd Thursday of each month, 6pm at Puppet Labs.

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group, which meets on the 1st Monday of every month.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

Agenda for January 6

• 6:30 - 7:00: Eat pizza / salads and talk to other Puppet users
• 7:00 - 7:45: Puppet and Windows - Josh Cooper
• 7:45 - 8:25: Puppet Enterprise and Puppet Open Source: Similarities and differences from a technical perspective - Eric Sorenson
• 8:25 - 8:30: Plan next agenda

If you have an idea for what you would like to see or if you want to volunteer to present a talk, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

We'll be talking about high-level goals for 2014, and coming up with a list of: - topics on which we can present to each other - topics/technologies around which to build hack nights/days - speakers we'd like to raise funds to invite to Portland

If you're a Clojure/Lisp vet, it'd be great to have your insight on expert topics. If you're new to the ecosystem, we want to hear about what areas your interests revolve around to best cater to the local community.

In December, we'll be playing the Agile Adoption Game created by James Shore and Arlo Belshee. The Agile Adoption Game is a board game in the style of "Eurogames" such as Settlers of Catan. In the game, you'll be part of a team adopting Agile for the first time. Your job is to decide when and where to spend your team's effort to get the best results possible. Will you deliver features, which earn points? Or Agile practices, which don't? Choose wisely, and don't get fired!

The game isn't just a fun time—it's also a fairly realistic simulation of the tradeoffs involved in adopting Agile. It's suitable for anyone who's interested in adopting Agile or who just likes games. Bring your product owner and your thinking cap!

Bio: James Shore, AgilePDX coordinating group member, is a thought leader in the Agile software development community. He combines deep technical expertise with whole-system thinking, and believes that great software development teams consistently deliver market success, technical success, and personal success for team members and stakeholders. Find him at http://jamesshore.com

Details and Pizza:

This event is free. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion.

For details, click here: https://www.eventbrite.com/event/8695425251

This month we are excited to welcome Andrew Colclough to the PDX Sass podium as he gives us a full length talk on his SMACSS + BEM + SASS approach!

@PdxSass

Some of the biggest challenges encountered by Hadoop users seem to be the possibility to integrate their current systems with Hadoop, to administrate and take full advantage of its performance, and to be able to perform key analytics over the data stored in Hadoop.

Join us for this meetup event where we will show you how to resolve these issues!

Presenters:

-  Integration: Vincent Galopin, Solutions Consultant at Talend

-  Monitoring and Performance: Parham Parvizi, Solutions Consultant at Pivotal

-  Analytics: Bob Hardaway, Big Data Expert at Qlikview

Thanks a lot to Kara and Lee from Puppet Labs for hosting this event!

As usual, you will be able to enjoy some good drinks and our great thin-crust pizzas!

Agenda:

6 - 6:30 : Meet and Greet

6:30 - 7:30: From Integration to Analysis: A full Big Data Scenario

7:30 - 9 : Talk with the experts around a nice drink and delicious pizzas!

Those who missed last OpenStack summit need not worry. This meetup will bring Hong Kong highlights to you. We will level set new comers on the technology then cover what's new in the Havana release and how it all fits in the overall Cloud market landscape. Come learn, chat, network and have a good time. Brought to you by DetaCloud.com

Come along and join us to discuss the excellent Just Enough Research by Mule Design's Erika Hall. Erika, will be joining us via video at 6:30PM to answer any questions you have.

Just Enough Research is a short, really useful book on getting research done in your job. It's just the thing to read if you're looking to get started with research, or you know you need to do research but don't have much support to get it done. Visit our Google Group for a book discount code.

We're being hosted by the fine folks at Puppet Labs at their offices in The Pearl.

If you don't manage to finish the book on time, please still feel free to attend!

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group, which meets on the 1st Monday of every month.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

Agenda for December 2

• 6:30 - 7:00: Eat pizza / salads and talk to other Puppet users
• 7:00 - 7:30: Monitoring and Puppet Setup at Puppet Labs: Derrick Dymock
• 7:30 - 8:00: Puppet patterns: Spencer Krum
• 8:00 - 8:30: Geppetto: Ryan Coleman

If you have an idea for what you would like to see or if you want to volunteer to present a talk, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

Ever wondered what it takes to be an entrepreneur?

The professional and personal challenges, the high and lows, the failures and the success?

Startup Weekend is a global grassroots movement of active and empowered entrepreneurs who are learning the basics of founding startups and launching successful ventures. It is the largest community of passionate entrepreneurs with over 400 past events in 100 countries around the world in 2011.

The non-profit organization is headquartered in Seattle, Washington but Startup Weekend organizers and facilitators can be found in over 200 cities around the world. From Mongolia to South Africa to London to Brazil, people around the globe are coming together for weekend long workshops to pitch ideas, form teams, and start companies.

All Startup Weekend events follow the same basic model: anyone is welcome to pitch their startup idea and receive feedback from their peers. Teams organically form around the top ideas (as determined by popular vote) and then it’s a 54 hour frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation. The weekends culminate with presentations in front of local entrepreneurial leaders with another opportunity for critical feedback.

Whether entrepreneurs found companies, find a cofounder, meet someone new, or learn a skill far outside their usual 9-to-5, everyone is guaranteed to leave the event better prepared to navigate the chaotic but fun world of startups. If you want to put yourself in the shoes of an entrepreneur, register now for the best weekend of your life!

Instilling good habits isn't easy: Just ask anyone trying to give up a bad one. It's more challenging trying to change the habits of 100,000. Matt will discuss efforts at Intel to accelerate adoption of better technical capabilities, and the impediments faced by teams in adopting new skills under pressure.

Bio:

Matt Plavcan is a Technical Practices Coach with the Intel's Emergent Systems and Coaching team. He has worked at Intel for sixteen years, and has been writing code for three decades. His previous jobs include hardware validation for the Pentium 4 and Core microprocessors and teaching Intel architecture at the University of Illinois. Matt is the founder of the Code Dojo and Retreat program at Intel, which uses dedicated practice to hone professional programming skills.

Internet Of Things Portland

Thing Tuesday CHRISTMAS EDITION!!!! :-)

It's that time again for Thing Tuesday on November the 19th, at the offices of our gracious hosts, Puppet Labs.

The Internet of Things is technology driven but it's greatest impact will be cultural. Who better to lead our last conversation of 2013 than those who are able to create meaning from chaos and beauty in the mundane - The Designers.

This is the Christmas "Design Issue" - we get three local designers / creatives to give us their perspective on what the future holds...

Our Speakers on Nov 19th:

Roberto Tagliabue - Jawbone Noah Di Julio - Ziba Design Nilesh Ashra - W+K Lodge ( Wieden and Kennedy Innovation Team)

And one uber technologist to tell us what he is doing hacking Drop Cam's to spot Santa Claus...

Short Talk: Michael Jones - Grinch Cam: Dropcam Hacks

Not to be missed and the last time y'all will get to hang out together until January, so make sure you get put this in your calendar and drag a friend or two along as well and if you are able to, bring a show and tell project along...

Due to an emergency, our speaker for this evening cannot make the event. Since so many events are happening in Portland this evening, we recommend you look at the other events on Calagator

This event is free, but please RSVP: http://ta3m-pdx-6.eventbrite.com/

Event Description

Talk by Logan Kleier Talk by Logan Kleier - Logan is the chief information security and privacy officer for the City of Portland. Prior to this role, he worked in the private sector in a variety of product management and marketing roles for software and telecommunications companies. He has a Bachelors of Arts in history and political science and a Masters in public policy from Georgetown University.

The presentation presents a framework to aid government decision makers in the publication of various data sets. While government data is generally presumed to be a public record, this presentation will talk about use cases where it is not as well as grey areas where the law and public sentiment differ on notions of what government data is and isn't private.

What is it?

This is the fifth Techno-Activism 3rd Monday event for Portland, Oregon! Read more about techno-activism 3rd mondays.

Who should come?

Anyone interested in techno-activism. We invite coders, geeks, artists, and anyone else. No technical experience required.

Who's hosting?

The Privly Foundation will organize this and future TA3M Portland events. Puppet Labs is generously providing space.

PDXTech4Good

If you're interested in this event, you might also be interested in the PDXTech4Good meetup.

Is sifting through your own data like stepping in quicksand? With marketing automation tools (used correctly) like Eloqua, Marketo, and Hubspot, it doesn’t have to be such a struggle.

Using the right tools can help you see who’s engaging with your product or service and where they are in the sales cycle. Knowing the right information about your potential customers can help you have more relevant conversations that lead to closing deals.

Raising Capital in Silicon Valley with Puneet Agarwal of True Ventures, Luke Kanies, and Scott Kveton

People took notice when Silicon Valley VC firm True Ventures announced it had invested in Portland tech companies Puppet Labs and Urban Airship. Portland tech startups continue to benefit from this trend as True Ventures grows its portfolio of local investments. If you're part of Portland's high-tech business community but need to know how to raise money in Silicon Valley, this event is for you. Join Puneet Agarwal of True Ventures along with Portland CEOs Luke Kanies and Scott Kveton for tips and strategies on raising venture capital in the Valley.

You'll learn:

• the best strategies for getting noticed by investors • how to find the right investor for your business • what not to do when you pitch • much, much more.

We will be meeting on the 4th Thursday of every month at Puppet Labs.

Join the Community Leadership Meetup group if you want to get notified about future meetups.

Agenda for October 24:

• 6:30 - 7:00: Welcome and introductions
• 7:00 - 7:45: Events and Community: Cami Kaos (Automattic / WordPress)
• 7:45 - 8:00: Brainstorm future agenda topics.

Application Delivery at PGE currently uses both waterfall and iterative work management methodologies. PGE’s IT uses these to support six internal lines of business with their project and production support needs. PGE started the agile journey in 2009 in aid of a large scale multi-project initiative to roll-out network read meters for our customers. Over the subsequent four and half years, that experience was extended into where PGE’s IT delivery is today. Scaling to the enterprise required the synthesis of many different viewpoints, overcoming the deficiencies of agile training as applied in larger circumstances, and fabricating new processes and tools to enhance and manage the value of delivery. During this talk Mark will share highlights of what was valuable, what was a struggle, what he would do the same if starting over, and what he would do differently.

Bio: Mark Menger is a passionate leader in the adoption of Scrum at Portland General Electric, believing strongly in the underpinning concepts of servant leadership and self-organization. He led four Scrum teams and the enterprise architecture function of PGE’s multi-million dollar Automated Metering Infrastructure initiative. As the supervisor of Application Delivery Services, he is currently scaling PGE’s adoption of Agile software delivery to 14 teams across six business client functions. This effort includes business client relationship development, and improvements in quality assurance and engineering practices. When he’s not rooting for the Timbers, the remainder of his attention is focused on Sailflow reports for the Columbia and Willamette rivers.

This event is free and is at Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion.

This month will be a Sass Bootcamp! We'll be covering everything from installing the gems to setting up your file structure. Everything you'll need to know to get started (and a few advanced tricks as well).

Bring your laptop and stick around for free pizza and some hands on Sass QA.

The presentations will start at 6:15pm and be done a little after 7 giving everyone plenty of time to mingle over food and talk about all things Sassy.

We will be broadcasting live and recording this session. So if you can't make it in person you can still catch all of the action on this event page.

Having a lot of data isn’t a bad thing—as long as you don’t let it bog down your sales team. Join this panel and learn how companies are achieving better sales performance through big data and technology.

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group, which meets on the 1st Monday of every month.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

Agenda for October 7

• 6:30 - 7:00: Eat pizza / salads and talk to other Puppet users
• 7:00 - 7:45: Getting started with Puppet: Mike Stahnke
• 7:45 - 8:15: New free online learning for Puppet: Brad Hamilton
• 8:15 - 8:30: Brainstorm topics for upcoming meetings

If you have an idea for what you would like to see or if you want to volunteer to present a talk, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

Join your fellow coders for Portland's Fall Code Retreat! It will be a day of fun, programming, learning, teaching, and getting to know other programmers who are passionate about their craft. Food will be provided, so all you need to do is show up and participate. Just remember to bring your laptop!

What is a Code Retreat? It's a great place to practice your software skills and push your limits. If you haven't heard of code retreat before, you might want to take a look at http://coderetreat.org for a complete explanation of what to expect.

Interested in contributing to Puppet? Want to come hang out with fun people and do geeky things all day? Come to our Triage-A-Thon on Wednesday, October 2nd! You can participate virtually from anywhere in the world, or join us in person in our office in Portland, OR.

If you plan to attend, please register to help us plan for food and space!

Our goal is to review all the open tickets in the Puppet and Module projects to: - Update and confirm that issues are still relevant - Ensure tickets are in the right status and all the right information is present to fix the problem - Close any invalid or no longer relevant tickets

We’ll assign blocks of tickets to every participant, explain what you need to do, and provide people on the ground to answer questions and help you make decisions. If you want a few more details about how you can help, you should read about the process we use to triage bugs.

Participate online worldwide: Virtually we’ll provide an IRC channel (#puppethack), IM, and rewards for people who triage tickets and get involved. The Triage-a-Thon will be happening online from 1am-5pm PDT so that our friends and employees outside the US can also participate, so drop in any time that works for you.

In Portland: Join us in person at our office in the Pearl! We'll provide breakfast, coffee, a delicious lunch, snacks and space in our office. Please bring a laptop computer with you. The in-office portion of the Triage-a-Thon starts at 9am, and runs all day, so you're welcome to drop in at any point.

The first 200 people who help for at least 2 hours will be sent a special edition Puppet Triage-a-Thon 2013 t-shirt, and we'll have additional prizes for top participants!

We will be meeting on the 4th Thursday of every month at Puppet Labs.

Join the Community Leadership Meetup group if you want to get notified about future meetups.

Agenda for September 26:

• 6:30: Welcome and introductions
• 7:00 - 7:45: Dawn Foster - What Science Fiction Can Teach us about building communities
• 7:45 - 8:00: Brainstorming ideas for future agenda items.

The new PDX Git Together is fast-forwarding into the future!

We are meeting at the Puppet Labs PDX office this month! Puppet is graciously providing food sponsorship as well, so remember to thank them.

This meeting will concentrate on storing non-textual data (small and large) in Git. Examples include images, binaries, videos, VM images and encrypted data. Duke will talk about using "bup" to backup large files:

https://github.com/bup/bup

Would you like to present at a future PDX Git Together? Send an email to the pdxgit mailing list and/or contact Duke at [email protected] .

Would you like to sponsor food or other stuff for future PDX Git Togethers? Contact Duke at [email protected] .

Tracking your mood with your smartphone? Recording your workouts, diet and/or weight? Using a Fitbit, Withings scale, or heart-rate monitor?
Quantified Self is "self-knowledge through numbers" and we want to hear your self-tracking stories! Sign up to give a talk. Our content comes from our community. Show us your graphs, spreadsheets, biometric devices, practical solutions and crazy notions. They are all welcome. We focus on real self-tracking projects involving your personal data.

Or just bring your enthusiasm and come to marvel and learn with us. Sharing is not required if you're just curious to see what this is about!

Agenda:

• 6 to 6:30 pm: Doors open. Social time. This is an opportunity to meet other self-trackers and catch up with friends.

• 6:30 to 7 pm: Group Mind. Do you have a tool that you’re working on, or a self-tracking idea that you want feedback on? The format for Group Mind is 2.5 minutes to talk about your question, project, issue, proposal or challenge and 2.5 minutes to solicit ideas and brainstorming from our members. It is a great way to kick-start or problem-solve your QS issue. You’ll be able to sign up to participate on the day of the event.

• 7 to 8 pm: Scheduled Show & Tell talks. These are 7 minute talks with 5 minutes for questions. This is the meat & potatoes of QS meetups. This is an opportunity to share your story with your peers. Please contact us in advance if you want to give one.

• 8 to 8:30 pm: Walk-on Show & Tell talks. These are 5 minutes with time for a couple questions. They are signed up for on the day of the event, using a sheet at the welcome table. We’ll go through as many as we can, time permitting.

• 8:30 pm onward: The discussion continues over drinks at a pub to-be-named later! This is a good opportunity to talk with presenters or follow-up on an issue that came up in the Group Mind. If you can join us, I very much encourage you to do so. Not only is it good fun, but the conversations are invigorating.

If you're interested in doing a Show & Tell, please mention it in your RSVP or email the organizers in advance. If we hear from you before the meetup, you’ll have a little more time and be guaranteed to talk. You can also sign up on the day of the event as a walk-on.

A note if you plan on presenting: don’t think that this needs to be a TED Talk. We call it Show & Tell for a reason. This is just like first grade. All you have to do is come up, show us something and tell us about it. You can use slides if you want, but it is not required.

One thing that will help with your talk is to structure it around these three questions: What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn? Remember, sharing is important and valuable even if you share your failures - you never know when someone else will be trying the same thing and you can help them avoid the mistakes that you made! We want to hear your personal stories, and that means really human things like struggling with motivation, experiencing setbacks, and hopefully, every so often, having a flash of insight! Keep it informal. Keep it honest. You're in a safe place.

It helps to watch videos of previous QS talks. This link explains why these three questions make for a good talk.

Finally, thanks to our friends at PuppetLabs for providing the space. And feel free to tweet at the event - #QuantifiedSelf #QSPDX

We can't wait to see you there!

Anyone who has seen a few generations of computer technology knows that each generation brings in a whole new vocabulary. It seems like the same old thing but with all of the names changed. Why do they do that?

It helps us get unstuck. That's the short answer. Each generation brings with it unfamiliar capabilities. It takes serious effort to find application for those capabilities and hiding the good stuff among the familiar just makes doing new things harder.

In this presentation I'll describe my own lurch forward over the last two years. The web, which has been stuck in its own way, has busted free. Its a great time to try something new. Some of this is technology, some methodology, and some community. All of it impresses me. Let me tell you why it's important.

Bio: Ward Cunningham made the first wiki 18 years ago to host the conversation that became agile software developments. Now, two years into developing a truly modern wiki he finds that he must approach programming a completely different way.

This event is free and is at Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion.

This event is free, but please RSVP: http://ta3m-pdx-4.eventbrite.com/

What is it?

This is the third Techno-Activism 3rd Monday event for Portland, Oregon! Read more about techno-activism 3rd mondays.

Who should come?

Anyone interested in techno-activism. We invite coders, geeks, artists, and anyone else. No technical experience required.

Who's hosting?

The Privly Foundation will organize this and future TA3M Portland events. Puppet Labs is generously providing space. The folks at OpenITP are providing refreshments.

Event Description

Current Events - Research something that happened in the last month that is of interest to TA3M folk, then email [email protected] to be put on the schedule. These should be very short but informative updates.

• Did we find out that all web cryptography is broken? -- Sean McGregor

Talk by Steve Wyshywaniuk! - Steve is co-founder of Small World News, an organization dedicated to helping people around the world tell better stories through media. For the last seven years he has worked in Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, as well as remotely with teams in Libya and Mexico to create content for international audiences. He has a life long passion for using technology as well as a formal education in film and media arts.

Steve will be sharing his experience of what works and fails from a technological and social perspective, and how he and his colleagues are putting their efforts into StoryMaker, an open source android app so that anybody can learn how to create great content.

Demo time! After the talk/Q&A, we will reserve time for folks to demo their favorite security/privacy tech tool. If you would like to be be a demoer, please let us know at [email protected], and we will work you into the schedule.

PDXTech4Good

If you're interested in this event, you might also be interested in the PDXTech4Good meetup.

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group.

Important note: This group meets on the 1st Monday of every month. Because of the Labor Day holiday, we have decided to move the September meeting to the 2nd Monday. We will return to our regular 1st Monday schedule in October.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

Agenda for September 9

• 6:30 - 7:00: Eat pizza and talk to other Puppet users
• 7:00 - 7:45: Ben Kero: Vee: A holistic approach to Puppet CI
• 7:45 - 8:30: Joe Wagner: Introducing Puppet Enterprise’s Event Inspector

If you have an idea for what you would like to see or if you want to volunteer to present a talk, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

Who: YOU and all members of the local active Agile community (i.e., anyone who's doing any form of Agile - or wishes they could)

What: We invite you to join us in looking at future opportunities for AgilePDX.

When: On our regular meeting date, 3rd Wednesday, August 21

Why: Because "self-organizing" "collaborative" "responding to change"

How: Alicia Lanier (our facilitator) will help us stay on track as we take a couple of hours to look at:

• our draft Purpose and how it influences our decisions

• where we are now and how we got here (3+ meetings at different days, times of day, and geographic locations!)

• what that tells us about where we'd like to be

• what next steps will help us get there

Not one of our usual meetings, but more of an AgilePDX-wide retrospective and continuous improvement event. Please join us in service to the local Agile community. AgilePDX can be the best user group EVER!

This event is free, but please RSVP: http://ta3m-pdx-3.eventbrite.com/

What is it?

This is the third Techno-Activism 3rd Monday event for Portland, Oregon! Read more about techno-activism 3rd mondays.

Who should come?

Anyone interested in techno-activism. We invite coders, geeks, artists, and anyone else. No technical experience required.

Who's hosting?

The Privly Foundation will organize this and future TA3M Portland events. Puppet Labs is generously providing space. The folks at OpenITP are providing refreshments.

Event Description

Steve Mancini will be speaking with us about "The impact of disruptive innovation and privacy on your average hair stylist". A bit about him: After spending way too many years and dollars pursuing college degrees, Steve Mancini eventually had to enter the real world. A trek from the East coast to the West coast landed him a job in large corporation out in the burbs and after a decade+ of working there he has learned a thing or two about computer security, hacking, forensics, and incident response. He’s worn many hats and titles; his current is Harbinger of Doom (no really, it is on his business card).

Demo time! After the talk/Q&A, we will reserve time for folks to demo their favorite security/privacy tech tool. If you would like to be be a demoer, please let us know at [email protected], and we will work you into the schedule.

PDXTech4Good

If you're interested in this event, you might also be interested in the PDXTech4Good meetup.

CALL FOR SPEAKERS: We're currently looking for people willing to give 5-25 minute talks for the August and future meetups. It can be a presentation or just a show and tell of some new mixin, framework or cool new toy. Ping me if you are interested.

The presentations will start at 6pm and be done a little after 7 giving everyone plenty of time to mingle over food and talk about all things Sassy.

We will be broadcasting live and recording this session. So if you can't make it in person you can still catch all of the action on this event page.

Follow us on twitter @PDXSass

If you missed last month's meetup you can view the video and get the slides here: https://plus.google.com/events/cgmhi963mq5lms840pdetc1qh6s Transit and parking info:There is paid parking near Puppet Labs or you can park on the West side of 405 at no charge.

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

Agenda:

• 6:30 - 7:00: Eat pizza and talk to other Puppet users
• 7:00 - 7:45: Intro to the Puppet Forge - Ryan Coleman
• 7:45 - 8:30: Panel: Module Best Practices - Ryan Coleman

If you have an idea for what you would like to see or if you want to volunteer to present a talk, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

Note: This event is free but please RSVP at http://ta3m-pdx-2.eventbrite.com

What is it?

This is the second Techno-Activism 3rd Monday event for Portland, Oregon! Read more about techno-activism 3rd mondays.

Who should come?

Anyone interested in techno-activism. We invite coders, geeks, artists, and anyone else. No technical experience required.

Who's hosting?

The Privly Foundation will organize this and future TA3M Portland events. Puppet Labs is generously providing space.

Event Description

We're excited to have Kees Cook chat with us this month. He will most likely be talking about digital surveillance and physical privacy. A little more about him: Kees Cook has been working with Free Software since 1994, and has been a Debian Developer since 2007. He is currently employed by Google to work on Chrome OS Security. From 2006 through 2011 he worked for Canonical as the Ubuntu Security Team's Tech Lead, and remains on the Ubuntu Technical Board. Before that, he worked at OSDL where he helped admin the mirrors at kernel.org, and sometimes hacked on Inkscape. He has written various utilities including GOPchop and Sendpage, and contributes randomly to other projects including fun chunks of code in Wine, MPlayer, OpenSSH,and Wireshark. He's been spending most of his time lately focused on security features in the Linux Kernel.

Interested in contributing to Puppet? Want to come hang out with fun people and do geeky things all day? Come to our Triage-A-Thon on Saturday, July 13!

Anyone can participate. Our goal is to review all the open tickets in the Puppet and Module projects. We’ll assign blocks of tickets to every participant, explain what you need to do, and provide people on the ground to answer questions and help you make decisions.

We’ll also provide bagels, a delicious lunch (from Nicholas), snacks and space in our Portland, OR offices. Virtually we’ll provide an IRC channel (#puppethack), IM, and rewards for people who triage tickets and get involved.

The first 200 people who help for at least 2 hours will be sent a special edition Puppet Triage-a-Thon 2013 t-shirt, and we'll have additional prizes for top participants!

Free Pizza! Ok, now that I have your attention: Welcome to the first meetings of the Portland Sass & Front-end Meetup Group! We'll be meeting the 2nd Thursday of every month at Puppet Labs in the Pearl District. The presentation will start at 6pm and be done a little after 7 giving everyone plenty of time to mingle over pizza and talk about all things Sassy.

Pitch ideas, form teams, and build something amazing in 24 hours.

What should I bring? Bring anything that you think will make yourself productive. You definitely need a laptop, but anything beyond that is up to you!

Are we expected to sleep? The venue will be open overnight, but you can choose to sleep or keep working overnight! Please bring a pillow or sleeping bag if you feel that will make you more comfortable.

Are there any age requirements? No, the event is open to all currently enrolled students.

What languages can we use? There are no restrictions to what tools you can use (other than a few intended to prevent cheating, check the rules). If you use a language which few people know, you will have more difficulty getting help.

Some languages which are commonly used:

C#/XNA Java C++ Javascript Objective C Construct PHP Python Corona Will there be food? Yep! We'll provide lunch and dinner on Saturday, a midnight snack, and breakfast on Sunday. The cost of food is included in your ticket.

Can I go even if I don't know anything? Of course! Part of the fun of a hackathon is figuring out things as you go along. We'll also have some great workshops that you can attend. Or just hang out and have fun!

How big are the teams? We suggest 3-6 people per team. 8 is the absolute max. You can be a team of 1.

Can I be on multiple teams? Yes.

Do I need a group to attend? We'll be forming teams at the event, so you don't need to know anyone beforehand. Just show up!

Is it possible to make an app or game in such a short time? Yes! We're constantly amazed by the results of CodeDay events! Check out S.S. Halfling, and Running Blind, both games led by students at Redmond HS in Washington.

Are there any more official rules? Check out The Official Rules.

How can I contact you? Just email [email protected]

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

We'll also be holding a raffle at 8:30pm where you can enter to win a free ticket to PuppetConf on August 22-23!

Agenda:

• 6:30 - 7:00: Eat pizza and talk to other Puppet users
• 7:00 - 7:45: Intro to Systems Orchestration with MCollective - Devon Peters
• 7:45 - 8:30: Open discussion and general Q&A
• 8:30: Raffle for a free PuppetConf ticket!

If you have an idea for what you would like to see or if you want to volunteer to present a talk, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

Come hear quick stories from the community of Agile Highs and Agile lows.

This event is free and is at Puppet Labs. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion.

RSVP to this FREE event on eventbrite

What is it?

This is the first Techno-Activism 3rd Monday event for Portland, Oregon! Read more about techno-activism 3rd mondays.

Who should come?

Anyone interested in techno-activism. We invite coders, geeks, artists, and anyone else. No technical experience required.

Who's hosting?

The Privly Foundation will organize this and future TA3M Portland events. Puppet Labs is generously providing space. Gliph is providing free refreshments for attendees.

Event Description

We'll be chatting with James Vasile. James directs the Open Internet Tools Project, which supports development of anti-censorship and anti-surveillance tools. He is a partner at Open Tech Strategies, which advises organizations and businesses as they navigate the open-source world. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Software Freedom Law Center, where he acts as a strategic advisor on a range of free software efforts.

James has helped boot up a number of free software organizations, including the FreedomBox Foundation, Open Source Matters, and the Software Freedom Conservancy. His FreedomBox work has been recognized by an Innovation Award at Contact Summit 2011, as well as an Ashoka ChangeMaker’s award for Citizen’s Media.

You can learn more about James at JamesVasile.com.

The monthly PDX Puppet User Group.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Who should attend? Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

We'll also be holding a raffle at 8:30pm where you can enter to win a free ticket to PuppetConf on August 22-23!

Agenda:

• 6:30 - 7:00: Eat pizza and talk to other Puppet users
• 7:00 - 7:45: Intro to PuppetDB - Nick Lewis
• 7:45 - 8:30: Exported Resources - Spencer and William
• 8:30: Decide if we should meet on July 1 (scheduled), push to July 8 or cancel July
• 8:30: Raffle for a free PuppetConf ticket!

If you have an idea for what you would like to see or if you want to volunteer to present a talk, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

This month at our evening meeting we will be hearing from another local exec who champions agile in his organization. Rony Lerner, VP of Engineering at Tripwire, will share how he stumbled upon Scrum and will argue that a top down approach is more effective than a bottom up approach to agile adoptions.

Don’t be shy. Bring your toughest questions and your management team. Rony can take it.

Bio: When Aaron (Rony) Lerner joined Tripwire as Vice President of Engineering he brought years of product development and management experience to Tripwire’s recognized team of industry experts. Rony is responsible for growing and extending the company’s market-leading software products across a wide range of industries to help customers meet compliance regulations, improve security and drive IT efficiency. Prior to joining Tripwire, Rony was Vice President of Research and Development for the Database Management Business Unit of Quest Software Inc., where he led the development and release of more than 40 products, with 250 engineers distributed in 20 locations across four continents. Rony earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. Rony also served eight years in the Israeli Air Force, where he received intensive technical and officer's leadership training. He retired with the rank of Major.

The first meeting of what will be a monthly PDX Puppet User Group.

Join the PDX Puppet Google Group to get notifications of upcoming meetings.

Details:

• When: May 6 from 6:30 - 8:30
• Where: Puppet Labs 926 NW 13th Ave #210, Portland, OR
• Who: Puppet users and people interested in learning more about Puppet.

Agenda:

• 6:30 - 7:00: Eat pizza
• 7:00 - 8:00: Puppet Overview / Q&A with Luke Kanies (Founder of Puppet)
• 8:00 - 8:30: Operating System Support in Puppet with Mike Stahnke

If you have an idea for what you would like to see on a future agenda or if you want to volunteer to present a talk, please post those ideas in the PDX Puppet Google Group

Advancing the Careers of Women in Tech
4/30/2013

When: Tuesday, April 30th 4:30 - 8:30 PM Where: Puppet Labs 926 NW 13th Ave Portland, Oregon 97209 United States Contact: Kari Naone ([email protected])

REGISTRATION INFORMATION Online registration is available until: 5/1/2013 Register for this event » https://sao.site-ym.com/events/register.asp?id=304711

DETAILS Advancing the Careers of Women in Tech brought to you by: TAO, Women in IT, and ChickTech

A few PDX orgs passionate about increasing the numbers of women in tech invite women of all levels of interest and involvement in tech to join them for a career-building interactive booths, networking, and refreshments. Whether you have a lot to learn or a bit to teach, we hope you join us.

Schedule:

4:30 -- Registration, Networking, Refreshments,

5:00 -- Career Booths Open

5:30 -- Welcome From Hosts (TAO, WIIT and ChickTech)

5:45 -- Career Booths Re-open

8:15 -- Closing (15 min warning)

8:30 -- End

Career Booths:

1. Improve your elevator pitch through effective body language

2. Practice your interview skills with mock interviews with local tech recruiters

3. Get great ideas on how to improve your resume with a one on one resume review with local tech recruiter

4. Learn how to survive a tech interview with Celia Cottle of Puppet Lab

5. Talk with style experts on professional presentation

6. Learn about mentoring and supporting a motivated HS girl through ChickTech's mentoring program

7. More!

Price: FREE! Free to attend however registration is required

Date: April 30, 2013

Time: 4:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Place: Puppet Labs, 926 NW 13th Ave, Portland, OR 97209

To Register via PDX Women in IT - http://lanyrd.com/2013/pdxwiitapr13/

Donations are welcome – help support ChickTech by donating today! http://www.chicktech.org/

Thank you to our presenting sponsor:

Comcast Business

Supporting Sponsor:

SalesForce

Additional sponsorship opportunities available - contact [email protected].

Come join an amazing group of ladies! No specific agenda, just network and have fun!

This month we are joining forces with ChickTech and the Technology Association of Oregon (TAO) to offer a night of networking and workshops! Food and bevys will be provided!

PDX Women in Information Technology exists to celebrate professional women in the Portland-metro area who work with, manage, lead or have an interest in technology. Whether you are developing event-driven, non-blocking applications in node.js or setting technology strategy for a Fortune 500 company–or anything in between–come join us!

@PDXWiIT

vendors: This is a friendly networking event only

pdxdevops is a Portland, Oregon user group that explores the glorious intersection of software development and systems operations, and shares practical advice on working effectively in an era of agile infrastructure, server automation and cloud computing. Meetings are usually on the third Monday of the month. Website: http://pdxdevops.org/ && Twitter: @pdxdevops

This meeting was rescheduled from 4-15.

Currently lined up to speak are:

• Aaron Bento: Using AWS Cloudformation & Chef
• Spencer Krum: Zero to Root

What do a 17th century painter’s workshop, an international photographic cooperative, and an early 20th century design house have in common with a modern software development team? On the surface it may not seem like much, but bringing a group of makers together to work presents special challenges and opportunities, regardless of field.

In this session we’ll explore what worked, and didn’t, for several groups of historical makers. We’ll draw parallels with agile software development teams, and discuss coaching strategies around the examples provided.

Nathaniel Cadwell has over thirteen years of strategic consulting experience in software development, Agile enablement, and change management, helping organizations achieve dramatic improvement in the efficiency of their software delivery. In his current role, Nathaniel is an Agile Coach working closely with software development teams. He has presented, or co-presented, sessions on Agile coaching, Agile portfolio management, and facilitation skills at multiple venues in the United States and abroad.

Details and Pizza:

This event is free. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion.

OpenStack Summit Party

Puppet Labs

Tuesday, April 16, 2013 from 8:30 PM to 11:00 PM (PDT)

Portland, OR

As developers, we've created heuristics that help us build robust systems and employed test-driven development (TDD) to improve code design and counter instability. Yet object-oriented development principles and TDD have failed to gain traction in the database world. That’s because database development involves an additional driving force—the data.

Max Guernsey shows how to treat databases as objects with classes of their own—rather than as containers of objects—and how to drive database designs from tests. He illustrates a way to give these database classes the ability to upgrade old data without introducing undue risk. Max also shares how to apply good object-oriented design principles to database classes and how to enforce semantic connections between databases and clients. Max demonstrates how it all works together, ensuring that your production databases work exactly the same as test databases, minimizing the risk of design changes, and enabling client applications to more easily keep up with database changes.

Come for pizza & networking from 6:30pm. The program starts at 7:00 pm.

Speaker Bio Max Guernsey is currently a Managing Member at Hexagon Software LLC. He has 15 years of experience as a professional software developer. For nearly half that time, he has been blogging, writing, and delivering lectures on the topic of agile and test-driven database development. For much of Max’s professional career, he has been a consultant, advising a variety of software companies in many different industries using multiple programming and database technologies. In most of these engagements, he spent months or even years helping teams implement cutting-edge techniques such as test-driven development, object-oriented design, acceptance-test-driven development, and agile planning.

Max has always been a “hands-on” consultant, working with teams for long periods of time to help them build both software and skills. This series of diverse, yet deep, engagements helped him gain a unique understanding of the database-related testing and design problems that impede most agile teams. Since 2005, he has been thinking, writing, blogging, lecturing, and creating developer-facing software dedicated to resolving these issues.

Max posts regularly on his Twitter account (@MaxGuernseyIII) and his blog (maxg3prog.blogspot.com).

Mark Lawler on Why He Loves and Hates Agile

One of our local madmen is coming to talk to AgilePDX at Puppet Labs on February 20 at 6:30p. Having clawed his way up from the ranks of programmer, Mark Lawler now sits on top of 40 agile teams at Cambia Health Solutions (formerly Regence Blue Cross/Blue Shield). Barreling his way through yet another enterprise agile transition the last couple of years, Lawler occasionally shouts out the world what he loves and hates about agile to any of us who are willing to listen. Carrying around the title of Chief Technical Officer for one of the largest employers in the Portland metro area doesn’t slow him down one bit. Come prepared to listen to an agile executive talk about why agile is the best way to drive an organization to thrive.

As Lawler says on his blog, “I love Agile; I also hate Agile. I love how it can free teams to truly delight customers while delivering high quality products on time. I hate how Agile zealots can use the Tower of Agile Babble to confuse the heck out of teams trying Agile on for size. My goal is to help new teams actually embrace and become Agile without having to learn all of the pomp and circumstance in one big fat swallow.”

Mark Lawler is the VP and Chief Technology Officer of Cambia Health Solutions, responsible for transformative IT strategies, technologies and efforts for its portfolio companies. With over 30 Agile teams the group delivers and supports solutions across the business spectrum, including award winning products that are sold and hosted in a SaaS model to other leading health insurance payers. A Portland, Oregon based technology executive with over 20 years of experience of delivering software products, Mark believes strongly in the mantra of delivering high quality products on time while delighting customers.

You can find Mark sharing his opinions on technology, software development and quality, as well as Agile methodologies as @mark_lawler on Twitter and through his blog at: http://markslawler.wordpress.com/

About Cambia Health Solutions Cambia Health Solutions is a nonprofit total health solutions company based in the Pacific Northwest/Intermountain region, serving consumers and communities for nearly 100 years. Cambia companies provide a wide range of products and services, including health care information technology and software development, retail health care, health insurance, life insurance, pharmacy benefit management, consumer engagement and wellness.

Agile Fluency Tune-Up

It's time for your annual tune-up! Do you want to get more mileage out of your Agile teams? Is one of your New Years' resolutions to figure out how to get the results Agile promises? If so, come to AgilePDX's annual tune-up session, hosted by James Shore and Diana Larsen. They'll walk you through four levels of Agile fluency and how to make the leap from one level to the next, then help you apply those ideas to your real-world situation. You'll go home with specific, actionable ideas you can use with your own teams.

Details and Pizza:

This event is free. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion.

Arlo Belshee and James Shore present "This One Goes to 121:"

We will explore excellence. What it is, how one achieves it, and how one exceeds it. What determines the outer limits of your team s capability? How can you be continually more awesome? We've each got a decade of transitioning to (Jim), being on (Arlo), and building (both) awesome Agile teams.

Details and Pizza:

This event is free. It begins at 6:30 pm with pizza, sponsored by PNSQC (Many thanks to both Puppet Labs and PNSQC for supporting agile in Portland).

The program starts at 7:00 pm.

After the program you're invited to join us for a no-host gathering at a nearby brewpub for further discussion of launching Agile Projects.

Join in the Global Day of Code Retreat!

Make sure you sign up for the event on the website provided. This is an all day event and the registration is critical for us to figure out catering.