Have you ever been excited to tinker with a software project, only to have trip Dependency Hell ruin all of the fun? Technologies like Docker aim to take the pain out of spinning up support services and installing runtimes. Join in as we scoff at the demo gods and create a complete Rails stack—web server to database—from scratch, without installing any software.

Swing by Quick Left for some foodz on us and your open ears to listen to one of our expert consultants in this Engineering Lunch tutorial.

Stop by Quick Left to see CEO of Consulting Ingrid Alongi give her wildly popular, data-driven talk - Deconstructing Women in Technology: What is the Data Really Telling Us? Ingrid's is passionate about creating an environment for our developers that harbors creativity and collaboration, and believe incorporating women on the team is a key element to what makes our company work so seamlessly.

In her opinion, there are 7 ways to promote a better performing team:

Make a commitment Host team building events during business hours Provide ample outlets for feedback to leadership team  Examine your hiring practices: from job posts to interviewing style  Examine your bonus and raise criteria - not everyone is good at asking  Having more women in leadership encourages more women in general 

Your job is a place of business where adults work, but it can still be fun! If you would like to see the stats on women in technology, and reasons why females aren't coming up the pipeline, check out the slideshare from Ingrid's keynote at GlueCon. This is one of the talks that you can't miss during Portland Startup Week! Plus we'll have Q afterwords and happy hour on Quick Left!

Get amped - Name.com does more than hosting. We're hosting our first Quick Left hackfest in Portland with them! And what better week than Portland Startup Week to do so! 

Aided by the increased processing speed of chips, capacity of batteries and precision of sensor technologies, devices are becoming smaller, faster and more feature heavy than ever before. Where is the power of wearables going? We're bringing it in hackfest form to Portland, OR! Register now for our hackfest Feb 4th and find out (or make it happen).

With the Quick Left wearable hackfest, we want take wearable data beyond the miles you pedal or calories burned. We want wearables to be useful in your daily life. According to technology research and advisory company Gartner, by 2020, developed world life expectancy will increase by 0.5 years due to widespread adoption of wireless health monitoring technology. Business leaders must examine the impact of increased wellness on insurance and employee costs as a competitive factor. Inspire innovation to affect this trend at our hackfest. If you've got ideas on what to do with health and exercise data (for humans, your pets or....), you'll want to get your hack on at Quick Left!

Wednesday, February 4th, doors open at 6pm, hacking begins at 6:30 Free beer and food provided by our awesome sponsors Teams formed night of Hack for 3 hrs (no previous feature design or code written, please) Winners will be chosen by our sponsors (hint, hint)

Thanks to our sponsor, Sparkfun, for supplying Lily Pad Design Kits. And Fitbit is giving away a Fitbit Flex wristband to the winning team and more sponsors to be announced shortly! Still need more convincing to join our hackfests? See three year's worth of Quick Left hackfests we've hosted here!

For our upcoming Networking Night at Quick Left, we're switching things up and featuring a talk on advanced networking techniques by Karen O'Keefe. This is a very important topic that each of us will face throughout our careers, and we're very lucky to have Karen joining us to impart her knowledge and experience.

Program

6:00-6:30 - Check-in + Networking
6:30-6:45 - Women Who Code Intro + Quick Left Intro
6:45-7:45 - Women and Negotiation: Professional Happines, One Conversation at a Time
7:45-8:30 - Networking + Wrap-up

Women and Negotiation: Professional Happiness One Conversation at a Time

When we hear the word ‘negotiation,’ most of us think about deal-making, buying and selling on behalf of a company, legal settlements, union/management contract negotiations, and mergers and acquisitions. In these cases, the negotiators follow a formal process to achieve their successes.

While important, not everyone is involved in buying and selling in this sense. Many of us are navigating workplace issues on our way to becoming respected professionals and leaders. Examples of our work conversations revolve around getting resources to do our job, priority for our projects, for getting new opportunities, support for our ideas, for advancement, to hammer out budget agreements, a change in title, or a change in work schedule. Negotiating skill is critical to accomplishing these goals. Today, we will learn how to apply a deal-maker’s formal negotiation process to our work conversations in order to achieve our goals, to bring professional happiness and to develop as leaders in our organizations.

About Karen O'Keefe: 

Karen O’Keefe is the founder of Advanced Negotiation Strategies, a training and consulting firm dedicated to helping professionals and business owners achieve breakthrough results by building personal and company-wide negotiation strength. She works with business owners and their teams to develop overall negotiation strategy, to prepare and plan for negotiations, and to build executives’ and managers’ negotiation skills through training.

Prior to launching her own firm, Karen enjoyed a successful 25-year career with several large manufacturing firms, where she held operations and financial responsibility for performance in the supply chain disciplines. She negotiated multi-million dollar logistics contracts and designed and managed service programs to support the flow of goods from suppliers through to the firms’ customers.

About Quick Left:

Quick Left Inc. is a leading provider of innovative software development services and tools with offices in Boulder, Denver, Portland and San Francisco. Its services team specializes in agile web development, mobile applications, design and team training/mentoring. The company also operates Sprintly, a development management platform designed to power a more productive relationship between teams and their managers. Together with Sprintly, Quick Left accelerates software product launches with a process defined by accountability, simplicity, scalability and today’s smartest web technologies. 

Visit Quick Left at quickleft.com.