Vacasa

Does using Facebook leave you lonely? Is staying in touch your family via Skype a mood-booster? How is sleep quality after screen time on your smartphone? In this presentation, Dr. Alan Teo, a physician and researcher at OHSU, will take a tour of selected highlights from his own research and the broader medical literature. Practical tips on how to promote mental wellness in the midst of our technological lives will be included.

Calorie restriction has been associated with greater longevity, how does that affect the brain? Gail Stonebarger is currently collaborating with the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to determine whether calorie restriction (CR) of 30% is able to delay or slow brain aging in rhesus macaque monkeys. Previously, CR has been shown in various species to enhance cognition and metabolic function, extend lifespan, and, in this population, extend healthspan. In this talk, Gail will discuss normal and pathological brain aging, the unique population of very old monkeys housed at the NIA, what effects CR has on the brain, and will also include future directions of this research.

The elusive product manager. Who are they? What do they do? What makes them most effective? Large, seminal studies have been done across various corporate leadership roles, but product management leadership remains a role with much less examination.

Join us for a discussion on the key findings from a recent survey of 300 product leaders conducted by Pendo and Product Collective. You’ll learn about PM career paths and progression, their spheres of responsibility, decision making authorities, alignment with other functions, reporting lines, and the outlook for the future of the role. Some of the findings are bound to surprise you, others will probably confirm what you suspected but didn’t know for sure.

Join Eric Boduch, chief evangelist and co-founder of Pendo, for a rich discussion on the key characteristics of the highest performing product leaders. If you’re a product manager, a product executive or aspire to hold a product leadership role, you’re bound to walk away better prepared to master your role.

About Eric

Eric Boduch has been involved with both startup and publicly traded software companies in senior management positions since 1995. He has extensive technology marketing, product management, strategy development, and business development experience. He has been a co-founder of 3 different startups that have raised over $75 million in aggregate and has been an executive at two different public companies.

He currently is a founder and the Chief Evangelist of Pendo, a venture-backed software company. Pendo delivers a complete platform for product teams that helps companies create products that customers love. With Pendo, product teams can understand product usage, collect feedback, measure NPS, onboard users, and announce new features in app - all without requiring engineering resources. Founded in 2013 and backed by Meritech Capital, Spark Capital, and Battery Ventures, Pendo has raised $56 million, and grown revenue by 400% in the past year. Used by hundreds of innovative software product leaders, Pendo tracks 20 billion user actions and improves the product experience for 22 million users every month.

Previously, he was CEO of SMaSh, a mobile SMS technology company, and was VP of Marketing for Vitria Inc., a publicly traded software vendor based in silicon valley. Before Vitria, Mr. Boduch held senior positions at Embarcadero Technologies, ProductSoft, and Cerebellum Software.

Eric has been a public speaker for multiple companies over the last 20 years. He has spoken at analyst conferences, universities, product camps, and company events. Today, he regularly speaks at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh on entrepreneurship speaks about product management at industry events like Industry, Pendomonium, and the CS100 Summit and has participated in regional product events in Toronto, Chicago, LA, and other U.S. cities. He has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

About VACASA:

Vacasa is the second largest U.S. technology-enabled vacation rental management company with operations in 16 U.S. states, Europe, and Central and South America. Leveraging proprietary technology, Vacasa drives revenue for homeowners and provides a seamless experience for guests. Founded in 2009 and based in Portland, Oregon, Vacasa has grown from two to more than 1,400 employees in eight years, has been honored as the Oregon Better Business Bureau Large Business of the Year and was ranked ninth on the Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Companies list.

Join us to learn about how alcohol affects the brain's decision-making (spoiler alert: not so great decision-making can happen!) along with how sex differences in the brain may have an effect on how this plays out.

Historically, the study of human consciousness was often considered to be outside the scope of scientific inquiry. Thanks to recent advances in brain imaging techniques and the development of various methods for manipulating consciousness in the lab, the scientific study of consciousness is now recognized as a mainstream topic of research within the cognitive neurosciences. In this talk Dr. Pitts will outline some of the recent progress in the field... Please RSVP at Meetup.com.

Inference, Deep Neural Nets, Hyper-Parameters, Sign Language and Visual Insights

Welcome to TensorFlow Northwest. It was exciting to have so many of you come out during February’s snow-mageddon. This month, we prepared a balanced agenda to have new contents, and to incrementally build on what you’ve learned. On the other hand, we built the labs in a way that will allow those who couldn’t beat the storm to catch up quickly.

Al Kari will begin with an introduction and a technology update, then he moves on to cover a key topic in TensorFlow: Saving your models so you can use them to classify new data. The discussion will cover best practices and techniques to use your trained models for inference and transfer learning.

Al is Manceps’ Co-founder and CEO (www.manceps.com) where he helps enterprise clients with their Digital Transformation and intelligent computing roadmaps.

Next, Andrew Ferlitsch will take you on a code-along adventure via Colaboratory- An Introduction to Constructing Neural Networks and Hyper-parameter Tuning.

You’ve kicked the tires with 5 digits hand signs last month. Now, we progressively build layers of a neural network for the larger dataset of the American Sign Language hand gestures including all the letters of the alphabet. We will cover a fully connected neural network, proceed to a deep neural network, and then add dropout layers to tackle overfitting. Then we wrap up with the fundamentals of hyper-parameter tuning. The lab requires a laptop with a modern browser and will be at a modest pace to provide sufficient opportunity to ask questions and share insights.

As Chief Data Scientist at Manceps, Andrew works on solving a diverse set of problems using Deep Learning and advanced analytics.

Finally, David Molina will demystify Neural Networks once and for all, visually! What does bias do in a Neural Network? Why are weights important? What happens when we select a high learning rate? How do we know how many inputs to select? How many hidden layers a model needs in order to predict accurately? How does a Neural Network work? These are questions we ask when we begin studying Machine Learning as we encounter our first Neural Network. David will explore visually what’s behind the code, and what happens inside a Neural Network when it runs.

David is an Industrial Engineer with five years corporate experience in building databases, managing and analyzing large data sets, and optimizing systems and processes. He is currently studying Machine Learning and consulting for companies in his native country of Colombia.

REMEMBER to bring your laptop

Pizza and drinks sponsored by Intel. Links to the labs will be posted shortly.

Hope you have a great time learning and networking.

We've got three awesome 15 minute talks for you this month!

Venue and Food
This month we're hosted by the fantastic folks at Vacasa, and food this month is brought to you by Apex Systems!

Our Talks
Setting Up AOT with ngUpgrade: We all love the CLI, but in an ngUpgrade project, you can't always use it. Yet we need to be able to take both Angular and AngularJS to production. That means we need to be able to set up our Angular project and our Webpack build to use Angular's AOT compiler. In this talk, Sam Julien will show you how to do it and what pitfalls to avoid.

_(ツ)_/¯ Works on my machine: a practical approach to TDD: How do you know if your code works? common stigma: [“You should writes tests", "If you don't write tests from the start, you'll never get around to it”, “I never have time to write tests”]. Nathan Brenner is here to show you how he got around these hurdles.

Say Bye Bye to Hybrid apps, and Hello to NativeScript: Ever wanted to develop native mobile apps but couldn’t find the time to learn new languages? Or, you tried hybrid app development but were not happy with the performance? NativeScript is here to offer you the best of hybrid and native development workflow. With NativeScript, you are already a Mobile app developer! You will get a development experience which is similar to the web, while still getting a native mobile app as the end result. AND you can get to market up to 5x faster than a native approach, with no compromise to performance. Shiva Prasad joins us remotely all the way from India for this exciting talk!

Our Speakers
Sam Julien (@samjulien) is the founder of UpgradingAngularJS.com and a C# and JavaScript developer at Energy Trust of Oregon. He's also the co-organizer of this meetup (woot!).

Nathan Brenner (@njbrenner) is a senior software engineer with lots of Angular experience. He's currently funemployed but that's subject to change.

Shiva Prasad (@MultiShiv19) is a Lead Software Developer at Bfit Technologies, a partner at nStudio.io, and a NativeScript Developer Expert.

Interested in getting a scientific perspective on managing adult ADHD? Integrated Neurobiology is a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding the mind. Greg Crosby, author of Transforming ADHD will give this talk addressing how ADHD affects the mind and strategies that can help overcome distraction and re-focus attention.

Interested in how neurons form and grow in the brain? Learn about the mechanics of brain development at Neurogeeks, a community of people interested in cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience. Please RSVP at Meetup with the link here.

Presentations begin at 6:30pm. We feature 2 awesome speakers that bring you the best that Portland (and beyond) has to offer in Node & JavaScript. Periodically we'll open with a brief lightning talk too.

Open dialogue during the presentations is very welcome–we're all here to learn!

Come a little early and say hi! The organizers will be available to help any newcomers with getting started. If you need help installing node and npm, or have questions or anything–please reach out.

Before our first talk we'll engage in a friendly Node quiz! Prizes include awesome learning materials sponsored by Cloudflare (eg. Books like "Effective JavaScript" by David Herman, and "Node.js in Action" by Harter, Cantelon, Rajlich, and Holowaychuk).

Our talks cover a variety of topics, presented by people with varying levels of experience. Some of our most recent speakers have been: Max Ogden, Substack, Chris Dickinson, Ben Acker, and more.

Afterwards, if you're stoked to keep hangin' we regularly take our discussions onward to post-talk drinks nearby! We may even hack a little if the night is young!

People who're new to programming and new friends to the Node community are very welcome! Say hi, make some noise, get to know folks, and ask questions!

Brief note about our location:

Please look for Nodesters standing by the door to let you in if it's locked! If you arrive beyond 6:35pm, please shoot us a tweet at @pdxnode, and we'll come as soon as we can to let you in. :)

Did you know that in the Portland metro area alone, there are over 50 organizations dedicated to helping entrepreneurs? But which ones can help YOU?

Our Startup Resource Tradeshow 2017 is the perfect starting point for new entrepreneurs trying to navigate our startup ecosystem. It includes representatives from local organizations, accelerators, incubators, and government programs that provide support, mentorship, and potential funding for entrepreneurs.

Learn more and register here: http://bit.ly/oen-tradeshow

Presentations begin at 6:30pm. We feature 2 awesome speakers that bring you the best that Portland (and beyond) has to offer in Node & JavaScript. Periodically we'll open with a brief lightning talk too.

Open dialogue during the presentations is very welcome–we're all here to learn!

Come a little early and say hi! The organizers will be available to help any newcomers with getting started. If you need help installing node and npm, or have questions or anything–please reach out.

Before our first talk we'll engage in a friendly Node quiz! Prizes include awesome learning materials sponsored by Cloudflare (eg. Books like "Effective JavaScript" by David Herman, and "Node.js in Action" by Harter, Cantelon, Rajlich, and Holowaychuk).

Our talks cover a variety of topics, presented by people with varying levels of experience. Some of our most recent speakers have been: Max Ogden, Substack, Chris Dickinson, Ben Acker, and more.

Afterwards, if you're stoked to keep hangin' we regularly take our discussions onward to post-talk drinks nearby! We may even hack a little if the night is young!

People who're new to programming and new friends to the Node community are very welcome! Say hi, make some noise, get to know folks, and ask questions!

Brief note about our location:

Please look for Nodesters standing by the door to let you in if it's locked! If you arrive beyond 6:35pm, please shoot us a tweet at @pdxnode, and we'll come as soon as we can to let you in. :)

f we were bold enough to attempt building a brain inside a computer, how much detail would our computer program require to pass as ‘convincingly intelligent’?

This should be a great meetup!

Presentations begin at 6:30pm. We feature 2 awesome speakers that bring you the best that Portland (and beyond) has to offer in Node & JavaScript. Periodically we'll open with a brief lightning talk too.

Open dialogue during the presentations is very welcome–we're all here to learn!

Come a little early and say hi! The organizers will be available to help any newcomers with getting started. If you need help installing node and npm, or have questions or anything–please reach out.

Before our first talk we'll engage in a friendly Node quiz! Prizes include awesome learning materials sponsored by Cloudflare (eg. Books like "Effective JavaScript" by David Herman, and "Node.js in Action" by Harter, Cantelon, Rajlich, and Holowaychuk).

Our talks cover a variety of topics, presented by people with varying levels of experience. Some of our most recent speakers have been: Max Ogden, Substack, Chris Dickinson, Ben Acker, and more.

Afterwards, if you're stoked to keep hangin' we regularly take our discussions onward to post-talk drinks nearby! We may even hack a little if the night is young!

People who're new to programming and new friends to the Node community are very welcome! Say hi, make some noise, get to know folks, and ask questions!

Brief note about our location:

Please look for Nodesters standing by the door to let you in if it's locked! If you arrive beyond 6:35pm, please shoot us a tweet at @pdxnode, and we'll come as soon as we can to let you in. :)

Presentations begin at 6:30pm. We feature 2 awesome speakers that bring you the best that Portland (and beyond) has to offer in Node & JavaScript. Periodically we'll open with a brief lightning talk too.

Open dialogue during the presentations is very welcome–we're all here to learn!

Come a little early and say hi! The organizers will be available to help any newcomers with getting started. If you need help installing node and npm, or have questions or anything–please reach out.

Before our first talk we'll engage in a friendly Node quiz! Prizes include awesome learning materials sponsored by Cloudflare (eg. Books like "Effective JavaScript" by David Herman, and "Node.js in Action" by Harter, Cantelon, Rajlich, and Holowaychuk).

Our talks cover a variety of topics, presented by people with varying levels of experience. Some of our most recent speakers have been: Max Ogden, Substack, Chris Dickinson, Ben Acker, and more.

Afterwards, if you're stoked to keep hangin' we regularly take our discussions onward to post-talk drinks nearby! We may even hack a little if the night is young!

People who're new to programming and new friends to the Node community are very welcome! Say hi, make some noise, get to know folks, and ask questions!

Brief note about our location:

Please look for Nodesters standing by the door to let you in if it's locked! If you arrive beyond 6:35pm, please shoot us a tweet at @pdxnode, and we'll come as soon as we can to let you in. :)