Hey Techies, let’s get together for another meetup! Meeting in the new conference/training room at the WTEC, we will have the following speakers and presentations.
Presentation: Students and Robotics!
Wendy Parker and Josh Moody are Engineering Teachers at Amarillo Area Center for Advanced Learning (AACAL). They teach classes through Project Lead the Way which is a nationally recognized program that offers high school students college and AP credit. In addition, they are coaches for the Atomic Armadillos, a FIRST robotics team that meets at the school in the evenings. Their experience with FIRST has inspired them to recruit and develop more FIRST teams in the Amarillo area at all levels of competition. Their presentation is over the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), how an FRC Team operates, and what is needed to start a team at the FRC level, but also at other levels targeted at younger students: junior FIRST Lego League (Jr FLL), FIRST Lego League (FLL), and FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC).
Afterwards, we’ll have a discussion of our 2nd annual hackathon, the Yellow City Hack-A-Thon, and provide some details pertaining to the event.
Winter, we hardly knew ye. Spring is here, and it’s time to plant those seeds that will blossom in 2018. In keeping with the theme of new starts, we will be meeting in the brand new building at The Enterprise Center. Our speakers:
Duncan Miertschin – Bored Games Necessity may be the mother of invention, but Duncan will be speaking to us about how boredom can be the origin of creativity.
Duncan, a senior at Amarillo High School, loves public speaking and the sciences and always advocates for people to do their own research and for change. He has been a state and national qualifier for Speech and Debate, and is a member of the National Honor Society.
Bill Glover – Starting With Zero
Bill will show you how to take some of those ideas to the next logical step with a live coding demo. Take your simple web app ideas live for next to nothing and still scale fast if the idea takes off. Topics touched on will include Microservices, Serverless Architecture, Content Distribution Networks, Source Control and programming language agnostic development.
Bill has been building software for all kinds of organizations for 30 years and enjoys helping other people learn how to do the same better and faster.
(Bluebonnets Photo by Roberta Guillen on Unsplash)
As Winter comes and 2017 draws to a close, it’s a great time to look back over our year and make plans for the next. The theme for this meeting is wishlists and how they might inspire us to come up with new ideas.
Chuck Dooley will speak to us about his wishlist for new businesses and projects from the perspective of an investor.
David Terry will share his wishlist for startups, and talk about ideas and qualities he would like to see more of from the next crop of entrepreneurs.
Bill Glover will talk about our year in retrospect and also about ways to help the community in 2018.
You’ve heard it before, “This is a good wage for Amarillo.” Local businesses reduce their cost by tying compensation to local cost of living. But what if you could turn the tables and make New York, London, San Francisco money while paying Amarillo costs?
The chief impact of the Internet is to make the location less important. Two people don’t have to be right next to each other to work together anymore. Many people living in Amarillo work daily with colleagues all over the world. How can you find a gig like that? This talk will cover some of the resources and skills needed to find and keep a remote gig.
Amarillo Tech Meetup Project Updates
Adopt a Business Update: DeWayne Higgs
Programming Club Update: Barek Bently
Make-A-Thon Update: Bill Glover
Beyond Digital Currency: Ethereum and Digital Contracts
Imagine a world where two machines can negotiate a binding contract in real time with no human intervention. That could be pretty incredible even if it’s a website buying a container of product from a factory server in China. Now imagine if, instead, those two machines are cars approaching an intersection and the contract is for who “owns” the intersection for .5 second 10 seconds from now. Who wild is a world where a contract replaces a stoplight? There’s a whole new platform for applications growing out of Ethereum, learn more about the possibilities and the sought-after skill required to write Ethereum contracts.
It’s about that time, again! On June 13th at 6:00 pm at the WT Enterprise Center, we’ll be having another meetup.
Food for this meetup is sponsored by Jerri Glover, Realtor.
We’ll talk about the progress regarding our initiatives and hear some great presentations from our speakers!
In addition to the scheduled fare, there will also be some fun and games as brought to you by Bill Glover, and the winner will receive one-hundredth of a bitcoin (approximately valued at $26 given current market rates).
I encourage you all to attend, meet up, have fun, hear a few good presentations, and have some free food! Be sure to RSVP and I’ll see you there!
The following are our speakers in no particular order:
Mark Nair – Discussion on Network Building with Problem-solving Tech People and Maker Spaces in Amarillo.
Mark Nair is an inventor and entrepreneur. He has spent more than 20 years in the entertainment industry building digital platforms that handle digital content, rights management, and digital distribution. He has worked closely with large retailers, including Walmart, to develop digital marketing strategies for in-store promotions and events including the first generation Walmart.com website. He has built retail custom CD and DVD burning kiosks, in-store ringtone distribution stations, music and book promotional stations, digital signage displays, and back-end massively scalable content management systems.
He has produced one of the Internet’s earliest and largest live streaming events for Nick Lachey and 98 Degrees, as well as producing innovative digital marketing campaigns for Willie Nelson, Stephen King, and many other well-known artists. He’s worked with Thomas Dolby and Headspace Labs on the design of early polyphonic ringtones.
He has worked with Nokia in Helsinki on content for their early digital smartphone prototypes as well as with Phillips Electronics in Eindhoven on smart audio waveform interpretation for digital compression. Recently he has spent time in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen, China with Quanta computer on designing a new type of e-book reader based on dynamic LCD light-sensitive displays. He is currently working on blockchain technology to improve the transfer of digital property ownership.
Mark has his undergraduate and Master’s degrees from Texas A&M University and attended law school at the University of Texas School of Law.
He has been a member of the San Antonio Arts and Grants Commission, a board member of the Don Harrington Discovery Center, Wildcat Bluff Nature Center, Big Brothers Big Sisters, the Amarillo Adult Literacy Council, Panhandle 20/Twenty, Haven Health Clinics, the Amarillo Little Theater, and Mariposa Eco Village. He has served on the Amarillo City Council as an elected council-member. He is an adjunct technology instructor at Ascension Academy, a local college prep school. He has won awards for poetry and fiction and is currently working on a series of detective science novels for children.
Christopher George – Introduction to Digital Forensics using Open Source Software
Abstract: In a world of digital anarchy, IT professionals and law enforcement must be capable of acquiring, preserving, and analyzing digital sources of evidence as malicious digital activity occurs. By leveraging open source tools professionals can expedite this process and ensure that the integrity of the evidence acquired is maintained.
Mr. George has been working in the IT industry for 18 years and is the owner of Route 66 Computer Company where he supports his break/fix clients and consults on all matters IT. He holds an Associate’s degree in Electronics Systems Technologies from Amarillo College and a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Management from Oklahoma Panhandle State University. Mr. George holds several IT industry certifications from CompTIA and Cisco and has been an instructor of Cybersecurity and Networking for the past 4 years at Amarillo College. In the past two years, Mr. George has developed and delivered a multidisciplinary curriculum in Digital Forensics available to students in the Paralegal and Cybersecurity programs. He also has completed training with the Public Agency Training Council (PATC) and Frisco police department in Mobile Device and Cellphone Records Investigations. Other training includes Digital Forensics Basics and Incident Response with the Texas Engineering Extension Agency (TEEX), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Most recently Mr. George has been a judge for the National Black T-shirt Cyber Forensic Challenge.
We’ll be going over the survey results and plans for the year.
Snacks this time are sponsored by USA Land and Ranch Realty and Auctions.
We also have a great line-up of speakers!
Paul M. Sigle – The Groundwater Interactive Map
The North Plains Groundwater Conservation District has developed the Groundwater Interactive Map to better serve those within our district. This interactive map allows those involved with groundwater production to access information on wells across the District in a number of ways. Local producers can view district’s submitted well logs, Texas Water Development Board’s databases, hydrological maps, and current and past water levels.
Edgar Bolivar – Omnidirectional 3D Printing
Edgar Bolivar is founder of Petricor LLC and author of the book titled Minerva Initiative – “Unlocking the secrets of electromagnetic radiation.” He will be speaking about the Omnidirectional 3D Printer (petricor.org).
Matt Herzberger – Building action-oriented web information architecture: call to action for successful business outcomes.
Think about your website as a means to ends for both you and your customer, be it asking for a brochure, calling to gets your hours or purchasing a product your customer comes to your website with a goal in mind. Every page on your website should have an intended outcome. Matt will share best practices on how to optimize your site to propel your business forward and motivate your customers to action.
James Baker – Become the Craftsman
James Baker is a Senior Software Engineer at LinkedIn in Sunnyvale, California. He works on the Feed team, specializing in UI development. He is also a technology evangelist and public speaker focused on topics such as leadership, craftsmanship, site performance, and security.
It has been quite a year in technology and in the region!
For out fourth Tech Meetup, it’s time to have a look back over the year and also begin planning for the next, so this meetup will have two parts. The first part will be our standard format with two speakers. The Second part will be a short business meeting to make this club official and begin to provide more services and events.
Technology Highlights Of 2016
We have seen quite a bit of change this year both in technology in general and specifically in technology industries in the panhandle. This will be a quick overview of the highlights and some insights into what we might expect next.
Speaker: Aaron Howerton
Instant Gratification: Launch Your Next Project Fast With Node.js For Hackathons
You have a great idea for a side project or even a Software as a Service (SaaS) business. The best way to make sure it will work is to put it out there for people to use, but how do you get started? We will walk through how to create a new application from scratch with Node.js for Hackathons. This is also a chance to see how cloud development works and what “Full Stack Developer” really means without having to get bogged down in details.
Speaker: Bill Glover
Business Meeting
It’s time to make this thing official, so you are cordially invited to attend the business meeting after the speakers. Everyone attending is automatically a Member of the Board. Bring your voting hand.
Agenda
Talk about what we want to do in 2017
Call for Volunteers
Programs – Help find people to speak. Think-up cool events.
It’s time for our second tech meetup event! Once again, we’re lining up some great presenters for the evening, and many thanks to the WT Enterprise Center for hosting.
The format will be similar to last time around and will happen on a weeknight evening, Tuesday, May 24th. More details coming in the next week+.
6 pm: arrival, snacks, and chat
6:15 – 6:30: welcome and sponsors
6:30 – 7:40: Presentations and Q&A
It’s Always 3 am Somewhere: Getting Work Done With A Globally Distributed Team – Bill Glover of Frame / Bright Canopy
3D Laser Scanning, David Salas & Jacob Moreno of Altura Engineering & Design
Solar Power Industry & Private Power Grids, Stephanie Billingsly of Private Power Solutions
7:40 – onwards: networking & community announcements.
Looking forward to the exciting presentations and seeing everyone there!
It’s about time for our first meetup! Many thanks to the WT Enterprise Center for hosting the event – we’re locked in for an evening of great presentations and conversations on Tuesday, February 23rd.
