The Canadian government publishes climate data from thousands of individual weather stations going back decades. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to access for certain scenarios – particularly when you’re interested in a geography wider than a single station.
In this session Doug Sartori demonstrates a Python solution to access climate data in bulk and store it in a database table for analysis or visualization. Everyone is welcome and there is no cost to attend this hybrid event.
FinOps, AKA “how to manage your cloud costs and have all teams take ownership of their cloud usage.” It’s a cultural practice that applies to developers, engineers, architects, and finance teams. Let’s learn how to master this important discipline!
Featuring guest speaker and Amazon Web Services Technical Account Manager Rick Triana.
Are you looking to part with some old games, or hunting for some nostalgia? Perhaps you’re just interested in meeting like-minded folks and playing a few casual rounds of Jet Moto? Either way, we want you to come out to the Windsor Hackforge Video Game Swap!
All games and systems are welcome. We’ll have a couple of consoles set up for people to play and test games on, and attendees are also welcome to bring their own consoles.
This event is happening at our new HQ (300 Ouellette Ave, Suite 210) on Saturday, April 22 from 1 – 4pm. It is completely free and open to everyone, but there are a few ground rules:
While straight swaps are encouraged, sales are allowed. However, this event isn’t intended as a money-maker for anyone. Please keep this in mind.
Hackforge is not mediating any sales or swaps. This is entirely peer-to-peer, and we expect everyone to behave civilly.
Don’t be a jerk.
If you are a jerk, you’ll be asked to leave.
Play nice and share the consoles.
Attendees under 18 must be accompanied by a guardian
Please respect Hackforge’s facilities and volunteers.
Winfosec – OWASP Top 10: Security Misconfiguration
We’re now halfway through the OWASP top 10! Attend to learn about number 5 of the list: Security misconfiguration.
Modern software is highly configurable, making this security threat more and more common. Ensuring that all security settings are properly enabled (or even enabled at all) can greatly reduce threats to your system or application. Join this free training to learn more – physical and virtual attendance options available!
The University of Windsor’s Leddy Library and Academic Data Centre has partnered with the Essex County Library System and Hackforge to promote a data mining challenge using digitized local newspapers.
Papers dating as far back as 1982 have been made available as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) data, allowing users to query 60 years of local history. A Notebookthat walks users through the basic process of accessing and querying the data has also been made available.
Leddy Library is inviting the community to come up with their own ways to use this important and extensive data collection. Interested parties can submit ideas or completed code that could potentially be used on the thousands of pages of newspapers that have been digitized.
Border City Data: Data Mining Essex County’s Rich Newspaper History
Monday, March 6th @ 6pm| 5950 Malden Road (Lasalle Branch of the Essex County Library) Facebook | Linkedin | Meetup
Text collections and textual analysis offer a unique and largely untapped combination for applying data mining techniques and computational analysis to generate new insights into the past. This is particularly true for newspaper collections.
Newspaper pages typically have eight times the amount of text that appears on a book page, and a modest weekly newspaper can represent many thousands of pages of local content for even the smallest of communities.The Leddy Library at the University of Windsor has been digitizing local newspapers with partners for over a decade, including the Amherstburg Echo, the Essex Free Press, and the Border Cities Star. With the help of the Essex County Library System, this session kicks off a month-long event to encourage the use of digitized newspapers for data mining and text analysis. Participants in the entire program are eligible for one of ten $50 Amazon gift cards and a guide to the newspapers that have recorded the history of our region.
This free, in-person event will provide background on the digitization process and the plan for the month ahead. Hope to see you there!
Location: Program Room of the LaSalle Branch of the Essex County Library (inside the LaSalle Civic Centre at 5950 Malden Road)
This month we’ve pulled MapRoulette as our highlight from the never-ending list of OpenStreetMap tools. In this 60(ish) minute session, we’ll take an overview of how MapRoulette works, followed by a discussion on how we can use it to improve OSM data in Windsor-Essex. Come with ideas for local data points that can use some updating!
This event is free and everyone is welcome. While an OSM account and some experience with the platform is recommended, neither is required. Register via Zoom and we’ll see you on Thursday, March 16th at 6pm.
Join special guest speaker Deepak Kaushik for a rundown of Azure Lakehouse. This modern data management architecture combines the cost-efficiency, scale, and flexibility features of a data lake with the data and transaction management capabilities of a data warehouse.
In this one-hour session, Deepak will cover:
Concept
Demo
Real time challenges
Q/A
This virtual event takes place on Thursday, February 9th at 6pm. Register now via Zoom to reserve your spot.
Speaker Bio:
Deepak is a Microsoft Azure MVP. His breadth and depth of knowledge have enabled him to lead the development of various products/solutions around Microsoft Azure. Deepak is a knowledgeable and sought-after speaker within IT circles and consulted regularly by companies formulating their Cloud strategies.
Launching in early February, ADUSearch is a data-driven application intended to empower property owners, industry professionals, policymakers, non-profit housing providers, and researchers to see the potential of detached ADUs in Canadian municipalities.
In this edition of Border City Data, host Doug Sartori will be joined by ADUSearch leadership and GIS researchers to discuss how the application was made. Attendees will get the chance to see some of the ArcGIS processes that went into creating the geodata that drives the project, as well as how Doug and his team at Parallel 42 Systems turned that data into an interactive web app. Attendees will have a chance to ask questions at the end of the session.
This virtual event will take place via Zoom on Monday, February 13th from 6 – 7:30 pm. There is no cost to attend and everyone is welcome.
Come meet other local mappers in person at this low-key event. Bring your laptop and/or favourite mobile editing app and do some collaborative mapping!
This is a great opportunity to make connections in the OSM community as well as to ask questions and get advice from other active OSM contributors. Whether you’re brand new or well-seasoned, we’d love to have you out!
Serratore Bistro-Café (98 University Ave, W.) is new to Windsor’s downtown, so this is also a great chance to check them out! We recommend the chocolate croissant, but also hear great things about their paninis.We’ll be hanging out from 6 – 8pm. Drop in for a quick visit or stay the whole time – however you prefer!
AWS Re:Invent took place between November 28 and December 2, 2022 in Las Vegas. For those who were unable to make the trip, the Windsor AWS User Group is going to be rehashing everything on Tuesday, February 21st.
Hear about news and updates in the world of Amazon Web Services, and connect with other AWS users at this free, virtual event.
6:30 PM – 6:45 PM Meet and greet
6:45 PM – 7:45 RE:CAP – brief overview of all cool technologies introduced at RE:INVENT
7:45 PM – 8:00 PM – Post event discussion, Q&A, career advice, project advice, industry trends, anything AWS related, etc
We’ll be posting a Chime link and the AWS speaker shortly – follow the Linkedin Event for all the latest updates.
Join us to learn about a new entrant into the OWASP list: Insecure Design. We’ll look at common mistakes made in the design of software that can affect security, and give advice on what to do instead.
This is our fourth session on OWASP Top 10 – visit our Youtube channel to review past events.
This is a virtual event that will be held via Zoom.
It’s great to be back as part of the Hackforge governance team. We’ve met a couple times since the Annual General Meeting. We’re currently working on aligning the Hackforge mission and strategy with the needs of the community. One of the first changes we’ve decided to make is an end to membership fees. Hackforge has financial stability and modest expenses, so we can continue to deliver our programming without asking our members to contribute monthly. From now on, we’ll consider anyone who has donated money to the organization or volunteered their time for Hackforge in any capacity in the previous twelve months as a member with standing to vote at our Annual General Meetings.
With that in mind I’d like to encourage folks reading this message to consider volunteering for Hackforge in 2023. We can scale your contribution to fit your available time. Whether you want to organize a whole interest group or help us out with programming once in a while, there is a volunteer role that will fit your skill set and schedule. Please touch base with Lauren or a board member if you want to learn more.
— Doug Sartori, Chair of the Hackforge Board of Directors
