Google Developers Group: Flutter Study Jam Part Deux (CANCELED) Wednesday, December 5 @ 6:30PMFacebook | Meetup
Flutter is Google’s mobile app SDK for crafting high-quality native interfaces on iOS and Android in record time. Flutter works with existing code, is used by developers and organizations around the world, and is free and open source.
Join us for a talk/workshop about the ins and outs of electrical components and sensors!
Holiday Lean Coffee & Social Friday, December 14 @ 7PM Facebook | Meetup
Join the .NET Developers and Border City JavaScript for an epic Lean Coffee – you’ll brainstorm programming or industry related topics YOU want to talk about, and we’ll shred through them in a rapid, structured discussion.
Networking: Feel free to join us afterward at Craftheads for some refreshments while talking more shop and socializing.
This month we are going to explore support/info platforms on project management available on the web, especially LiquidPlanner.
Intro to Machine Learning with Shawn Daichendt Thursday, November 22 @ 7PM Facebook | Meetup
In this presentation, we’ll talk about Machine Learning: what it’s used for today, common concepts and terminology used in the ML world, and how you can get started programming your own ML programs in Python.
Board Game Night @ Hackforge Friday, November 23 @ 7PM Facebook | Meetup
Join us at Hackforge for some of our favourite board games, or bring your own! Come on in and we’ll get you set up with a game and a group to play with as soon as there’s an opening.
This event is open to anyone and the earlier you arrive the quicker you’ll get into a group playing a game.
Windsor-Essex .NET Developers: Establishing a SOLID Foundation – An Intro to Software Design Tuesday, November 27 @ 6:30PM Facebook | Meetup
Are you tired of opening classes that have hundreds or thousands of lines of code? Do you feel that you spend too much time trying to understand how something (that should be simple) in your application works? Are you frustrated with following spaghetti-like logic through your code’s core?
In this presentation, we’re going to examine a set of design principles that yield easy-to-read, decoupled code referred to as SOLID. To start, we’ll explore the history of SOLID and establish the problems it solves. From there, we’ll dive into the different principles, defining what each principle means, how to spot violations, and how to resolve them.
Border City Javascript: Another talk is held in the same space by the Border City Javascript group. Stick around after this talk for more content!
Networking: Feel free to join us afterward at Craftheads for refreshments while talking shop and socializing.
Border City Javascript: Building an Emotionally Intelligent Bot? Tuesday, November 27 @ 7:30PM Facebook | Meetup
Shivang Rana tells us how he used a mix of JavaScript and Python to build a bot that can analyze the emotional sentiment of a sample of text. Stick around after the talk for open discussion and get to know some fellow developers.
Join us for a talk/workshop about the ins and outs of electrical components and sensors!
TechBoost Workshops (Offsite)
TechBoost: Facebook Marketing Masterclass Tuesday, November 20 5:30pm – 7:30pm
Libro Credit Union – Amherstburg Branch
463 Sandwich Street South, Amherstburg, Ontario N9V 3L4
Not sure what to be posting on Facebook? Or further… How to create that content? Looking for an easy way to find clients online? We’ll cover how to create a Facebook account, page, event and more and discuss different types of content, specific tips for creating high-quality content, and how to focus your content around engagement.
TechBoost: Working Smarter in the Cloud Tuesday, November 27 5:30pm–7:30pm
Libro Credit Union – Amherstburg Branch
463 Sandwich Street South, Amherstburg, Ontario N9V 3L4
Straight Outta the Cloud! Update your numbers, log your inventory, track your staff hours, pay your bills and so much more. Cloud systems are rapidly expanding and giving small business owners back their time to work ON their business and NOT IN their business. By the end of this workshop, participants will understand what the tech world has to offer not only their accounting but apps and integrations that are game changers for small business owners.
TechBoost: So, Your Business Has a Website, Now What? Thursday, November 29 5:30pm–7:30pm
Libro Credit Union – Amherstburg Branch
463 Sandwich Street South, Amherstburg, Ontario N9V 3L4
Congratulations! You’ve conquered the first step in your digital marketing journey and have setup your small business with a well-designed website, so what’s the next step? Driving traffic to your website and tracking where that traffic comes from of course! In “So, Your Small Business Has a Website – What’s Next?”, we’ll walk through how to drive traffic to your website using search engine optimization, Google My Business and Google Ads as well as how to setup success tracking software such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Project Management Professionals Meetup: City of Windsor Municipal Energy Management Monday, October 15 @ 7PM Facebook | Meetup
Cole Nadalin is a Certified Energy Manager, Engineering Technologist, and Project Management Professional employed by the City of Windsor to identify opportunities that reduce the municipality’s energy costs. Targeting electricity, natural gas, and greenhouse gas emissions reduction, Cole develops projects and processes that lessen utility expenses and free capital for critical programs like infrastructure renewal, economic development, and community outreach. Cole will speak to the many current and planned energy initiatives being conducted by the City of Windsor, how projects are developed and executed, and their positive impact for Windsorites.
Windsor Essex Google Developers Group: Flutter Study Jam Wednesday, October 17 @ 6:30pm Facebook | Meetup
Flutter is Google’s mobile app SDK for crafting high-quality native interfaces on iOS and Android in record time. Flutter works with existing code, is used by developers and organizations around the world, and is free and open source. Want to get started on building Flutter apps? Join us for our Flutter Study Jam! Together we’ll work through Flutter Udacity Course prepared by Google instructors. You will be able to get hands-on experience with Flutter and build a Flutter app while learning the fundamentals.. Bring a laptop! The course will run on all of the latest versions of the popular browsers. For the best experience, the laptop should have Flutter installed on it prior to starting the study jam to save time. Windows/Linux/Mac would all be fine. Check out : https://flutter.io/get-started/install/
Board Game Night at Craft Heads Brewing Company Friday, October 19 @ 7PM onwards Facebook | Meetup
Join us at the awesome Craft Heads Brewing Company for Board Game Night. We bring the games, you bring your strategy and drive to win! Enjoy a delicious craft beer or cup of coffee and feel free to bring your own snacks!
AWS Users Group: Say NO to Datacenters Introduction to Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and Infrastructure as Code Tuesday, October 23 @ 7PM Facebook | Meetup
Because friends don’t let friends build data centers, we are building a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on AWS: your own private software defined data center built through automated and repeatable process known as Infrastructure as Code.
Best part – no coding experience required just fundamental networking knowledge.
AWS UG members are full-stack engineers and developers who practice at intersection of DevSecOps and can go from networking to infosec and from blue green code deployments to application infrastructure in less than no time. Come join us to explore fun cloud topics together.
Intro to Software Defined Radio [POSTPONED] How to Track Airplanes with ADB-S Decoder Thursday, October 25 @ 7PMFacebook | Meetup
In this talk we will be covering the basics of Software Defined Radio (SDR), the hardware used and examples of some of the many projects one may want to explore. We will look at how to setup PiAware (ADS-B & MLAT receiver) to track airplanes and other examples of SDR projects.
Border City Javascript: RxJS & Ansible Friday, October 26 @ 7PM Facebook | Meetup
Ansible is a Python-based tool for automatically deploying your application on demand. RxJS is a JavaScript implementation of ReactiveX, a functional programming paradigm useful for managing asynchronous work. Randy and Jeff will talk about these tools briefly and show examples of their use, so you can decide whether to explore them further.
Intro to Arduino Workshop
Thursday, November 1 @ 6PM Facebook | Meetup
Please join us at Hackforge to learn about Arduino boards! We’ll cover how to code them and the different features available on the boards. Participants can come with pre-existing projects to look for help or we can help the community get interested in a new project. If you have an Arduino, please bring it! Also, please bring laptops if you would like to experiment with code.
TechBoost Workshops (Amherstburg)
So, Your Small Business Has a Website. What’s Next?
Tuesday, October 23 5:30pm–7:30pm
Libro Credit Union, 463 Sandwich Street South, Amherstburg
Congratulations! You’ve conquered the first step in your digital marketing journey and have setup your small business with a well-designed website, so what’s the next step? Driving traffic to your website and tracking where that traffic comes from of course! In “So, Your Small Business Has a Website – What’s Next?”, we’ll walk through how to drive traffic to your website using search engine optimization, Google My Business and Google Ads as well as how to setup success tracking software such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Libro Credit Union, 463 Sandwich Street South, Amherstburg
Websites such as emarketer.com are saying that eCommerce sales will hit $4 trillion dollars by 2020. Small businesses simply can’t rely on their local communities alone to support or grow their businesses. If you’re selling products, you need to be online. Good news is, tools like Shopify make it easy and fun too! By the end of this workshop, you’ll have your Shopify account set up and know how to choose a theme, customize your theme, add products and manage shipping.
Libro Credit Union, 463 Sandwich Street South, Amherstburg
According to Instagram Business, there are over 25 million business profiles on Instagram worldwide. Are you one of them? Many Instagram users use the platform as a way to keep tabs on their favourite brands and companies. By the end of this workshop, participants will understand how Instagram can help accomplish business goals, have created an Instagram profile and uploaded their first post and story.
Libro Credit Union, 463 Sandwich Street South, Amherstburg
Not sure what to be posting on Facebook? Or further… How to create that content? Looking for an easy way to find clients online? We’ll cover how to create a Facebook account, page, event and more and discuss different types of content, specific tips for creating high-quality content, and how to focus your content around engagement.
Libro Credit Union, 463 Sandwich Street South, Amherstburg
Straight Outta the Cloud! Update your numbers, log your inventory, track your staff hours, pay your bills and so much more. Cloud systems are rapidly expanding and giving small business owners back their time to work ON their business and NOT IN their business.
Board Game Night @ Craft Heads Brewing Company Friday, September 14 @ 7PM onwards Facebook | Meetup
Join us at the awesome Craft Heads Brewing Company for Board Game Night. We bring the games, you bring your strategy and drive to win! Enjoy a delicious craft beer or cup of coffee and feel free to bring your own snacks!
After a summer vacation, the Project Management Professionals meetup is back! This group is for all professionals from any industry, and business owners to come together and exchange ideas and good practices in Project Management, Agile Product Development and Process Improvement, in a fun and relaxed atmosphere.
Border City Javascript: Lean Coffee Tuesday, September 18 @ 7PM Facebook | Meetup
Join the new Border City Javascript group for a Lean Coffee – you’ll brainstorm programming or industry related topics YOU want to talk about, and we’ll shred through them in a rapid, structured discussion. Bring your favourite hot beverage.
Forge Founders: WEtech Founders Group Wednesday, September 19 @ 5:30pm Facebook | Meetup
Calling all founders, trailblazers and entrepreneurs, Join us for “Forge Founders” the launch of a new peer2peer group on September 19th from 5:30-8:00PM. Forge Founders will be a bi-monthly networking experience for local founders to connect, learn, and share. Our first speaker, Darrel Laurendeau, Director of Information Technology for Ground Effects will be leading us with his best practices on creating ways to get your customers excited and engaged in ICT, and tactics to communicate with executives. Light food and refreshments will be served.
Museum Tech Users Group: Cataloguing Tuesday, September 25 @ 7PM Facebook | Meetup
This session we’ll be taking a look at ways of using technology to assist with cataloguing. If you have a cataloguing story, please send me an email! We’d love to have you come and tell the group about your process, the successes and roadblocks, and how things are working for you now. This includes projects that didn’t work out the way you’d hoped! Knowing about the challenges others have faced can help us prepare for upcoming projects.
Some ideas include
Cataloguing softwares you like/don’t like
Data entry challenges
Cloud cataloguing using Google Drive or other shared resources
Moving from a paper catalogue to a digital one
Backing up your catalogues
AWS Users Group: AWS Organizations, Cognito, and Planning the Photo Scavenger Hunt Thursday, September 27 @ 7PM Facebook | Meetup This month, we’ll start talking about how you can work together with different accounts with AWS Organizations, and how we can use Cognito to establish and track users across all the products. We’ll also continue to look at the design for our Photo Scavenger Hunt.
Border City Javascript: A Recipe for a Javascript Mapping App Soufflé Friday, September 28 @ 7PM Facebook | Meetup Many times when building an app, Javascript will be just one component of a larger solution. The good news is, mixing technologies together to solve a problem is a lot of fun. It’s kind of like baking. Attend this session to learn about how several technologies were whisked together to build windsorcensusmaps.com. We’ll talk about CSS libraries, GIS, mapping libraries, React, NodeJS, and AWS and how they all came together to build a tasteful web app.
Due to some recent changes after the passing of our dear friend Mark Boscariol, there has been some speculation as to what will happen to Hackforge’s current physical space at 255 Ouellette Ave. Mark Boscariol owned the building that Hackforge resides in, along with the neighbouring buildings that housed the Downtown Pizza Co. and Snack BBQ restaurants. Recently, all three of Mark’s restaurants were closed due to financial insolvency.
In the interest of transparency, we want to let you know we are in discussion with the Boscariol family and as of right now, we have access to our space and will continue to run events as normal. In the past week, one event was moved to Craft Heads Brewery and one event was rescheduled due to an issue with our shared alarm system with Downtown Pizza Co. We have since resolved the issue and we will continue to host events at Hackforge. If anything changes, we will let you and/or the host of the event know. Please check our social media channels or website for any announcements.
On that note, we have two great events coming up in the next couple of days and we’d love to see you there!
Border City Javascript: Diving into React.js
? Friday, August 24 @ 7PM
React.js is easily one of the most popular JavaScript libraries for creating user interfaces. Randy Topliffe demonstrates creating a simple React app with no build tools, transpilers or additional frameworks, so you can see the features React offers on its own. JavaScript novices will learn how they might try using React without needing to embrace a dozen new technologies at once, and pros will get to see how many of the tools they take for granted are unnecessary for some applications.
After this short talk, we’ll break to mingle and chat. We can discuss React with Randy, get to know each other, and get a feel for topics that would appeal to the community for future talks. If you have talk ideas, bring them up with Randy or Jeff and we can get something on the schedule – we can even help you workshop your talk and get you prepared to deliver it.
? Saturday Workshop: Help Build the VEX Robot!
? Saturday, August 25 @ 11am-2pm
With the help of the Windsor Essex Robotics Club, we’re going to assemble Hackforge’s VEX Robot. The VEX kit is the Classroom and Competition Super Kit. We’re welcoming the community to an introduction to VEX robotics by building their standard claw bot and practicing the basic VEX coding. We hope to have a functioning robot to learn off of so newcomers have the building blocks to be creative so they can further create a robot with custom tasks. A fun Saturday activity for both adults and kids alike who love robots!