#Wellington.Web - October 2015

Who comes to #Wellington.Web?
Technical Managers, Developers, Designers, Sys Admins, Web Hosts, SaaS Providers, Tech Startups, Tech Students.

• Special Thanks to our host: Creative HQ
• Beer and pizzas will be provided by our wonderful sponsor Heyday!

Agenda:

5:45pm - Doors Open
6:05pm - Introductions & Announcements:

We'll start the evening with introductions followed by announcements. Do you have a job announcement? Are you looking for a job? Are you looking for talents for your company? Send us a message!

6:15pm - Adventures with the MEAN stack presented by Ken Kopelson

6:35pm - How to Git, part II presented by Stephen Holdaway

6:55pm - Break

7:20pm - What UX is and why it matters presented by Kathryn Reeves & Samantha Ryan

7:35pm - So you want to build an App? presented by Sam Jarman

About speakers and talks:

• Adventures with the MEAN stack - Ken Kopelson / Metaera (http://metaera.com)
  Ken Kopelson shows how he built an innovative cloud-based SPA that raises the bar for systems that create employee work/shift schedules. The system uses A.I. heuristics to automatically create the schedules and is written in MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, and Node.js.

Ken Kopelson: Ken is a seasoned software engineer, consultant, CTO, and startup entrepreneur. He had his first programming job in 1979 in Juneau, Alaska working on DEC PDP/1170 mini-computers, and has kept pace by mastering the best of the latest and greatest technologies as they appeared.
Ken pioneered a number of successful innovations for a number of industries, including all county highway departments in the U.S. and the corrugated box industry worldwide. He continues to innovate new ideas whenever he can. He has also actively worked as an A.I. researcher for the last 20 years, focusing on the toughest problems surrounding strong A.I., such as general-purpose reasoning, emotion-driven systems, and natural language processing, making significant advancements in each.

• How to Git, part II - Stephen Holdaway / Heyday! (http://www.heyday.co.nz/)
  Think of this talk as what should really come after Github's interactive "try Git" tutorial, and the Pro Git book by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub. Stephen discusses the practical side of using Git, including tools, features and practices that have proved super useful with experience, but aren't covered very well in these guides.

Stephen Holdaway: Stephen is a developer at Heyday! and a computer enthusiast to boot. He's been working as a web developer in Wellington since 2010 - mainly using PHP and Javascript - is strong advocate of open-source and Linux, and is a bit of a tooling and automation nut.

• So you want to build an App? - Sam Jarman / Carnival (http://carnival.io/)

So the website is going well, but now you think you might need an app to go with your service, but your expertise, skill sets and knowledge are low. This talk will address some of the questions you might have on where to start and how to deliver a delightful and powerful app for your users.

Sam Jarman: Sam is an iOS Developer at Carnival.io. He’s been programming for iOS apps since he was 17, and had over 10 apps on the store before leaving high school. He’s worked in .NET land, with Rails and PHP and a few others. Outside of iOS, Sam is a big fan of getting people to try out coding, and maintains http://CSUnplugged.org .

• What UX is and why it matters? - Kathryn Reeves & Samantha Ryan / Optimal Workshop (http://www.optimalworkshop.com)
  UX (User Experience) is the latest buzzword changing the digital world of large enterprise teams and even tech start-ups. But what is it? Samantha and Kathryn, from Optimal Workshop, will break down some of the processes involved in UX and explain why everyone should be practicing it.