Vote on python-powered start-ups and learn about Django from Andrew Godwin

On March 9, learn more about the latest with Django, WebSockets and WSGI from Andrew Godwin and get into the spirit for PyCon 2016 by voting on your favorite python-powered startup.

We will start off the night with Susan Tan giving a lightning talk on Let's run Django, Flask, Pyramid apps all under 1 WSGI server in 1 command line.

Next, Andrew Godwin, Django core developer and the author of South, the Django migrations framework will delight us with the latest happenings in Django. As we know, Django is ten years old and WSGI is even older, and the web has changed around them in the last decade - most notably, the rise of non-request-response interactions like those offered by WebSockets and long polling. Andrew will talk about what Django is doing to bring in support for WebSockets, post-request tasks and more, what other Python web code can be doing, as well as how this all interacts with WSGI and the possibility of a "WSGI 2".

After that, 6 start ups using Python in their stack will pitch their company to you and a panel of judges. One of them will win a FREE EXPO BOOTH at Startup Row (https://us.pycon.org/2016/events/startup_row/) in Portland's PyCon 2016 and 2 of their company representatives will get to attend the conference.

Companies presenting at Startup Row

Alpaca (https://www.alpaca.ai/)
Alpaca is building a mobile app and platform that helps individual financial traders to automate their trading strategy without any programming skill. The platform mainly uses deep learning to capture human traders behavior and turns it to fully-automated trading system and allows them to run backtest and live test against real market data, as well as executing orders.

Bauxy (https://bauxy.com/)
Bauxy administers a patient's health insurance and financial accounts to help reconcile healthcare transactions at the point of service.

Consumers don't understand or know how to use their health insurance benefits. This results in consumers paying for things that they don't need to and not leveraging all of the financial and health benefits they have available to them. Bauxy collects and administers consumers’ accounts like HSAs, FSAs, and HRAs through it's API and web application.

Independent health providers can self-onboard to the web application while larger enterprise providers can plug in via the API -- everything is done at the point of service with the patient on site. No more filing paper claims or forgetting to mail your reimbursements in -- Bauxy takes care of it all digitally.

Beansprock (https://www.beansprock.com/)
Unlike every other recruiting tool that starts by helping employers, Beansprock is focused first and foremost on helping software developers find and attain their best job at a company they believe in.

Users take 2-5 minutes to sign up and tell us about their job preferences.

Every day we:

1. Index thousands of new job postings and augment them with info on companies, cities, commutes

2. Use NLP to evaluate job fits based on skills, company markets, size, commute time, salary, and more.

UtilityAPI (https://utilityapi.com/)
UtilityAPI is an energy data infrastructure company that specializes in facilitating communication between utilities, account holders, and third parties. We provide access to secure, standardized, fast, automated access to energy data. We currently work with most of the top solar companies in the U.S., along with many energy efficiency, energy storage, energy audit, and building management companies.

Our data may be readily integrated with any solar or storage proposal tool at the request of the utility account holder. We are the only company compliant with the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s DataGuard standard regarding the sharing and use of utility meter data.

Opsulutely (https://www.opsolutely.com/)
We do collaborative infrastructure management. Basically, making deploy delightful and infrastructure management easy for teams of engineers. We do this by making devOps something that the entire team can access.

No more bottlenecks because only one person knows how to deploy. No more of the traditional engineering onboarding meetings where you draw out the application architecture. People can see, discover, and interact with your infrastructure (in a secure way).

Watt Time (http://watttime.org/)
Where is your electricity coming from right now? Sometimes it’s fossil fuels, other moments it’s renewables—and WattTime knows which. WattTime is a nonprofit startup that’s fighting climate change by making it easy to use energy when it’s cleanest.

We provide a light software integration that enables IoT companies to offer "green" features to their customers, by automatically shifting energy use to the times when it's coming from cleaner sources. Some of our markets include EVs, smart thermostats, and building automation systems.

Judges for Startup Row

bethanye McKinney Blount (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethanye?authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=MK4c&locale=en_US&trk=tyah&trkInfo=clickedVertical%3Amynetwork%2CclickedEntityId%3A8021859%2CauthType%3ANAME_SEARCH%2Cidx%3A4-1-7%2CtarId%3A1456261466670%2Ctas%3Abethanye), Founder Cathy Labs
bethanye McKinney Blount a Texas native is a technology leader with over 20 years of experience delivering great products and scalable infrastructure. She was briefly reddit’s first VP of Engineering, after working on some of Facebook’s most complex infrastructure projects.

Bebe Chueh (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bebe-chueh-6968a216), Chief Marketing Office Legalzoom Local
Bebe Chueh cofounded AttorneyFee acquired by Legalzoom in summer 2014. Currently as Chief Marketing Officer of Legalzoom Local, Bebe prioritizes building value in the product for all stakeholders and profitability of Legalzoom Local both short-term and in the more distant horizon.

Leah Culver (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahculver)
Leah is a Developer Advocate at Dropbox where she promotes the Dropbox APIs to 3rd party developers.

Formerly Leah co-founded Pownce, a microblogging and social networking website that was acquired by Six Apart in November 2008. She was lead developer of Pownce. She also co-founded Convore Inc which was funded by Y Combinator in Winter 2011. Leah co-created Hurl (hurl.it (http://hurl.it/)), an HTTP client for testing web APIs that was acquired by Twilio. Hurl is open source and notable for inspiring the Twitter API browser.

Kat Manalac (https://www.linkedin.com/in/katmanalac?authType=name&authToken=47IE&trk=apia109924s118458*), Partner Y Combinator
Kat Manalac is a partner at Y Combinator and originally joined as its first Director of Outreach. Kat focuses on finding great entrepreneurs for the program.

Jessica Scorpio (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicascorpio?authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=48WG&locale=en_US&trk=tyah&trkInfo=clickedVertical%3Amynetwork%2CclickedEntityId%3A10326849%2CauthType%3ANAME_SEARCH%2Cidx%3A1-1-1%2CtarId%3A1456261380748%2Ctas%3Ajessica%20sc), Founder Getaround

Jessica Scorpio is a founder and Director of Marketing at Getaround, a peer-to-peer carsharing company. Scorpio previously founded IDEAL, a not-for-profit network for entrepreneurs and young leaders.

Christine Spang (https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinespang?authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=am8t&locale=en_US&srchid=113451501456261397592&srchindex=1&srchtotal=8&trk=vsrp_people_res_name&trkInfo=VSRPsearchId%3A113451501456261397592%2CVSRPtargetId%3A16284692%2CVSRPcmpt%3Aprimary%2CVSRPnm%3Atrue%2CauthType%3ANAME_SEARCH), Founder & CTO Nylas

Christine went to MIT, dropped out of an operating systems graduate program to be an early engineer at Ksplice, and most recently cofounded Nylas, a startup building an email platform. Recently Forbes named Christine to its 30 under 30: Enterprise Software list.

Agenda:

6:15p - Check-in and mingle, with Pizza and Beer provided by our generous sponsor Yelp!

7:00p - Welcome

7:03p - Lightning Talk

7:10p - Main Talk & Q&A

7:50p - Announcements while Startup row panel set up

7:55p - Startup Row Pitches and Q&A

9:00p - More mingling

9:30p - Doors close

Please take note of the important check-in details at Yelp

1. Doors open at 6:15pm to allow enough time for the check-in process. Before 6:15pm, please wait outside without blocking the building entrance. Wait list will be admitted beginning at 6:45pm. Doors close at 7:30pm.

2. Please update the name on your account to reflect your FIRST NAME and LAST NAME. Yelp security will be checking IDs downstairs. If your name on Meetup.com is not the name on your ID, then please enter your full name here (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1d_oPoxjcAQzOJqozHIzVuFNnOYi7CDrzouywq4U9SUo/edit).

3. Since alcohol will be served at the event, we ask that any underage attendees RSVP directly to the meet up organizers.

4. Waiting list folks will be allowed into the event AFTER we admit all confirmed attendees.

5. Unfortunately, Yelp cannot safe keep your bicycles, please park your bike on the street.

Yelp is generously providing food, drinks, and beer in addition to their venue space.