TekMountain hangout + mini presentations: the ELK stack, Agile & PivotalTracker

Hi all,

For our December 4th meetup, we will be having two mini-presentations. They will be about 20-30 minutes in length. If you want to delve deeper and learn more about the topics, you can get with the presenter and schedule a specific breakout meeting/workshop with a small group at a later time (which we will advertise here).

We think these shorter presentations will give others an idea of "what's out there" without scaring people away from coming out to the meetups for fear of boredom on a topic they are not interested in. We shan't forget our main purpose: to get together and nerd it up.

So, we'll do two mini-presentations on Dec. 4th:

1. Search and Visualize your logs with the ELK stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana

Jason Ashby of IMS, Inc (http://imsweb.com). aka hostmaster, will show you how to use the ELK stack to correlate, search, and visualize your logs (or any unstructured data). It's open source and runs on Linux, Windows, or OSX.

Elasticsearch said they'll be sending over some "swag" to give out to everyone. Not sure if that means t-shirts, stickers or what, but who cares; free stuff!!

http://www.elasticsearch.org/content/uploads/2014/03/Screen-Shot-2014-02-25-at-4.42.52-PM.png

2. Gettin' Agile with Pivotal Tracker

Adam Fox of CTS Software (http://www.cts-software.com/) will tell us about how his team went from waterfall to agile with the help of Pivotal Tracker, "a Simple, collaborative project management from the experts in agile software development".

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Pivotal-Tracker-Stacked.png

Hope to see everyone there to hang out and also to try out this mini-presentation format! Keep the suggestions coming everyone.

Jason

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Original post:

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We've got it locked down that we will be having this meetup on a monthly basis. We'll get together like last time at Tek Mountain and talk shop over some hors d'oeuvres and whatever's on tap from Tek Mtn brewery that month, as well as other non-alcoholic beverages. So regardless of presentations being on the schedule, we'll still get together and see what's new and discuss potential topics.

Any presentations we have for the monthly meetups will be shorter in length (~ 20 minutes), and anyone who wants to delve deeper can schedule a "breakout" meetup at another time with a subset of members that want to discuss a particular topic in depth. Or you can grab a conference room or take a laptop to a table and hack away in a small group. So plenty of options here, but the idea is we want to:

a) get everyone together monthly to have fun and network
b) share knowledge

The latter is the more challenging one, as we discussed last time, as we all have different interests. The mini presentations will help introduce technologies you may not be aware of, but not too long to bore people that aren't interested.

As always, comments and suggestions are always welcome. If you want to present something, that would be fantastic. Also, we will be going with the first Thursday of the month.

Cheers!
Jason