Los Angeles Hacker News Meetup

What our meetups are like: We generally have about an hour of presentations, hang out at the coloft for another hour, then head out for drinks down the street around 6PM. You'll find a wide variety of people with a wide variety of expertise.

Talks This Month:

How to Work With Nerds - John Shiple

KidsRuby: Hacking Code And Minds At The Same Time - Ron Evans

Full Talk Descriptions

How to work with Nerds - Building innovative products using technical resources you may not really understand.

In a talk targeted at both business people and engineers John Shiple (http://www.FreelanceCTO.com (http://www.freelancecto.com/)) will offer his proprietary secrets for building successful technology companies even if you are not a technically-oriented CEO. John's approach to integrating People, Process, and Technology will offer CEOS a new and different understanding of building and scaling their companies.

Bio: John Shiple is an acclaimed technology consultant to CEOs throughout the U.S. He architects award-winning technologies that scale businesses while concurrently building, training, and mentoring development teams and CEOs. John’s work brings forth new products, optimizes business processes, lowers operating costs, and enables operational scalability. He has a special expertise in working with emerging and disruptive technologies.

KidsRuby: Hacking Code And Minds At The Same Time - Ron Evans

Most of us in the software community are aware that it is a great time to be a programmer. However, it's not so great to be some company trying to find an experienced programmer to hire. And the problem is only going to get worse, since the state of computer programming education is the US and UK is down, even as demand increases. Like becoming a master musician, master programmers are not created quickly. Many of the best programmers today started when they were young. KidsRuby was born over 1 year ago as a fresh approach to this problem. It is a simple environment that makes it fun to lean to write code. Despite that, KidsRuby is a real Ruby, so that kids are not treated like second class citizens just because they are learning to code. It addresses a number of the biggest problems with teaching programming to kids. In the process, the dev team had to solve some interesting technical and social problems as well. It it time for a general call to arms to the programming world. We all need to get serious now about training the next generation of hackers. After all, think of the children!

Ron Evans is a well-known software developer and blogger based in Los Angeles, CA. As ringleader of The Hybrid Group (http://hybridgroup.com (http://hybridgroup.com/)), he has been helping clients solve some of their most difficult problems, both technical and business related. Ron is a very active speaker, presenting at industry conferences such as RubyConf, FutureRuby, Ignite, 140 THE Twitter Conference, Los Angeles Ruby Conference, Conferencia Rails, and TWTRCON. He was featured in Computerworld Magazine in the article "Rock Star Coders" (January 22, 2008) for his popular blog post "I'd Rather Be A Jazz Programmer". He has also written articles for MSNBC, BYTE Magazine, and the Direct Marketing Association, as well as being an active code contributor to many open source projects.