DenverScript

Lightning Talks | DenverScript July 2026

Tue, July 28 · 18:00 MDT

Code Talent, 3412 Blake St, Denver, CO, US

This month you'll hear from several speakers about a wide range of topics including: Debugging your finances, Sandboxed workflows with Linux VMs and Spec Driven Development by example.

Lightning talks are 10 minutes max, including Q&A. We are still looking for lightning talk speakers. If you have a talk in mind please submit! We accept talks of all types / topics / skill / experience levels. If you're not sure if your talk will fit, submit with your questions and the organizers will get back to you.

Submit your talk here: https://forms.gle/5A26sY5475X8J14S8

Food and drinks will be provided.

This meetup will be recorded and uploaded (not live-streamed) to our YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@DenverScriptMeetup

Agenda
6:00 PM - Networking
6:15 PM - JS News
6:30 PM - Lightning Talks (order TBD)

• A Software Engineers Guide to Debugging Your Finances by Riley Winfred
• Linux on Linux: Local VMs for Sandboxed Workflows by Scott Morse
• Spec Driven Development at Ludicrous Speed by JP Barela

Talk Descriptions

A Software Engineers Guide to Debugging Your Finances by Riley Winfred

Software engineers are trained to think in systems of inputs, outputs, edge cases, and failure modes. Even though we tend to have high tech salaries, most of us don’t apply this same kind of thinking to our personal finances. For this talk, I want to share frameworks for looking at your finances the same way you would debug code: by identifying assumptions, testing edge cases, and uncovering issues of scale that might not show up until later. My talk isn't intended to give exact strategies; instead, I want it to help devs to start thinking differently about their finances in the same way they think about their code architecture.

Linux on Linux: Local VMs for Sandboxed Workflows by Scott Morse

This will be a quick overview of how Linux virtual machines can be used locally as isolated sandboxes for development work, potentially allowing for more secure agentic development, where you can grant an agent broader permissions, without it being able to even see your real machine. We'll cover how a shared directory between your host and VM can be used to stage code you're working on and how VM overlays can be used to create lightweight clones of a base system.

Spec Driven Development at Ludicrous Speed by JP Barela

AI requires fundamental shifts in the way we build software to get the most benefits. In this talk I go over a practical example of a spec driven workflow to showcase how developers can realize these benefits.

Speaker Bios

Riley Winfred is a financial professional, software engineer, and serial entrepreneur. After spending nearly a decade working as a full-time software engineer in the eCommerce and healthcare industries, Riley continues to work on personal code repositories while helping others apply systems thinking, debugging skills, and computer science fundamentals to their financial lives.

Scott Morse has 8 years of experience as a coder, having worked for startups in Austin, TX and as a senior technical lead for the corporate music industry in LA. He currently focuses on a mix of contract work for more freedom and his own open source projects, mainly for his npm package "pacwich," lightweight monorepo tooling that works directly with Bun, npm and pnpm workspaces.

JP Barela is a senior developer with over ten years of development experience across backend, web, and mobile.

Isolation: VMs, Containers, Namespaces, Oh my! | DenverScript August 2026

Tue, Aug 25 · 18:00 MDT

Code Talent, 3412 Blake St, Denver, CO, US

This month you'll hear about all the ways to isolate development work including VMs, Containers and Namespaces.

We're always looking for speakers. Submit your talk here: https://forms.gle/5A26sY5475X8J14S8

Food and drinks will be provided.

This meetup will be recorded and uploaded (not live-streamed) to our YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@DenverScriptMeetup

Agenda
6:00 PM - Networking
6:15 PM - JS News
6:30 PM - Short Talk TBD
7:00 PM - Isolation: VMs, Containers, Namespaces, Oh my! by Sam Currie

Talk Descriptions

Isolation: VMs, Containers, Namespaces, Oh my! by Sam Currie

There's a ton of isolation mechanisms out there (e.g. for agent operations), each with advantages and disadvantages. Let's review the basic levels of isolation and good applications for each:
- Basic Linux namespacing, cgroups, etc
- Node isolates
- Common isolation methods for different agent harnesses
- Container runtimes
- Virtual machines & KVM
- Use cases and tradeoffs
- Isolation within application architecture

Speaker Bios

Sam Currie was previously the head of infrastructure at Flatfile and Obvious AI and now the CEO at Heyo Computer. He has run workloads at scale on various technologies including Kubernetes/containers, VMs, Node isolates (and predecessors) lambdas, and sandboxes (e.g. E2B).