Monthly Meetup 🌙

Hey fellow Astorians!

Our eighth monthly meetup is happening at our usual time and place. Whether you're in tech or just interested, all are welcome.

Our main event will be a short presentation by Blane Cordes, one of the founders of Astoria Tech Meetup. He'll be discussing his early experiences in machine learning and the lessons he has learned thus far.

AGENDA:
6:30 - 7:30: Quick discussions - submit topics via Lean Coffee*
7:30 - 8:00: "First Steps in Machine Learning" by Blane Cordes
8:00 - 8:30: Group project planning

The goal of our meetups moving forward will be twofold:

• educate ourselves
• work on Astoria-focused projects together as a community

• Members of this meetup built Lean Coffee, a web app that allows anyone to submit topics that they'd like to discuss during the first hour. Feel free to submit any tech or tech-adjacent topics:
  https://astoria-arc-lean-coffee-master.env.shipyard.host

Format:
6:30 - Arrival
6:30-7:30 - We will discuss the most voted on lean coffee topics created via our app (https://astoria-arc-lean-coffee-master.env.shipyard.host)
7:30 Kubernetes Presentation from Peter, Open Mic for anyone else that wants to demo something they are working on
Last - Reciprocity, you tell the group something you need help with or are working on, people offer to help/participate, I collect that data and send each person the list of people that offered to be involved

Join our Slack! https://bit.ly/2JLFweu
Join our Github org! https://github.com/orgs/astoria-arc

We will gather in the back room and Katch will also be providing drink specials! Look forward to seeing everyone!

Format:
6:30-7:30 - We will discuss the most voted on lean coffee topics created via our app (https://astoria-arc.herokuapp.com/) new features coming in the next few days! :)
7:30-8 - Reciprocity, you tell the group something you need help with or are working on, people offer to help/participate, I collect that data and send each person the list of people that offered to be involved

Join our Slack! https://bit.ly/2JLFweu
Join our Github org! https://github.com/orgs/astoria-arc

Thanks everyone that attended last time, please let us know any ideas or suggestions you might have for the group going forward.

We made a github org - https://github.com/astoria-arc and I set up an app that we can hack on to turn our lean coffee format into a more efficient digital version for the next meetup. (https://github.com/astoria-arc/lean-coffee) Feel free to check out the issues or start submitting PR's if you would like to get involved.

Some people mentioned doing CTF's or code challenges this month so we can collaborate on those next meetup. If someone wants to setup a repo or project and post ideas or links in this meetup that would be great.

We'll use this meetup page and github for communication for now, but hopefully we can have some sort of central chat service soon.

See you all soon!

Thanks everyone that attended last time, we had some great discussions about things we can do to make this useful and fun for people in the neighborhood.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

• Our new codename is archipelago
• We may explore spinning up a bunch of services and building out a local community network from scratch, hence the "archipelago" aspect.
• We will try the Lean Coffee format this time, as suggested by Audrey who has had good experiences with this format in the past. http://leancoffee.org/ (I will bring the supplies)
• We have a few members that are trying to break into tech, having completed coding bootcamps and looking for their first gigs. They have been nice enough to share their github accounts, please try to help them if you can.
• https://github.com/DanielChen1234
• https://github.com/omardeleo

I'll be in touch closer to the event, see everyone again soon!

Hi all, Happy new year! Looking to get this meetup going again. Will use this as a general meet and greet and see if we can make a plan to have a more formal recurring meetup. Hope to see you there!

Hey Guys- Hope everyone had a great summer. We want to try and get this off the ground again so figured next week would be a good time for another informal gathering. Feel free to come with or post any ideas for the meetup and things you would like to get out of it. Look forward to seeing everyone next week!

-Blane and Ian

We're excited so many people are interested in forming a tech community in Astoria and wanted to invite everyone to a formal kick off on April 16th at Katch Brewery.

Our goal is to learn about everyone's interests and help to build a fully accommodating tech meetup. So come grab a drink, meet some fellow technologists and help support a local bar in our own backyard.

Here are some things to think about/address for the future of this meetup:

• Do all people live in Astoria? If so, where is optimal location?
• How frequently would people like to meet? (weekly, monthly?)
• How long for each event?
• What is most important to people? (networking, learning, working, exploring Astoria?)

Ideas for this Meetup (please add to list):

• Guest Speakers
• Networking
• Collaborative open source project
• Code Review/Lectures
• Hackathons
• Happy Hour
• Community give back project (i.e. hack to help Astoria?)
• Games/Competitions (tech trivia/code trivia?)

All Feedback is Encouraged! Please let us know your thoughts/opinions! Thanks everyone and we hope to see you at Katch!