Vancouver Tech Podcast

Charlene Tessier, Strength in Numbers Virtual Summit  Charlene Tessier, founder of the Strength in Numbers virtual summit joins hosts Lauren Bates and Drew Ogryzek this week to discuss community building, and networking in the current state of the world.Have a listen, and make sure to get your free ticket to the Strength in Numbers virtual summit with a host of amazing guest speakers, and interactive workshops. Topics range from Equity Splits and Aligning your Message, to Credibility and even Virtual Retreats!Listen in to this week's episode to hear more.

Kahlil Ashanti, Founder of WeShowUp.ioKahlil Ashanti, Founder of WeShowUp.io, joins hosts Lauren Bates and Drew Ogryzek to discuss the journey of discovering and developing a product and a business that has come out of a combining a rich history of experience in performing arts and web-based payments. "In addition to performing, it was actually our job to stand and thank every audience member who came to see us," explains Ashanti reminscing of the early days of his perfomance career in the 90s, "And people kept saying, 'I would have paid more for that.'"Continuing how he had started, Ashanti kept shaking hands with audience members and thanking them after the show, and kept finding people echoing the same sentiment, "I would have paid more for that."Listen in to find out more about this founder's journey of discovery and development.

John Thompson, Analytics Leader & Best Selling Author, Keynote Speaker, Data Science Thought Leader.John Thompson, Global Head, Advanced Analytics & Artificial Intelligence at CSL Behring. Author of Building Analytics Teams: Harnessing analytics and artificial intelligence for business improvement, and Analytics: How to Win with Intelligence joins hosts Lauren Bates and Drew Ogryzek for episode 105 of the Vancouver Tech Podcast.Thompson explains that he started writing his latest book, Building Analytics Teams: Harnessing analytics and artificial intelligence for business improvement, or at least thinking about it last year. He asked people how they felt about their analytics teams, the people on them, and the cohesion, and those kind of topics, at a few presentations in Chicago and other places around the United States. The incredible responses he received prompted him to stop working on a book he had started regarding AI and Ethics, and pivot to the topics addressed in Building Analytics Teams.This book is for people who are hiring and managing high performance advanced analytics and AI teams. So, if you're a manager and you're responsible for a data science team, this book was written for you.

-Download Episode 104 Annee Ngo, Co-Founder and CEO of Startup League Join Annee Ngo, Co-Founder and CEO of Startup League with host Drew Ogryzek to talk about Startup League, QUP, and more for the first episode of the new Fall 2019 Season of the Vancouver Tech Podcast. Having spent the past several years in the North American startup scene, spending time in Vancouver, New York, San Francisco, Ngo shares insights garnished from leading endeavors such as ProtoHack, a code free hackathon, focused on producing a prototype, key factors in co-founding startups, and building teams for success. "With Startup League, what we're trying to really solve here is the problem of opportunity" "We encountered a school of thought called design thinking. Stanford has a school called The D School for Design and I was just blown away. I was like wow, this is what innovation really comes down to; these core principles and core educational values of 1: empathy, 2: syntheses, 3: ideation, and then it goes into prototyping and testing," explains Ngo, "I was trying to wrap my head around what have we been doing with ProtoHack and understanding that this model existed, we saw that this entire time, we were focused so much on the ideas. In a similar way to what education looks like today, we were focused on outcomes, ideas and solutions. And I really wanted to figure out a way that we could make students, and in this case aspiring entrepreneurs, really fall in love with the problems themselves." Listen in to hear more! Community Partners Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

-Download Episode 103 Angela Griffen, CTO of Glance Technologies Angela Griffen, CTO of Glance Technologies Inc. joins host Drew Ogryzek to talk about Glance Pay, the life of a CTO, team culture, and more! As a seasoned software developer and CTO, having started her career when building web-based software solutions was first starting out, Griffen shares knowledge and insight ranging from domain expertise, the role of a CTO as companies grow over time, the beginnings of Glance Pay, and some thoughts on future adoption of cryptocurrency payments. Listen in to hear the whole conversation. Follow Glance Pay on Twitter at @glancepay, and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast. Vancouver Public Library Events Friday, January 5 Are you curious about making movies, creating a podcast, or editing photos? What about publishing your own book or ebook? You can do all of this and much more in the Inspiration Lab. Come learn about the creative possibilities! 2:00 PM: All About the Inspiration Lab Tuesday, January 9th Learn how you can tell the story of a family member, bring together family history, or just share a vacation adventure... it's up to you! Get hands-on experience digitizing, creating, and editing media to help turn your memories into movies. 2:00 PM Turn Memories into Movies: Part 1 Wednesday, January 10 From personal stories, to marketing videos, to social and environmental films – it all starts with an idea and a dream. Award-winning documentary filmmaker Julia Ivanova leads this four-hour workshop where participants learn how to develop a successful, achievable film or video project idea. 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM: Reel Stories: Developing an Idea for Film For more events, visit vpl.ca/events and to find out more about the Inspiration Lab visit vpl.ca/inspirationlab Community Partners Innovation Labs is hosting a DevOps for Any Language, Any Platform event, Tuesday January 9th, 2018 from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM. We are very excited to start the new year with a seminar dedicated to innovation in IT! We are bringing one of Microsoft's key cloud advocates, Donovan Brown to demonstrate how to set up your very own DevOps in your organization from scratch. Adaptech Solutions Drive business value. Stay ahead of competitors. Build great products. January 18th, and 19th, 2018 - Adaptech Solutions is holding workshops on Delivering Effective Microservices and Hands-On Microservices Implementation: Deep-Dive. deCode Hackathon: deCODE invites selected hackers to work alongside company engineers from high-growth tech companies to work on challenging and interesting technical challenges. Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

-Download Episode 102 Mike Volker of New Ventures BC Mike Volker of New Ventures BC joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss New Ventures BC, its venture acceleration program, and the BCIC-New Ventures Competition. "The ideal participant would be an individual participant or group of indivuduals that think they have something that has huge potential in the marketplace. And, they need some guidance, they need some help figuring out how to take their idea and commercialize it," Volker explains. "The capital is a very important part of it, because a lot of the mentors in the New Ventures BC program are investors; business angels, who invest in startup companies." "In addition to learning about business, and potentially winning the prize money, which can be quite substantial - first prize is more than $100,000, and that's cash, no-strings attached. And that of itself is attractive. But even more attractive is that not just the winner, but the runners up and the other companies that compete in the competition now have access to these investors who can get them launched." With mentors such as Peter Jennings co-founder of VisiCorp, the company that launched the first killer app, a $100,000 no-strings first-place prize, and a very modest entrance fee, the only reason someone wouldn't want to take advantange of the programs and competition is probably because they just don't know about it. Listen in to hear the full conversation and learn more about New Ventures BC. Follow New Ventures BC on Twitter at @NVBC, and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast. Vancouver Public Library Events Thursday, November 30th 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM: Self Publish 100: Introduction to EBooks. Wednesday, December 6th 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM Intro to Video Editing with Premiere Pro Saturday, December 2nd 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM Let's Talk About Personal Branding Thursday, December 7th 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM: Self Publishing 101: Create Your Own Ebook Community Partners deCode Hackathon: deCODE invites selected hackers to work alongside company engineers from high-growth tech companies to work on challenging and interesting technical challenges. ConFoo is a conference for developers that will take place on December 4th-6th at the Sheraton Wall Center. Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Jeffery Walsh, EtherParty Developer VanBex, a team of blockchain consultants and experts does client work, helping with development, marketing for businesses that want to integrate blockchain, smart contracts, crowdfunding and also has their own projects. EtherParty is a VanBex project that helps by making smart contracts easier to use. Smart contracts exist on the Ethereum blockchain. EtherParty is like the Wix or Squarespace of smart contracts; an app you can use to click through and make your own. Jeffery Walsh, fullstack developer of EtherParty joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss VanBex, EtherParty, blockchain development for both cryptocurrency and other uses. With regards to what blockchain is, "I just think of it as computers agreeing on something," says Walsh. "There's a bunch of computers, and they're all running the same code. They agree on something, and that can be entered into a public ledger, because everybody agreed." Listen in to dive deeper into how blockchains and cryptocurrencies like BitCoin and Ethereum work. Follow EtherParty on Twitter at @etherparty_io, and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast. Community Partners deCode Hackathon: deCODE invites selected hackers to work alongside company engineers from high-growth tech companies to work on challenging and interesting technical challenges. ConFoo is a conference for developers that will take place on December 4th-6th at the Sheraton Wall Center. Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Joni Brennan, President of DIACC Joni Brennan, president of the Digital Identification and Authentication Council of Canada joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss digital identity, and some of the challenges, dangers, and benefits associated with it. Brennan is working on trying to solve some of the problems with digital identity, such as storage of personal information across multiple sites, including photocopies of driver's licenses, having too many user ids and passwords, and many breaches of data, in ways that allow us to unlock opportunities for Canadians, and globally. What we do here in Canada, the DIACC hopes to bring out across the digital economy and to the world. An identity could be defined as a passport, or a permanent residency card. Brennan says she likes to think of an identity as being a construct of a village. When answering the question of who I am, a large part of the answer is based upon making a claim that we are something, and having that claim reinforced by a third party, often dependent on the context. In the digital world, there are still many challenges in moving from one context to the next. Within the digital identity landscape, the focus for people working on these issues, has shifted to what is called verified claims. Claims can be age, address, type of entity. Verifying these specific claims can be more interesting than verifying all of the potential attributes that could possibly go into making an identity. For example, we might simply need to know, whether a person is of age to purchase liquor. If we focus on answering the question of whether a given entity has access, we can also have data minimization, which Brennan describes as being not only a privacy measure, but also a security measure. It then becomes a question of, what is the smallest amount of information that can be provided, then verified to obtain access. Listen in to hear the whole discussion, including how technology like blockchain can help solve some of the problems of claim verification and access to information. Follow Joni Brennan on Twitter at @jonibrennan, the Digital ID & Auth Council of Canada at mydiacc, and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast. Community Partners Digital ID Design Challenge The Digital ID Design Challenge (DIDC) is a competition that asks teams of students and professionals to address critical issues with digital identity inspired solutions. deCode Hackathon: deCODE invites selected hackers to work alongside company engineers from high-growth tech companies to work on challenging and interesting technical challenges. ConFoo is a conference for developers that will take place on December 4th-6th at the Sheraton Wall Center. Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guest Ahmad Nassri of Telus Digital Special guest Ahmad Nassri, Principal Architect at Telus Digital joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss community building, TechMasters, and business and team organization. Nassri likes to describe Telus Digital, an approximately 300 person team, with a large presence in Vancouver as well as Toronto, as being the software arm, or the part that enables all the digital experiences that Telus customers, whether business or consumers are interacting with. As the organizer of TechMasters, Nassri is very active helping to bring the technology community closer together. Listen in to find out how this team is able to have developers deploy code to production 300 times a day, with no dedicated ops people, and more! Follow Ahmad Nassri on Twitter at @AhmadNassri and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast. Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guest Nicky Kunstman, Internal Recruiter at InVision Special guest Nicky Kunstman joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss InVision, and the process of recruiting. People who are passionate about issues of scale, usability, cloud-computing, and seeing the difference they are able to make in the lives of people on the design and UX side of things, while helping them make better products may find working with InVision appealing. Listen in to dive into questions around the interviewing process, how InVision maintains a 100% fully remote team, and much more! Follow Nicky Kunstman on Twitter at @LizaCole5280 and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast and frankly, why not go and work at InVision? Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guests MaRi Eagar and Manie Eagar Special guests Manie and MaRi Eagar of Digital Futures, who conducted the first study in Canada that set out to discover competitive drivers to build and further develop the ecosystem that supports Vancouver, BC, and Canada, as a global Blockchain and FinTech hub. And who have more associations and accomplishments than can easily be listed in an introduction join host Drew Ogryzek to discuss blockchain, cryptocurrencies and ICOs, and their implications to Canadians and the world. Blockchain Association of Canada Chairman, Manie Eagar, a contrinuting author of The Fintech Book explains that the BAC is a Canada-wide membership or community representation at a provincial and federal level, giving everybody a voice and participation opportunity in the debate on what blockchain is, how it can be applied, on the one-side through engaging with regulators and bankers on how this technology can make a difference. And on the other side, how it could disrupt the way we do business; literally our business models at the very core, if decentralist principles are applied. MaRi Eagar says that a lot of solutions, and whitepapers for blockchain based solutions are trying to crack the code of how to create decision making in a different way through coding thinking into an algorithm. Some of the questions aiming to be solved bring up old philosophical debates, such as who should be able to vote, and how much weight an individual's vote should have. Being very interested in how we might be able to achieve deep democracy, MaRi Eager explains that on the whole, we still seem to think that if everyone votes, then everyone will be happy. At the moment, if we have a minority then someone loses. How to deal with a minority vote and really how to be inclusive could be questions answered by blockchain technology. Listen in to follow along with the in-depth discussion! Follow MaRi Eagar on Twitter at @marieagar, Manie Eagar at @manieeagar and the Eventspodcsat at @eventspodcast. Links Digital Futures Blockchain Association of Canada BC Blockchain Forum MaRiEagar.com ManieEagar.com Community Partners Decentralized Database Hackathon - Come together with like minded folks to create cool new ways to use decentralized database technology, and win Crypto! Presented by Bluzelle deCode Hackathon: deCODE invites selected hackers to work alongside company engineers from high-growth tech companies to work on challenging and interesting technical challenges. ConFoo is a conference for developers that will take place on December 4th-6th at the Sheraton Wall Center. Events Podcast Presents: Vancouver Tech Events Oct 2 - 4, 2017 MON: OCT 2 Tech Starters Code Night! (Tech Starters | at Lighthouse Labs | 6:00 pm) TUE: OCT 3 TechVancouver Meetup (October 2017) (Tech Vancouver | at BrainStation | 6:00 pm) WED: OCT 4 Design Principles with C# & TypeScript examples (.NET User Group of BC | BCIT Downtown Campus | 5:45 pm) Creating Strong QA & Development Partnerships: Lessons learned in the real world (yvrTesting | at ACL | 5:30 pm) Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guest Dan Garfield of Codefresh Special guest Dan Garfield, VP of Marketing at Codefresh joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss continuous deployment with Codefresh, a CI/CD (continuous integration and deployment) platform with a focus on providing end-to-end automation for everything containers and Kubernetes. Historically looking at how automation has been done, there has been a lot of scripting, and a lot of duplication of work; people are building the same machines over and over again, with different projects. Codefresh aims at taking a strong pipeline, such as the the Netflix pipeline, whose development was an effort of millions of dollars of resources, and making that available for everyone to plug into in both a flexible, but yet prescriptive automation platform. Recognizing that there are universal standards for container deployments, the dream of Codefresh is to have an automation platform that emphasizes ease of use, while still allowing access to customize auto-generated configuration. The Codefresh team has coined the term "breaking the glass," to capture the concept of customizing these auto-generated configuration files. Having started in 2014, Codefresh launched general availability in January of this year, and has been growing very quickly since. With a strong emphasis on the user experience, Codefresh engages its customers, offering direct access via slack or scheduled phone support with developers, even at the free tier; which offers up to 200 builds/month and 5 concurrently. Builds/month can be increased by introducing Codefresh to your friends - something this podcaster wholeheartedly recommends. Sign up with this referral link (https://g.codefresh.io/signup?ref=ryJotnZj-) to help Drew build out a proof of concept to convince his team that Codefresh is as awesome as he believes it is! Garfield says understanding your audience and empathizing well with the problems that people face is important, and that Codefresh wants people, startups, and organizations to use the Codefresh platform to be successful. Recognizing that by providing an awesome free tier experience, it makes it easy to adopt, completely free for smaller shops who don't require more resources (and my not yet be earning revenue), that when organizations grow to want more environments, more than five concurrent builds, and scale up their builds per month, they'll be able to grow with Codefresh. Listen in to hear more in-depth discussion and follow Dan Garfield on Twitter at @todaywasawesome and the Eventspodcsat at @eventspodcast . Links Codefresh Community Partners Startup Week 2017 will kick off with our signature Hackathon from September 22 to 24, 2017, which will attract more than 200 innovators with the goal of building Vancouver’s next great startups. ConFoo is a conference for developers that will take place on December 4th-6th at the Sheraton Wall Center. Events Podcast Presents: Vancouver Tech Events Sep 25 - 28, 2017 MON: SEPT 25 HACKERNEST VANCOUVER TECH SOCIALS (at CodeCore | 8:00 pm) TUE: SEPT 26 Ultimate CMS Showdown! (Welcome back from Summer!) (Vancouver Web Design Meetup Group | at CodeCore | 6:00 pm) WED: SEPT 27 Querying Data Pipeline with AWS Athena (Vancouver Amazon Web Services User Group | at Demonware | 6:00 pm) THU: SEPT 28 Sandi Metz - Go Ahead, Make a Mess @Clio HQ with VanRuby (at Clio’s office | 5:30 pm) Intro to Deep Learning with Fast.AI: Week six (Learn Data Science | Boeing Vancouver Labs | 6:00 pm) Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guest Dieter Shirley of AxiomZen Special guest Dieter Shirley of AxiomZen joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss blockchain, cryptocurrency, and ICOs. AxiomZen is a company that is always investigating new technologies, building their own startups, partnering with external investors to build startups with them, building companies for fortune 500 companies and other industry groups. For AxiomZen, breaking new ground, rather than building "me too" products is the norm. Naturally, blockchain is something they have had their eyes on since day one. Shirley describes blockchain as a really clever technology, that is fundamentally a way of storing a series of transactions or events in a way that any sized group of people can always agree on what's in that log without any possibility of the history of that log being changed. Bitcoin introduced the public blockchain, basically stating that because we have this technology that lets us have an indelible log of transactions that everyone agrees have occurred, we don't need a bank, explains Shirley. Shirley believes the core technology of blockchain, being distributed publicly is disruptive because it is basically saying we don't need banks, or necessarily government to define currency for us. We can do everything in the cloud, in a decentralized way where no one is in charge, but the code. Listen in to hear more in-depth discussion and follow Dieter Shirley on Twitter at @dete73. Links Midas Guide AxiomZen AziomZenTeam on Twitter Community Partners Startup Week 2017 will kick off with our signature Hackathon from September 22 to 24, 2017, which will attract more than 200 innovators with the goal of building Vancouver’s next great startups. Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guest Boris Mann of FrontierFoundry Special Guest Boris Mann of FrontierFoundry joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss blockchain, cryptocurrency and ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings). Mann is an active contributor to helping grow Vancouver's technical community, he is involved in open source, running "geek meetups," and started FrontierFroundry with Adrian Jonklaas in March of 2017. FrontierFoundry was concieved with the question in mind, "What kind of company can we build in Vancouver that really has the whole world as its customers; that goes global from day one?" and thinking of areas of frontier technology, a very broad space where there's not a lot of concensus or understanding as to what successful companies in this space look like. This space includes blockchain, augmented reality, and machine learning, and other emerging tech. How are companies in this space funded? How are they created? Who are their customers? Mann explains that blockchain really has three definitions: The computer science innovation of Merkel Tree, and crypto algorithms that enable this concept of a blockchain Instances of public blockchain, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum The blockchain ethos of decentralization, trustlessness, permissionless innovation, and other interesting aspects as a result of global, decentralized networks Definitions, Mann attributes to Lisa Cheng, cofounder of Vanbex and has written about in the FrontierFoundry blog. Mann defines ICOs as ways of offering blockchain tokens or coins to people to buy into that will then fund building a project in some way. According to Mann, the big thing that has happened in the last six to nine months or so, is that the Ethereum blockchain has the ability to do programming on the chain and create coins or tokens directly, without having to run an entire separate codebase. This kind of bootstrapping on Ethereum lowers the barrier for entry makes it easy for people to create and offer tokens to a global audience that people can buy to fund projects, which has resulted in some record breaking funding. With open source as a foundation of the ethos of blockchain, various individuals collaborate on open source code repositories that actually run the core servers and clients of the blockchains and miners. Because these codebases are written in low level languages such as C and C++, which takes a fair level of expertise combined with solid computer science knowledge in efficiently implementing cryptographic algorithms, while making sure they are secure and performant; these networks have to run world wide. So, the level of effort to clone the codebase, and make changes that are both different enough from the initial codebase, and secure and highly performant, means it takes an entire stack of C/C++ programmers just to get started. In contrast to that, doing an Ethereum ERC20 Token (a formalized standard for Ethereum tokens), can be done in an afternoon. That won't necessarily mean it is fully secure or doesn't have bugs, but it's much easier to leverage this existing technology, and standard than to develop a completely new blockchain. Listen in to hear more in-depth discussion and follow Boris Mann on Twitter at @bmann. Community Partners Startup Week 2017will kick off with our signature Hackathon from September 22 to 24, 2017, which will attract more than 200 innovators with the goal of building Vancouver’s next great startups. Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guest Llew Morkel of ProsperiProp Special Guest Llew Morkel of ProsperiProp in South Africa joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings). Founder of ProsperiProp, a company currently in the process of an ICO (Initial Coin Offering), Morkel says the idea is to make it possible for a person with as little as USD $2.00 to get involved with property investment. There's often quite a high dollar bar, or minimum investment to get involved with property investment, so he sees this as a big game changer. Morkel says Bitcoin was the very first blockchain coin. It was the very first way of transacting and paying digitally. The open source Bitcoin currency and blockchain acts as the reference. One can download that source code and start their own coin. When Ethereum copied it and started the Ethereum chain, then decided to better it in a way with smart contracts. Bitcoin and Ethereum are payment systems, which makes them "coins," while ProsperiProp has an asset backed item which does not run on its own blockchain, and that makes it a token, explains Morkel. With all the hype around ICOs circulating, Morkel says some things to take into consideration, while evaluating whether to buy into a company's ICO are: Read the whitepaper: a whitepaper is like a business plan for technology, where everything the business plans on doing is written in detail. You can scrutinize that document to see exactly where it comes from. If that whitepaper does not make sense, then that's the first alarm bell. The team involved: does the team have experience in what they're doing, are they capable of being validated, and do you trust the people involved? Are the people involved open to public media: Often people who want to scam you out of a few dollars will not go into the media, because they do not want to be seen or known. Check out propxico.com to read the whitepaper, learn more about the ProsperiProp team or get involved in the ICO. Follow Morkel on Twitter at @LlewMorkel and Samantha Ming at @EventsPodcast. Events Podcast Presents: Vancouver Tech Events Sep 12 - 16, 2017 TUE: SEP 12 Vancouver Founder Institute Information Session (Vancouver Startup Founder 101 | at The Profile (Gastown) | 6:30 pm) WED: SEP 13 Intro to Einstein Data Discovery for Developers (Vancouver Salesforce Developer Group | at Salesforce | 6:00 pm) THU: SEP 14 Everything you need to know about Kubernetes + hands-on demo (Google Cloud Platform | at Scalar Office | 5:30 pm) Intro to Deep Learning with Fast.AI: Week five (Learn Data Science | at Boeing Vancouver Labs | 6:00 pm) SAT: SEP 16 How To Build A Sales Process That Converts (Spring Startup School | 10:00 am) Want to include your event? DM eventspodcast on instagram/twitter @eventspodcast Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guest Barinder Rasode, President and CEO of NICHE Canada, and Co-Founder of RoundHouse Radio's She Talks Special Guest Barinder Rasode, President and CEO of NICHE Canada, and Co-Founder of She Talks joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss cannabis legalization in Canada, and how NICHE Canada (National Institute for Cannabis Health and Education) fits in. Initially, Rasode was opposed to the proliferation of cannabis dispensaries, but seeing those who are affected in positive ways helped her change perspectives, and she now heads NICHE Canada, an organization that aims to operationalize the federal government commissioned cannabis legalization and regulation taskforce report by ensuring all stakeholders during and after the process are equipped in their fields to manage this new regime. Rasode says NICHE has a partnership with MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), with the CACP (Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police), and other regulatory bodies that are concerned about product safetly and testing for intoxication levels. There are a lot of issues to be dealt with from economic, medical, and regulatory and public safety points of view. NICHE is working to bring all three levels of government and industry together to get them on the same page. NICHE is hosting a job fair for the cannabis industry at UBC Robson Square on September 21st from 9:00AM to 9:00PM. Register on their site: https://www.nichecanada.com/job-fair-registration Follow Rasode on Twitter at @BarinderRasode and Samantha Ming at @EventsPodcast. Events Podcast Presents: Vancouver Tech Events Sep 5 - 8, 2017 TUE: SEP 5 5 Steps to Creating a User-Centered Product or Service (Spring Startup School | at Borden Ladner Gervais | 5:30 pm) Intro to HTML & CSS (Red Academy | 6:00 pm) WED: SEP 6 TALENT DAY: Meet local tech companies (BCjobs.ca | at BC Tech Innovation Hub | 5:00 pm) PHP Meetup: September 2017 (Vancouver PHP | at Eventbase | 6:00 pm) THU: SEP 7 Xamarin: .NET Standard 2.0 support and other new and upcoming features (.NET User Group of BC | at Microsoft Office | 5:45 pm) FRI: SEP 8 GRUB IN THE HUB: The right people to take care of your people (Tech Talent Meetup | at BC Tech Innovation Hub | 12:00 pm) Want to include your event? DM eventspodcast on instagram/twitter @eventspodcast Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guest Alex Cruise, Architect/Development Manager at Splunk Special guest Alex Cruise, Architect/Development Manager at Splunk joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss the development culture, organizational structure and some use cases for Splunk, the company that brings us log monitoring and analaysis tools and services. Cruise explains a little about LeSS (Large Scale Scrum), and that their team has been adopting it as a means of escaping some of the failure modes of traditional small-scale agile. LeSS involves things like a unified product backlog, such that every item that a product manager deems being worthy of being worked on, goes onto the shared product backlog. One of the main reasons for Cruise's teams to be making a transition towards LeSS is to reduce hyperspecialization. Mature organizations tend to have people who develop a great deal of expertise within a narrow field. With these hyperspecialized experts, it becomes increasingly difficult for someone new to get up to speed and be productive on a codebase where someone else is already a specialist. LeSS helps to break this coupling between individuals and teams, and particular product features they historically were experts in. Cruise also shares his thoughts on what it means to be a senior developer, including increasingly spending more time communicating and mentoring, and doing more leadership type tasks. Additionally, this includes commenting on wiki pages, reviewing code, training, and helping people to solve their own problems, while spending less time on one's own deliverables. Follow Cruise on Twitter at @alexcruise and Samantha Ming at @EventsPodcast. Events Podcast Presents: Vancouver Tech Events Aug 28 - 31, 2017 MON: AUG 28 Hackernest Vancouver Tech Socials (at BrainStation | 8:00 pm) TUE: AUG 29 Women's Pitch Night (Elevator Ventures | at Borden Ladner Gervais | 6:30 pm) Lambda apps with .architect, and Lightning talks (Vancouver Javascript Developers | at VFS Cafe | 6:30 pm) WED: AUG 30 [Advanced] Data Science Reading Group (Learn Data Science | at SFU Harbour Centre | 6:00 pm) Code & Coffee Pop-Up (at Richmond Public Library | 7:00 pm) THU: AUG 31 Intro to Deep Learning with Fast.AI: Week four (Learn Data Science | at Boeing Vancouver Labs | 6:00 pm) CodeCore Demo Day - August 2017 (at CodeCore | 6:00 pm) Want to include your event? DM eventspodcast on instagram/twitter @eventspodcast Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guest Kelsey Hightower, Staff Developer Advocate, Google Cloud Platform Special guest Kelsey Hightower joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss Kubernetes, its differentiating features in contrast to Mesos, CloudFoundry, Heroku and other Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions, such as OpenShift which is actually built on top of Kubernetes. When considering a fully hosted PaaS solution, if you find the opinions of the solution to be too constrained for all of your use-cases, then Kubernetes becomes super attractive. Many of the resources for Kubernetes have Kelsey Hightower's name around them, including Kubernetes the Hard Way, Udacity's course Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes, and the soon to be released O'Reilly publication Kubernetes: Up and Running. Follow Hightower on Twitter at @kelseyhightower and Samantha Ming at @EventsPodcast. Links Kuberetes: Up and Running Kubernetes the Hard Way Events Podcast Presents: Vancouver Tech Events Aug 22 - 27, 2017 TUE: Aug 22 - Machine Learning on Google Cloud - Bring your problems (Google Developers Group | at Lighthouse Labs | 5:30) Vancouver Startup Office Hours: Get Business Advice from Tech Startup Founders (Vancouver Startup Founder 101 | at The Profile | 6:30pm) WED: Aug 23 Intro to Deep Learning with Fast.AI: Week three (Learn Data Science | Boeing Vancouver Labs | 6:30pm) How to identify your top growth channels that will hit your marketing goals (Vancouver Growth Hackers | at BuildDirect | 6:00pm) THU: Aug 24 9 Weeks from Nuclear Engineer to Front End Developer - A Talk by Robyn Larsen (Women Who Code | at BrainStation | 5:30pm) The Women in Tech End of Summer Networking Party (Vancouver Women in Male-Dominated Industries | at Mobify | 5:30pm) SAT: Aug 26 Putting the FUN in FUNdamentals. (Lighthouse Labs | 4:00 pm) Want to include your event? DM eventspodcast on instagram/twitter @eventspodcast Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guest Alejandro Lujan of ScalaQuest Special guest Alejandro Lujan joins host Drew Ogryzek to discus the programming language Scala, the types of problems Scala, and functional programming languages in general are good at solving versus object oriented languages such as Java, for example. As a professional trainer and consultant for Lightbend Inc. Lujan brings his expertise in both programming and education to an exciting online game, ScalaQuest. Each level focuses on a topic, from values and expressions, to functions, to Monads. As you progress through the game, there are a number of challenges to solve in code, helping to gain familiarity with the Scala programming language and its key concepts. Check out the ScalaQuest kickstarter campaign! Follow Lujan on Twitter at @andanthor and Samantha Ming at @EventsPodcast. Links ScalaQuest Kickstarter Lightbend Blog: ScalaQuest Events Podcast Presents: Vancouver Tech Events Aug 14 - 17, 2017 MON: Aug 14 SEO: How to Drive More Traffic to Your Website (Camp Tech | at Hive Vancouver | 12:00 pm) TUE: Aug 15 Configuring AWS ECS infrastructure with Terraform and the Segment Stack (Vancouver Amazon Web Service User Group | at BuildDirect | 6:00 pm) Vancouver Startup Funding 101: How to Raise Capital for Your Idea (Vancouver Startup Founder 101 | at The Profile | 6:30 pm) WED: Aug 16 [Advanced] Data Science Reading Group (Learn Data Science | at SFU Harbour Centre | 6:00 pm) August 2017 Meetup (ReactJS | at HootSuite | 6:00 pm) THU: Aug 17 Free iOS Essentials Workshop (Lighthouse Labs | 6:00 pm) Code & Coffee (at Mobify | 6:30 pm) Want to include your event? DM eventspodcast on instagram/twitter @eventspodcast Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guest Brittany Whitmore of Exvera Communications Special guest Brittany Whitmore of Exvera Communications joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss PR in the world of tech, including 3D printing, crowdfunding, virtual reality, and what it means to tell great stories about inspiration and entrepreneurialism. In addition to being a public relations specialist and BC Business Top 30 under 30, Whitmore is quite active in the tech community as founder and executive director of Ted X Gastown Women, resident technology professional at Roundhouse Radio, and more. Follow Whitmore on Twitter at @BritWhitmore and Samantha Ming at @EventsPodcast. Events Podcast Presents: Vancouver Tech Events Aug 8 - 12, 2017 TUE: Aug 8 Slack bots on Kubernetes - Building the future (Google Developers Group | at Slack HQ | 6:00 pm) Vancouver Engineer to Entrepreneur: Startup Basics for Techies (Vancouver Startup Founder 101 | at The Profile | 6:30 p) WED: Aug 9 Crushing it on Social Media (Facebook and LinkedIn) (YVR Startups | at Istuary | 7:00 pm) THU: Aug 10 ViDIA August 2017 (VIDIA | at Hootsuite | 5:30 pm) Learn Data Science by Doing Kaggle Competitions: Amazon from Space (Learn Data Science | at SFU Harbour Centre | 6:00 pm) SAT: Aug 12 HTML & CSS for Beginners (Ladies Learning Code | at Mobify | 10:00 am) Want to include your event? DM eventspodcast on instagram/twitter @eventspodcast Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community. Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.