Wow! The first quarter of 2015 has been busy with lots of awesome energy in the tech community!
New Meetups
Patrick White‘s new SEO meetup has been really informative, useful and well attended. It’s on the second Tuesday of the month here at Ideas & Coffee. There have been a number of knowledgable folks willing to share what works and what doesn’t in this often misunderstood area.
Sam Hotchkiss, of Brute Force fame, has just started a WordPress for developers Meetup. Exact schedule in flux. We met last night at I&C for a lively debate on favorite editors and IDEs, cool tools, and interesting uses for Sugru. And Pizza! Keep an eye on the WP Meetup group for more information. He’ll also be hosting another Meetup called The Business of WordPress that will have it’s first meeting Thurs, Feb 26 at noon at the Flying Star on Corrales.
Jasper Blake and co-organizer Meredith have started a great new Meetup on Podcasting. They’ve had 3 meetings so far, with lots of useful information and tips on creating and publicizing your podcasts. Next meeting is Thursday, Mar 19th at noon at Ideas & Coffee. If you’ve considered doing a podcast this is a great group to help you get started!
Events
Local grassroots group, Built in New Mexico, has been working on a website to help local developers (and other workers in tech industries) find jobs, make contacts and promote New Mexico as a great place to live and work. They’ve built a website builtinnm.org when people can put up profiles of who they are and what they do, and companies can post jobs. Coupled with this is a monthly Meetup for short presentations and people being able to find jobs and talent. Modelled on similar successful meetings in Denver and Boulder, their first meeting will take place on Mar 9th at 6:30 in the UNM Law Library.
Another intriguing event that’s coming up is sponsored by the RubiABQ Meetup. It’s a Code Retreat. “Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design. By providing developers the opportunity to take part in focused practice, away from the pressures of ‘getting things done’, the coderetreat format has proven itself to be a highly effective means of skill improvement..” It’ll be held on Pi Day, Mar 14, 2015. It’s an all day event with a light breakfast and lunch provided. It’ll be at Ideas & Coffee. More information and registration can be found at abqcoderetreat.org.
Conversations
Last, but certainly not least, Patrick White has set up a great set of chat channels on Slack for New Mexico developers. It’s at nmdevs.slack.com, and you can invite yourself with a quick invite app Patrick set up at Heroku. Lots of interesting conversations going on from Mapping tools to what’s the best jams when you’re coding. 🙂
