Vancouver Tech Podcast

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.

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

MON: OCT 2

TUE: OCT 3

WED: OCT 4

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, 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 .

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

MON: SEPT 25

TUE: SEPT 26

WED: SEPT 27

THU: SEPT 28

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 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.

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 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.

TUE: SEP 12

WED: SEP 13

THU: SEP 14

SAT: SEP 16

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 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.

TUE: SEP 5

WED: SEP 6

THU: SEP 7

FRI: SEP 8

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 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.

MON: AUG 28

TUE: AUG 29

Women's Pitch Night

Lambda apps with .architect, and Lightning talks

WED: AUG 30

[Advanced] Data Science Reading Group

Code & Coffee Pop-Up

THU: AUG 31

Intro to Deep Learning with Fast.AI: Week four

CodeCore Demo Day - August 2017

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 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.

TUE: Aug 22

- Machine Learning on Google Cloud - Bring your problems

Vancouver Startup Office Hours: Get Business Advice from Tech Startup Founders

WED: Aug 23

Intro to Deep Learning with Fast.AI: Week three

How to identify your top growth channels that will hit your marketing goals

THU: Aug 24

9 Weeks from Nuclear Engineer to Front End Developer - A Talk by Robyn Larsen

The Women in Tech End of Summer Networking Party

SAT: Aug 26

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 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.

MON: Aug 14

TUE: Aug 15

Configuring AWS ECS infrastructure with Terraform and the Segment Stack

Vancouver Startup Funding 101: How to Raise Capital for Your Idea

WED: Aug 16

[Advanced] Data Science Reading Group

August 2017 Meetup

THU: Aug 17

Free iOS Essentials Workshop

Code & Coffee

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 joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss PR in the world of tech, including

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.

TUE: Aug 8

Slack bots on Kubernetes - Building the future

Vancouver Engineer to Entrepreneur: Startup Basics for Techies

WED: Aug 9

THU: Aug 10

ViDIA August 2017

Learn Data Science by Doing Kaggle Competitions: Amazon from Space

SAT: Aug 12

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.