Vancouver

You might remember how I mentioned the creation of a Vancouver SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud) Meetup. We had our first meetup on the recently announced Bluemix in June and it went really well. The second event will take place on July 23rd at 6pm at Launch Academy in downtown Vancouver. The topic will be “Hacking 101 and Securing Your Applications”. A very interesting, and often overlooked, subject. If you are in the area, join the meetup group, and consider RSVPing for the security event.

Also relevant to Vancouver and BC residents, the local Bluemix Day of training (that I mentioned before) has been moved to July 24th at Simon Fraser University. You can sign up for the event here. Note that the Bluemix training is split into two sessions, on the same day, a theoretical part and a practical/hands-on one. You might want to sign up for both.

Calgary

Finally, I recently created a Calgary SMAC meetup as well. You can join the meetup here. Our first event will take place this Thursday (July 17, 2014) at 6pm at the Assembly Coworking Space. You can RSVP for the first event (a Bluemix presentation and demo by yours truly), after joining, by following this link.

Edmonton might be next, but I’m still figuring out the logistics of it. I hear that it’s a very startup focused city so I’m excited by the prospective of creating a tech meetup there as well.

The post Learn to Secure Apps in Vancouver, and Calgary SMAC Meetup appeared first on Programming Zen.

The gist of it is that these meetups are hubs for developers and technologists who are interested in cool, innovative technologies related to Cloud computing, big data, analytics, mobile, wearable devices, social media, and so on (and of course IBM’s portfolio of relevant products.)

The first events have been very well received, but due to the geographical location of my team (Toronto), the focus thus far has been centered on Eastern Canada (specifically Ontario and Quebec). I, on the other hand, work from Penticton, BC so I happily offered to cover Western Canada starting with Vancouver. Depending on the interest level we receive out west, cities like Calgary and Edmonton may soon follow as well.

If these topics tickle your fancy and you reside in British Columbia (or travel here regularily), please consider joining the Vancouver SMAC meetup.

The first event will be held on June 9th, at 6pm at the Launch Academy. You can RSVP here.

The main topic of this first event will be Codename: BlueMix. IBM describes it as follows:

Codename: BlueMix is an open-standards, cloud-based platform for building, managing and running apps of all types (web, mobile, big data, new smart devices). Capabilities include Java, mobile backend development, application monitoring, as well as capabilities from ecosystem partners and open source — all through an as-a-service model in the cloud.

In practice, it’s a really cool developer playground to build and deploy apps in the Cloud with innovative components that are both IBM products/services such as BLU Acceleration and third parties such as Node.js, Redis, RabbitMQ, Twilio, and Square to name a few. If you played with Heroku before, the idea behind this platform shouldn’t feel alien to you.

During our first meetup, we will give you an overview and demo of this cool technology that’s currently available in beta. Fear not though, we’re not about to try and sell you anything. This isn’t a timeshare presentation afterall. 🙂

In fact, we want these events to become an opportunity to network and show and tell what the local community has been up to in the SMAC space. (Those who are interested in presenting should get in touch with me for future events.) And if you needed any more incentive to take part in this exciting event, free pizza and pop are also included.

If you’re intrigued, I suggest you join this SMAC meetup here, even if you can’t make it to the first meetup, so as to receive notifications about future events that you might be able to attend.

I really look forward to seeing you there!

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