We are pleased to invite you to the Open Chord on January 14th for the first ever KnoxDevs quarterly meetup! Join us for free beer from CirrusPath, free appetizers from Premier Staffing Partners, and hear an amazing pair of talented speakers. This is a technology-neutral meeting intended to bring together Knoxville area software developers of all skill levels under one roof to network and learn. Whether you’re a student or a senior specialist, come get inspired, build some new relationships, and help make an impact in the local software development community. We've also got door prizes to give away from JetBrains and Pearson Publishing/InformIT.

Agenda

6:30- 7:00 Meet and greet, networking, beer, food.

7:00 - 8:00 Talks by Dan Lipe and James Horey + Q&A

8:00 - 8:30 Networking, beer, food

(Possibly some karaoke to follow)

Dan Lipe ( Prototypes: from paper to digital)

We all have ideas. Some are good and some are, well not, and being able to distinguish the good and the bad is often tricky. That's where prototypes come in to play. We'll be talking about some ways to capture and evaluate ideas - some high tech and some very low tech - and evaluate them to quickly iterate on the best.

Dan Lipe has 20+ years experience in the design field covering a range of industries and focusing an multiple facets of the design process.He currently heads up the UX and Design for Eventbooking, working with developers and users on three different SAAS products - designed to manage booking spaces and time. Prior to EventBooking, Dan spent 9 years designing experiences for Scripps Networks Digital - most recently leading the design research, information architecture and user experience for the DIYnetwork.com web site. He totally nerds out on typography and has a fondness for designing and building furniture.

James Horey

Developing a production-grade data science product is hard. It's hard for various reasons, including but not limited to: fundamental data science and algorithm challenges, data quality issues, reconciling development methodologies, and appropriate tools selection. In this talk, I'll go over our business motivations for starting this venture, and how we're addressing some of our technical problems. I'll also talk about some open problems that I really hope some developer in the audience will solve.

James Horey currently leads the data science team at Cirruspath (past year). His team is largely responsible for analyzing customer sales data and producing novel data science products. Before that James did consulting for various companies to help them with data architecture and analytics planning. Before that he was in the Computational Data Analytics group at ORNL for over four years, where he helped lead Medicare & Medicaid analytics projects. Once upon a time he was a PhD student in Computer Science.



Thanks to our sponsors:



Beer: CirrusPath

Appetizers: Premier Staffing Partners

Meeting space: The Open Chord

Books: Pearson Publishing/InformIT

Software: Jetbrains