Wednesday, April 25, 2018 at 12:00:00 PM DEG 6601 College Boulevard, Overland Park,

First open meeting. The theme is best practices.

12:00 - 12:15 Hang out and eat
12:15 - 12:30 Short Talk
12:30 - 1:00 Open mic and discussion

Monday, April 30, 2018 at 6:00:00 PM WeWork Corrigan Station 1828 Walnut St, Kansas City, MO

Join us for the next VR/AR Meetup on April 30 at the WeWork coworking space at Corrigan Station! WeWork is a new modern office space in downtown KC with private offices and desk space available for businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs in Kansas City. Find out more about WeWork at https://www.wework.com/buildings/corrigan-station--kansas-city .

As always, we'll have gear set up and the latest and greatest demos to check out. If you have a project that you are working on or would like feedback on something you're making, we would love to have you show it off! As always, this is a FREE event (aside from parking.)

Street parking is available and free to use, but be aware of time limits. If no street parking is available, paid parking is available to the public in the Corrigan Station garage for $2/hour. WeWork does not validate parking. Also, please bring photo ID to check in at this location.

For easy access to the space, enter through the Walnut entrance.

We hope to see you there!

Sunday, April 22, 2018 at 1:00:00 PM The NEW HammerSpace Community Workshop 5200 E. 45th St., Kansas City, MO

Suggested age range for this class: 10-110 years old

Arduino is an inexpensive and easy-to-learn combination of software and hardware that lets students, artist, tinkerers,and hobbyists, add intelligence to their projects. In this class we'll be cover the basics of getting started with Arduino and guide you through three introductory projects.

Students needs to bring their own computer with them to this class. We will be downloading and installing software used to program your Arduino. **PLEASE NOTE**: Arduino units and other programming materials will be provided by the instructor, but will remain at HammerSpace after the class. 

In this 3-hour introductory class we will cover:

● What an Arduino is and what it is and what it does

● Downloading and Installing the Arduino Software on your computer

● How Arduino Programs are written, how they run, and what to do when they don't work

● How to control a LED connected to the Arduino

● How to control a Hobby Servo connected to the Arduino

● How to make the Arduino play a sound 

Wednesday, April 25, 2018 at 5:30:00 PM Garmin International 1200 E 151st Street, Olathe, KS

A special thanks to SpringCon. Tech for sponsoring our speakers travel! http://springcon.tech/

Abstract:

Serverless is a big topic these days. More specifically, Function as a Service (FaaS) enables small-scale functions deployed in the cloud to be enabled only as needed. Compared to Platform as a Service (PaaS) services which are "always on" and require explicit scaling, FaaS services wake up when needed and are scaled by the platform automatically.

Imagine a service that only gets invoked one per hour. In PaaS, that service is always running and ready to handle requests, consuming processor resources and ultimately costing more to be ready at a moment's notice. In contrast, FaaS services awaken quickly upon invocation and go away when finished, conserving resources and cost.

In this example-driven session, we'll see how to create and deploy Function as a Service (FaaS) services with Spring and Spring Boot.

Speaker Bio:

Craig Walls is a senior engineer with Pivotal and is the author of Spring in Action and Spring Boot in Action. He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring. When he's not slinging code, Craig is planning his next trip to Disney World or Disneyland and spending as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 2 birds and 3 dogs.

Schedule
• 5:30 - 6:30pm - Social Hour with food provided by sponsor by SpringCon. Tech
• 6:30pm - Presentation
• After presentation happy hour at Austin's Bar and Grill.

Monday, April 30, 2018 at 6:00:00 PM Plexpod Crossroads 1712 Main St, Kansas City, mo

Interested in helping the Kansas City area? Great! Whether or not you know how to code, you can help by joining us to work on civic hacking to create a better Kansas City and surrounding cities. Bring projects, ideas, designs, laptops, data, and friends.

Meeting Format

6:00 - Social / Networking
6:15 - Kickoff and Introductions
6:25 - New Member Orientation and Hacking
8:00 - Wrap-up

First Mondays are "Pitch Nights," when we have a slot for new project pitches during kickoff; third Mondays are "Learn Nights," where we have community speakers on civic tech topics from 6:30-7:30pm.

Location: Plexpod Crossroads (formerly Think Big CoWorking).
Entrance in the alley on the West side of the building.
https://goo.gl/maps/hsBMJdcdEh72

Please RSVP so that we know how many snacks & drinks to bring.

Civic Heroes of all types welcome! This event is for coders and non-coders alike -- as long as you're interested in making government more transparent and building interesting things for our city, you're more than welcome!

Bring a laptop: If you intend on getting some hands-on hacking done (it's ok if you can't but it definitely helps to have one).

If you have something you'd like to work on or are excited about, please let us know via the meetup or at the hack night itself. We are growing our initiative and the energy comes from the community.

Code for KC is a program of KC Digital Drive, a local non-profit whose mission is to make Kansas City a digital leader by developing civic capacity to adapt to technology change. We are the local affiliate in Code for America's Brigade network.

Connect with Us:

• Join our Code for KC email list (http://eepurl.com/7gbQP).

• Follow us on Twitter @CodeforKC (http://twitter.com/codeforkc) and @KCDigitalDrive (http://twitter.com/kcdigitaldrive).

Got questions? Email our Brigade Captain, Paul Barham: captain@codeforkc.org or codeforkc@kcdigitaldrive.org.

Code for KC has a Code of Conduct! Please always be respectful and help us keep our events welcoming, positive, productive environments for everyone. Code For KC presenters and participants are held to this anti-harassment policy (http://codeforkc.org/hackkc-code-of-conduct).

Monday, April 30, 2018 at 6:00:00 PM NAIC 1100 Walnut, Kansas City, MO

Selenium testing is notorious for being slow. In this Meetup session we'll look at some simple ways to make Selenium testing a little faster.

We'll try to keep the scope limited so that those who want to bring their laptop and follow along can do so.

Agenda:

- Meet and Greet, refreshments
- Introductions
- Sponsors and Announcements
- Demo and Workshop
- Next time on Selenium KC Meetup
- Quiz?

Workshop Requirements:

- Java (at least jdk 8+) (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html)
- Google Chrome (https://www.google.com/chrome/)
- Eclipse (https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/oomph/epp/oxygen/R2/eclipse-inst-win64.exe)
- M2Eclipse Plugin (http://www.eclipse.org/m2e/)
or
- IntelliJ (https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/)
- Git (https://git-scm.com/downloads ) (optional)
- ChromeDriver ("https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads")

Wednesday, April 25, 2018 at 5:00:00 PM WeWork Corrigan Station 1828 Walnut St, Kansas City, MO

• What we'll do
Don't miss the first Kansas City Alexa Meetup! It will be special.

The Kansas City Alexa Meetup is the best opportunity to gather users & developers who are passionate about Amazon Alexa. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, join the KC Alexa community to learn more, share and build your skills.

Join us at this first KCMO Alexa Meetup on Wednesday, April 25 to hear Amazon Alexa Evangelist Jeff Blankenburg and Alexa Champion Bob Stolzberg share the vision for Alexa and talk about how you too can create voice-enabled services for your users with Alexa. We will have special gifts, amazing speakers who will provide an overview of the conversational user interface industry, Skills Marketplace, and several interesting Alexa use cases. We will have several Amazon Echo/Dot's available to use and we'll be raffling a few cool prizes, too.

Agenda:

• 5:00 - 5:30: Doors open, free finger food, drinks & networking
• 5:30 - 6:00: Introductions and shout outs
• 6:00 - 6:30: "Alexa Voice Industry Overview" presentation by Bob Stolzberg
• 6:30 - 7:30: "Creating Alexa Skills" presentation by Amazon Alexa Evangelist
• 7:30 - 8:00: Raffles, food, drinks & networking

Alexa Abstract:

Amazon Alexa, the cloud-based voice service that powers Amazon Echo, provides access to thousands of skills that enable customers to voice-control their world, whether it's listening to music hands free, controlling their smart home devices with a simple ask of "turn on the lights," setting timers when their hands are busy in the kitchen, listening to the news in the morning as they get ready for work, or even ordering a pizza.

You don't need to have a background in natural language understanding (NLU) or speech recognition to build great voice experiences for Alexa. Through a series of free, self-service, public APIs like the Alexa Skills Kit (https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit) and Alexa Voice Service (https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-voice-service), developers can build new skills for Alexa and integrate Alexa into their products and services.

Speakers:

Jeff Blankenburg, Amazon Alexa Evangelist (@JeffBlankenburg)
Jeff has been an Amazon Alexa Evangelist for 2 years but spent the early part of his career in digital advertising, building websites for Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Ford Motor Company, among others. He also spent 9 years at Microsoft, primarily as an evangelist for any new development technology he could get his hands on. Today, he works on the Amazon Alexa team helping developers make Alexa even smarter. Jeff has also spoken at conferences all over the world, including London, Munich, Seattle, Chicago, Australia, and New York. He also serves as an organizer for the Stir Trek (http://stirtrek.com/) conference. On the academic front, Jeff holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Ohio's Bowling Green State University!

Bob Stolzberg (@bobstolzberg)
Bob Stolzberg (http://www.linkedin.com/in/bstolzberg) is the Founder & CEO of VoiceXP, a leading Alexa SaaS software company focused on the Alexa for Business space. Bob is an official Amazon Alexa Champion who has presented at Re:Invent 2017, the Alexa Conference, TedX St. Louis and several Voice Industry podcasts. Bob has also served as a subject matter expert in the areas of Cloud technology and DRBC for the past several years and has more than 20 years of engineering experience in the IT industry. In his spare time, Bob is a water lily farmer and scientist.

• What to bring
Bring a laptop if you want to c0d3..

• Important to know
Make sure you have registered for an Amazon Developer Account at http://developer.amazon.com and Regular Amazon AWS Account at http://console.amazon.com (No Cost, but requires a credit card)