Episode 62: Nikolas Badminton

On this week's podcast Drew talks about hiring incentives at his company. Alex put her node reading on hold and with help from Adaptech Solutions is building an Event Store (stores events for CQRS solutions) using node.js which so far includes creating a basic webserver. She's installed and is learning to use Vimium (Chrome extension) so that she can use keyboard shortcuts to navigate and is learning about http (hyper text transfer protocol) response headers.

For her programming environment Alex is using intellij IDEA Ultimate because it supports node.js and gives inline templates (as you type) for common structures such as line endings, parentheses and brace matching. She's also using yarn instead of npm because its better for getting the exact versions of packages and it’s more robust than npm. Plus Mozilla, Facebook and Google use it so it can't be all that bad!

Meetups around town Alex and Drew attended were Hackernest (hosted by Drew), Tech Vancouver, and DDD/CQRS/ES hosted by AdapTech.

Alex went to Tech Vancouver on Tuesday, January 31st which was hosted by Pindie at Mobify. Featured speakers were Darshan Kaler @dkaler CEO + Co-Founder of Tradable Bits who spoke about building a successful self-funded startup. Next up was Jessica Pautsch Founder of Mesh Food Exchange which is an intelligent match making service for the re-distribution of surplus food. Chris Randall VP, Customer Success and CX Strategy of ResponseTek spoke about finding your niche market and the value of realtime feedback. Next was Galya Westler Founder of Plazus who spoke about branded and targeted social media engagement. Last speaker of the night was Jean Lozano CTO of Media Valet speaking on their journey as a re-startup as they went from being a services based company to providing software as a service(SaaS). Key takeaways from this event were know your market and be able to address your customers pain points, be willing to define and redefine your services and company vision, and don't be afraid to pivot. Join us at the next TechVancouver meetup on February 28th at the Amazon Vancouver offices for more exciting speakers and networking opportunities!

Highlighted Meetups Around Town Alex and Drew are looking forward to this week are the Vancouver Azure Meetup on Tuesday and the regularly scheduled DDD/CQRS/ES Meetup on Thursday.

##Featured Guest

Our featured guest this week is Nikolas Badminton! Nik is a researcher and futurist speaker who splits his time between Canada (Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal), USA, UK, and provides insights into how people, communities, cities, businesses, and countries are changing with applied exponential technology. Nik's primary interests in technology are in Mixed Reality, Internet of Things, Smart Cities, Artificial Intelligence, and renewable energy.

He studied Applied Psychology and Computing in the U.K. and specialised in artificial intelligence and linguistics along with social network theory and human-computer interaction. For over 20 years he's been hacking his way through tech jobs in big data, analytics, advertising, and the sharing economy.

He recently interviewed Edward Snowden at the University of Waterloo, spoke to 1500 leaders at the Premier's Forum for Natural Resources in Prince George and you can see him at these upcoming events: Canada Futurists in Vancouver and Toronto, Our Futures Conference at Quest University in Squamish, and the 18th Annual Privacy & Security Conference leading a panel about Mixed Reality with innovators in that field.

You can see some of Nik's featured work and speaking engagements at NikolasBadminton.com and be sure to check out his Modern Futures Podcast which will soon be rebranded as Exponential Minds. Heard here first on the Vancouver Tech Podcast, Nik will soon be launching Exponential Minds which will be a content and event network and a worldwide superinfluencers network. One last thing. He is also launching the Futurists Speakers Agency as well this month so do check on futuristspeakersagency.com soon.

Welcome to the future!

If you're interested in contacting Nikolas you can reach him at [email protected] or on twitter @NikolasFuturist.

##Show Links

Tech Vancouver
AdapTech Solutions
Alex's blog
Nikolas Badminton
Changelog Go Time podcast

##Meetups Around Town

###Monday, February 6

Polyglot Vancouver Reading Group (#PapersWeLoveYVR) - Incremental consistency guarantees for replicated objects (Stage 3 Systems, #220-750 Hamilton St) 6:00 PM
Vancouver Linux Users Group - VanLUG Board Meeting (SFU Downtown, #1500 - 515 W. Hastings St) 7:00 PM

###Tuesday, February 7

VPC Open Coffee (Nelson the Seagull, 315 Carrall St) 8:00 AM
Vancouver Pixel Crafters Funding101 (Code Core, 142 W. Hastings St) 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM
VPC Camp Tech - Social Media Advanced (Hive Vancouver, #210 - 128 W Hastings St) 6:00 PM
PolyglotVancouver Social (St Regis, 608 Dunsmuir St) 6:00 PM
Vancouver Business Network - 5 Steps To Use Design To Better Your Life and Business, by Térence Doucet (The Tribe Space, 68 Water St, 4th floor) 6:00 PM to 9:15 PM
Vancouver Azure - Azure Functions (Microsoft, 11th Floor, 1100 W. Georgia St) 6:00 PM
Women Who Code Vancouver: Alice in Web Animations API Land - A Talk By Rachel Nabors (Microsoft Garage @ Microsoft Vancouver, 7th floor, 725 Granville St) 6:00 PM
Vancouver Hack Space - Informal Home Automation Chat (#104-1715 Cook St.) 6:30 PM to 7:30 PM
Vancouver Hack Space - Weekly Open house (#104-1715 Cook St.) 7:30 PM

###Wednesday, February 8

Tech Talent Meetup - Talent Day: Tech Professionals (BC Tech Innovation Hub, 887 Great Northern Way) 5:00 PM to 7:30 PM
Vancouver Pluralsight Study Group (100 - 425 Carrall St) 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM
Vancouver Data Visualization - Discuss Data Visualization Beyond the Screen! (Tableau Vancouver, #1450-885 W. Georgia St) 6:00 PM
Canada Futurists: Vancouver - 2017 Predictions Discussion (The Studio at Creative Coworkers, Unit 10 - 343 Railway St) 6:30 PM
VanBUG - PostgreSQL in OpenBSD (SFU Harbour Centre, #2235 EJ Safarik Sr. Conference Room, 515 W. Hastings St) 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM

###Thursday, February 9

OpenLate - Vancouver Tech Talks and Hack Nights Cloud Native/Kubernetes Training Roadshow: Pacific Northwest 2017 (Vancouver Marriott Pinnacle, 1128 W. Hastings St) 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM
DDD/CQRS/ES Practitioners (DCTRL, 436 West Pender St) 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM
Learn Data Science by Doing Kaggle Competitions: Yelp (SFU Harbour Centre - Room 1415, 515 W. Hastings St)
Vancouver Clojure Hacknight (Code Core, 142 W. Hastings St) 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM

###Friday, February 10

Launch Academy Pitch Fridays (Launch Academy, 300 - 128 W. Hastings St) 1:00 PM
Vancouver Internet Technology Talents Networking @ 9CAT.NET Tech & Startup Weekly (Unit 950 - 777 Hornby St.) (call 604-440-1433 / 778-927-3746 to get you in) 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

###Saturday, February 11

Our Futures Technology Conference in Squamish (Quest University, 3200 University Boulevard, Squamish BC) 8:00 AM

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.

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