infrastructure

Where to find Birmingham’s tech networks

August 24, 2017 / Shirley Hicks / 0 Comments

New to Birmingham and want to know where to find the techies? Or you’ve finished a first degree or training course and you want to know how to connect with other people in your field? In Birmingham, here are the three places you need to start looking to find them.

TechBirmingham’s community listings

TechBirmingham, the region non-profit coordinating and promoting the growth of the regional tech sector, has listings of the local tech organizations on its Community page. These include chapters of national organizations, such as the Project Management Institute, Infragard, Code for America, and Women Who Code .

You’ll also find local tech-focused groups such as the Red Mountain Makers and Steel City SQL.

Magic City Tech

MagicCityTech.org is the signup page for the Magic City Tech slack, a chat channel used by tech community organizers to coordinate events, share information and post jobs. An informal watercooler-style back channel, you’ll see everything from good React tutorials and case studies. to job postings for Scada and R programmers. The number of channels has grown significantly in 2017 & 2018

Meetup

Most of the local tech interest groups list their meetings on Meetup. (most of these are on the TechBirmingham community page). These interest groups range from language specific interest groups (javascript, .NET, to interest groups focused on startups and development)) A new group forming up, CSBhm, is looking to connect the computer science and technology educator community.

Building a project portfolio – how to get started

October 27, 2016 / Shirley Hicks / 0 Comments

Updated October 28, 2018.

In many cities with a tech scene there is a need for programmers and developers who aren’t necessarily computer science (CS) majors. CS is great for understanding the structures underlying programming, how software interacts with hardware, and the mathematics behind compression, encryption, algorithms graphics and topology. Their skills and understanding are needed to build computing and programming structures and frameworks, for working out effective storage techniques, telecommunication methods, encryption and for a lot of security work. You will always need these specialists. And, if you want to be a CEO of major tech company, the groundwork is vital.

But for the rest of us, a mix of our existing skillsets in combination with either a boot camp or self-study with tutorials are the most effective ways to start a programming career. Our power is crossover knowledge. We’re going to be working in teams to build and implement using existing tools – and being able to learn quickly, effectively and put existing pieces together to solve people’s problems is the best way we can contribute.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

February 22, 2016 / Shirley Hicks / 0 Comments

Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Decent history of how the initial Internet protocols and infrastructure were developed. If you want to understand how the underlying structure of what we use today was developed, read this book!