Friday Night Dev Club - Info Session

I'm excited to finally announce a new event series from AlcivarTech!

Hello AI Developers,

It's been a while! Since our last event I have launched AlcivarTech.com , my AI consulting effort, and I've been working hard finding out what AlcivarTech is and what sort of things it can provide to professionals and businesses right now. I’m happy to say I discovered several!

In that process I went to so many conferences and events that focused on how AI could impact a particular type of tech: Startup Tech, HealthTech, Fin(ance)Tech, Prop(erty)Tech.

In the meantime I was hard at work creating applications and demos of the technologies I kept encountering. I created several products under the AlcivarTech umbrella. Some of them are open source:

grants.alcivartech.com - vector search for government grants.

clipsearch.alcivartech.com - Demonstrates client side clip embeddings and multimodal vector search using screenshots from an old out-of-copyright movie called "A Star is Born".

boston-ai-project.alcivartech.com - This is the project that I would like Friday Night Dev club to launch!

In that process I learned to use AI to quickly build fully featured applications on multiple platforms with different frameworks, from Laravel, an amazing PHP, to Django, FastAPI, and Flask, the cutting edge python backend frameworks. I worked with React, but also Vue.js, and of course Docker, Docker Compose, and bash for system administration.

Not only did I use AI to build with these frameworks, I learned them along the way, so if AI disappears tomorrow I will still know how to use these powerful tools to build useful applications for clients and employers. I also built AI features into every one of my applications to demonstrate the many potential ways to integrate AI into a productive workflow.

I presented some of these applications to groups like Boston AI Tinkerers, and AI Blueprint for MA to a very positive reception. I learned I have become a pretty good full stack web developer by building on a strong foundation of system administration and networking concepts from my career long-ago working on academic library search software. It turns out the thing that makes modern frameworks modern is that they are easier than what I learned to do in college in 2012.

Who is Friday Night Dev Club for?

Attending all of these events, I also met the other attendees, and so many of them are people feeling a lot of pressure to find innovative ways to stand out in today’s job market. Over and over I saw them hiding fatigue that each event seemed more like an advertisement for a product or a vanity project for the speakers, without having any real opportunities to grow.

It made me want to create a new kind of group: one that is experimental, uses cutting edge AI tools to boost productivity and is collaborative, not competitive.

There are far more AI products that need building than there are people to build them.

Friday Night Dev Club is for anyone who wants to build a product, not just a portfolio project, and gain experience building with other people. It’s for anyone who wants to have a chance to watch or contribute to a full software product lifecycle. The best part is the products already exist. You don’t have to trust me, they are right there at the links above. The repositories are right here in github: https://github.com/mindfulcoder49/

I have more than one complete product that just needs some people involved to move it forward. My favorite is the app to help residents of Boston learn about city services happening in their area. These products have login systems, databases, data processing, cloud hosting, modern javascript frontends, and cutting edge AI applications.

If you're an international grad student looking to stand out when you complete your program and start looking for a job, this club is for you.

If you're a bootcamp grad looking to work on a complete software project in a real world setting to stand out in a crowd of over-qualified applicants, this club is for you.

If you stay in on Friday night and work on projects, or study, this club is absolutely for you.

We will build and launch real things that make a positive impact on residents of Boston, and YOU will get to choose 100% what skills you want to focus on growing. Together we will undoubtedly accomplish a lot, but more importantly we will have a lot of fun along the way. And if we make money, we will make sure everyone who contributes owns a part of that.

Interested? Attend this info session and bring your questions. I can promise the usual warm, welcoming, and non-judgmental atmosphere I try to bring to all of the events I run. I also promise to do my best to share my knowledge with the same positivity and patience as chatGPT does.

Can't wait to see you there!