Project Work Session

The objective of this meetup is for you to connect with your fellow founders, talk about what you are struggling with, and just get to know the community. Hope to see you all there! Josh & Mark As a business owner, you are faced with many challenges. You're forced to make decisions every day that could make or break your business. founder.coffee is a way to network with other entrepreneurs to allow free-flowing information with the intent to collaborate and help each other. So often we're challenged, and there's very little we can do to express our challenges with the people we work with or the people we care about. Think of founder.coffee as your own personal support group for business owners. We're all here to help!

General Admission Sales start on Aug 31, 2026 only on Eventbrite. Join us for the 4th Annual Silicon Forest Tech Connect, an evening bringing together business and technology professionals from across the Portland region. Whether you're leading a team, driving strategy, or solving hard problems at the intersection of business and tech, this is your chance to connect with the people shaping our region's technology community. Set on the patio at Migration Brewing's pop-up inside PacWest Center in downtown Portland, the evening features drinks, food, and plenty of room to network with peers across industries and disciplines. What to expect: A relaxed, business-casual networking environment Complimentary drinks and food Conversations with professionals across tech, operations, strategy, and beyond A chance to grow your local network and reconnect with familiar faces Event Details Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2026 Time: 5:30 PM – 8:30 PM Location: Migration Brewing Pop-Up, PacWest Center, 1211 SW 5th Ave Portland, OR 97204 Getting There Check-in is required at street level with building security. Recommended parking: PacWest Center Parking Garage (attached to the building) or SmartPark 1st & Jefferson (2 blocks away, open 24/7). REGISTRATION ON EVENTBRITE ONLY: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/silicon-forest-tech-connect-by-profocus-technology-tickets-1996829584039

🚨 Register on Luma 🚨 Six evenings that use the defining technology of our moment to re-examine our relationship to one another. Not AI as a tool to master or a threat to repel, but a sustained question: who are we in dialogue with when we use AI, and what is it teaching us about ourselves? Each evening stands on its own, and the six together make an argument. There is nothing to catch up on and no background required, beyond having noticed that something has changed. This is not a technical course. It is an invitation to look at AI plainly, together, and to notice what it is teaching us about ourselves. Bring whatever you already think. It holds up better in a room full of people than it does alone. Read more: https://www.indialoguewithai.org/ Demystifying AI Seeing plainly what AI is, and learning to look at it without projection. About Roberto Santiago Roberto A. Santiago is an applied AI researcher who has spent thirty-five years inside this field, in a lineage that runs directly back to Paul Werbos, the inventor of backpropagation through time. He builds these systems, and he has watched the culture around them form. Agenda 6:00 - 6:45: Lecture 6:45 - 7:00: Discussion 7:00 - 7:30: Post-event networking 🚨 Register on Luma 🚨

Cloud Native PDX September: Observability Night! For September, we're taking advantage of a speaker in town for DevOpsDaysPDX, and making it an all-observability night, with FluentBit and OpenTelemetry. Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2026 Time: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM Location: SteepleJack Brewing, Fireside Room, 2400 NE Broadway, Portland A big thank you to SUSE for sponsoring catering at SteepleJack, as well as Eric's travel. First Presentation: No C, No Opaque AI: Watch Your First Fluent Bit Contribution Happen Live Speaker: Eric D. Schabell, SUSE Contributing to a CNCF graduated project feels out of reach until someone shows you exactly how it happens. In this session, that someone is on stage doing it in real time — spotting a gap between what the Fluent Bit codebase actually does and what the docs say, opening a branch on a live fork, running the project's prose linter, writing a properly signed commit, and pushing a pull request that closes a real tracked issue. Every step, no shortcuts, no slides pretending to be a terminal. You will leave knowing the two-repo mental model that makes Fluent Bit doc contributions work, the git habits that signal credibility to maintainers, and the AI guardrails that keep your name attached to work you actually stand behind. Your first PR does not require deep C knowledge. It requires knowing where to look, how to show your work, and when to keep your hands on the wheel. Second Presentation: Devs, Transform (Your Data) and Roll Out!: Learning and Leveraging OTTL Speaker: Reese Lee, New Relic The OpenTelemetry Collector is OTel’s power tool for ingesting and processing your app and infrastructure data, but there’s even more you can do with your data before it reaches your backend! Learn how to start leveraging OTTL, or OpenTelemetry Transformation Language, to manage your data volume and quality. We’ll explore the syntax basics and its underlying architecture within the Collector, where its strength really comes into play, w