Vancouver Tech Podcast

Charlene Tessier, Strength in Numbers Virtual Summit  Charlene Tessier, founder of the Strength in Numbers virtual summit joins hosts Lauren Bates and Drew Ogryzek this week to discuss community building, and networking in the current state of the world.Have a listen, and make sure to get your free ticket to the Strength in Numbers virtual summit with a host of amazing guest speakers, and interactive workshops. Topics range from Equity Splits and Aligning your Message, to Credibility and even Virtual Retreats!Listen in to this week's episode to hear more.

Kahlil Ashanti, Founder of WeShowUp.ioKahlil Ashanti, Founder of WeShowUp.io, joins hosts Lauren Bates and Drew Ogryzek to discuss the journey of discovering and developing a product and a business that has come out of a combining a rich history of experience in performing arts and web-based payments. "In addition to performing, it was actually our job to stand and thank every audience member who came to see us," explains Ashanti reminscing of the early days of his perfomance career in the 90s, "And people kept saying, 'I would have paid more for that.'"Continuing how he had started, Ashanti kept shaking hands with audience members and thanking them after the show, and kept finding people echoing the same sentiment, "I would have paid more for that."Listen in to find out more about this founder's journey of discovery and development.

John Thompson, Analytics Leader & Best Selling Author, Keynote Speaker, Data Science Thought Leader.John Thompson, Global Head, Advanced Analytics & Artificial Intelligence at CSL Behring. Author of Building Analytics Teams: Harnessing analytics and artificial intelligence for business improvement, and Analytics: How to Win with Intelligence joins hosts Lauren Bates and Drew Ogryzek for episode 105 of the Vancouver Tech Podcast.Thompson explains that he started writing his latest book, Building Analytics Teams: Harnessing analytics and artificial intelligence for business improvement, or at least thinking about it last year. He asked people how they felt about their analytics teams, the people on them, and the cohesion, and those kind of topics, at a few presentations in Chicago and other places around the United States. The incredible responses he received prompted him to stop working on a book he had started regarding AI and Ethics, and pivot to the topics addressed in Building Analytics Teams.This

-Download Episode 104 Annee Ngo, Co-Founder and CEO of Startup League Join Annee Ngo, Co-Founder and CEO of Startup League with host Drew Ogryzek to talk about Startup League, QUP, and more for the first episode of the new Fall 2019 Season of the Vancouver Tech Podcast. Having spent the past several years in the North American startup scene, spending time in Vancouver, New York, San Francisco, Ngo shares insights garnished from leading endeavors such as ProtoHack, a code free hackathon, focused on producing a prototype, key factors in co-founding startups, and building teams for success. "With Startup League, what we're trying to really solve here is the problem of opportunity" "We encountered a school of thought called design thinking. Stanford has a school called The D School for Design and I was just blown away. I was like wow, this is what innovation really comes down to; these core principles and core educational values of 1: empathy, 2: syntheses, 3: ideation, and then it goes into proto

-Download Episode 103 Angela Griffen, CTO of Glance Technologies Angela Griffen, CTO of Glance Technologies Inc. joins host Drew Ogryzek to talk about Glance Pay, the life of a CTO, team culture, and more! As a seasoned software developer and CTO, having started her career when building web-based software solutions was first starting out, Griffen shares knowledge and insight ranging from domain expertise, the role of a CTO as companies grow over time, the beginnings of Glance Pay, and some thoughts on future adoption of cryptocurrency payments. Listen in to hear the whole conversation. Follow Glance Pay on Twitter at @glancepay, and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast. Vancouver Public Library Events Friday, January 5 Are you curious about making movies, creating a podcast, or editing photos? What about publishing your own book or ebook? You can do all of this and much more in the Inspiration Lab. Come learn about the creative possibilities! 2:00 PM: All About the Inspiration Lab Tuesday, January

-Download Episode 102 Mike Volker of New Ventures BC Mike Volker of New Ventures BC joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss New Ventures BC, its venture acceleration program, and the BCIC-New Ventures Competition. "The ideal participant would be an individual participant or group of indivuduals that think they have something that has huge potential in the marketplace. And, they need some guidance, they need some help figuring out how to take their idea and commercialize it," Volker explains. "The capital is a very important part of it, because a lot of the mentors in the New Ventures BC program are investors; business angels, who invest in startup companies." "In addition to learning about business, and potentially winning the prize money, which can be quite substantial - first prize is more than $100,000, and that's cash, no-strings attached. And that of itself is attractive. But even more attractive is that not just the winner, but the runners up and the other companies that compete in

Jeffery Walsh, EtherParty Developer VanBex, a team of blockchain consultants and experts does client work, helping with development, marketing for businesses that want to integrate blockchain, smart contracts, crowdfunding and also has their own projects. EtherParty is a VanBex project that helps by making smart contracts easier to use. Smart contracts exist on the Ethereum blockchain. EtherParty is like the Wix or Squarespace of smart contracts; an app you can use to click through and make your own. Jeffery Walsh, fullstack developer of EtherParty joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss VanBex, EtherParty, blockchain development for both cryptocurrency and other uses. With regards to what blockchain is, "I just think of it as computers agreeing on something," says Walsh. "There's a bunch of computers, and they're all running the same code. They agree on something, and that can be entered into a public ledger, because everybody agreed." Listen in to dive deeper into how blockchains and cryptoc

Joni Brennan, President of DIACC Joni Brennan, president of the Digital Identification and Authentication Council of Canada joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss digital identity, and some of the challenges, dangers, and benefits associated with it. Brennan is working on trying to solve some of the problems with digital identity, such as storage of personal information across multiple sites, including photocopies of driver's licenses, having too many user ids and passwords, and many breaches of data, in ways that allow us to unlock opportunities for Canadians, and globally. What we do here in Canada, the DIACC hopes to bring out across the digital economy and to the world. An identity could be defined as a passport, or a permanent residency card. Brennan says she likes to think of an identity as being a construct of a village. When answering the question of who I am, a large part of the answer is based upon making a claim that we are something, and having that claim reinforced by a third party, often dependent

Special Guest Ahmad Nassri of Telus Digital Special guest Ahmad Nassri, Principal Architect at Telus Digital joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss community building, TechMasters, and business and team organization. Nassri likes to describe Telus Digital, an approximately 300 person team, with a large presence in Vancouver as well as Toronto, as being the software arm, or the part that enables all the digital experiences that Telus customers, whether business or consumers are interacting with. As the organizer of TechMasters, Nassri is very active helping to bring the technology community closer together. Listen in to find out how this team is able to have developers deploy code to production 300 times a day, with no dedicated ops people, and more! Follow Ahmad Nassri on Twitter at @AhmadNassri and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast. 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. Ge

Special Guest Nicky Kunstman, Internal Recruiter at InVision Special guest Nicky Kunstman joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss InVision, and the process of recruiting. People who are passionate about issues of scale, usability, cloud-computing, and seeing the difference they are able to make in the lives of people on the design and UX side of things, while helping them make better products may find working with InVision appealing. Listen in to dive into questions around the interviewing process, how InVision maintains a 100% fully remote team, and much more! Follow Nicky Kunstman on Twitter at @LizaCole5280 and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast and frankly, why not go and work at InVision? 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 in

Special Guests MaRi Eagar and Manie Eagar Special guests Manie and MaRi Eagar of Digital Futures, who conducted the first study in Canada that set out to discover competitive drivers to build and further develop the ecosystem that supports Vancouver, BC, and Canada, as a global Blockchain and FinTech hub. And who have more associations and accomplishments than can easily be listed in an introduction join host Drew Ogryzek to discuss blockchain, cryptocurrencies and ICOs, and their implications to Canadians and the world. Blockchain Association of Canada Chairman, Manie Eagar, a contrinuting author of The Fintech Book explains that the BAC is a Canada-wide membership or community representation at a provincial and federal level, giving everybody a voice and participation opportunity in the debate on what blockchain is, how it can be applied, on the one-side through engaging with regulators and bankers on how this technology can make a difference. And on the other side, how it could disrupt the way we do busin

Special Guest Dan Garfield of Codefresh Special guest Dan Garfield, VP of Marketing at Codefresh joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss continuous deployment with Codefresh, a CI/CD (continuous integration and deployment) platform with a focus on providing end-to-end automation for everything containers and Kubernetes. Historically looking at how automation has been done, there has been a lot of scripting, and a lot of duplication of work; people are building the same machines over and over again, with different projects. Codefresh aims at taking a strong pipeline, such as the the Netflix pipeline, whose development was an effort of millions of dollars of resources, and making that available for everyone to plug into in both a flexible, but yet prescriptive automation platform. Recognizing that there are universal standards for container deployments, the dream of Codefresh is to have an automation platform that emphasizes ease of use, while still allowing access to customize auto-generated configuration. The Cod

Special Guest Dieter Shirley of AxiomZen Special guest Dieter Shirley of AxiomZen joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss blockchain, cryptocurrency, and ICOs. AxiomZen is a company that is always investigating new technologies, building their own startups, partnering with external investors to build startups with them, building companies for fortune 500 companies and other industry groups. For AxiomZen, breaking new ground, rather than building "me too" products is the norm. Naturally, blockchain is something they have had their eyes on since day one. Shirley describes blockchain as a really clever technology, that is fundamentally a way of storing a series of transactions or events in a way that any sized group of people can always agree on what's in that log without any possibility of the history of that log being changed. Bitcoin introduced the public blockchain, basically stating that because we have this technology that lets us have an indelible log of transactions that everyone agrees have occurr

Special Guest Boris Mann of FrontierFoundry Special Guest Boris Mann of FrontierFoundry joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss blockchain, cryptocurrency and ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings). Mann is an active contributor to helping grow Vancouver's technical community, he is involved in open source, running "geek meetups," and started FrontierFroundry with Adrian Jonklaas in March of 2017. FrontierFoundry was concieved with the question in mind, "What kind of company can we build in Vancouver that really has the whole world as its customers; that goes global from day one?" and thinking of areas of frontier technology, a very broad space where there's not a lot of concensus or understanding as to what successful companies in this space look like. This space includes blockchain, augmented reality, and machine learning, and other emerging tech. How are companies in this space funded? How are they created? Who are their customers? Mann explains that blockchain really has three definitions: The com

Special Guest Llew Morkel of ProsperiProp Special Guest Llew Morkel of ProsperiProp in South Africa joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings). Founder of ProsperiProp, a company currently in the process of an ICO (Initial Coin Offering), Morkel says the idea is to make it possible for a person with as little as USD $2.00 to get involved with property investment. There's often quite a high dollar bar, or minimum investment to get involved with property investment, so he sees this as a big game changer. Morkel says Bitcoin was the very first blockchain coin. It was the very first way of transacting and paying digitally. The open source Bitcoin currency and blockchain acts as the reference. One can download that source code and start their own coin. When Ethereum copied it and started the Ethereum chain, then decided to better it in a way with smart contracts. Bitcoin and Ethereum are payment systems, which makes them "coins," while ProsperiProp

Special Guest Barinder Rasode, President and CEO of NICHE Canada, and Co-Founder of RoundHouse Radio's She Talks Special Guest Barinder Rasode, President and CEO of NICHE Canada, and Co-Founder of She Talks joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss cannabis legalization in Canada, and how NICHE Canada (National Institute for Cannabis Health and Education) fits in. Initially, Rasode was opposed to the proliferation of cannabis dispensaries, but seeing those who are affected in positive ways helped her change perspectives, and she now heads NICHE Canada, an organization that aims to operationalize the federal government commissioned cannabis legalization and regulation taskforce report by ensuring all stakeholders during and after the process are equipped in their fields to manage this new regime. Rasode says NICHE has a partnership with MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), with the CACP (Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police), and other regulatory bodies that are concerned about product safetly and testing for i

Special Guest Alex Cruise, Architect/Development Manager at Splunk Special guest Alex Cruise, Architect/Development Manager at Splunk joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss the development culture, organizational structure and some use cases for Splunk, the company that brings us log monitoring and analaysis tools and services. Cruise explains a little about LeSS (Large Scale Scrum), and that their team has been adopting it as a means of escaping some of the failure modes of traditional small-scale agile. LeSS involves things like a unified product backlog, such that every item that a product manager deems being worthy of being worked on, goes onto the shared product backlog. One of the main reasons for Cruise's teams to be making a transition towards LeSS is to reduce hyperspecialization. Mature organizations tend to have people who develop a great deal of expertise within a narrow field. With these hyperspecialized experts, it becomes increasingly difficult for someone new to get up to speed and be productive

Special Guest Kelsey Hightower, Staff Developer Advocate, Google Cloud Platform Special guest Kelsey Hightower joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss Kubernetes, its differentiating features in contrast to Mesos, CloudFoundry, Heroku and other Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions, such as OpenShift which is actually built on top of Kubernetes. When considering a fully hosted PaaS solution, if you find the opinions of the solution to be too constrained for all of your use-cases, then Kubernetes becomes super attractive. Many of the resources for Kubernetes have Kelsey Hightower's name around them, including Kubernetes the Hard Way, Udacity's course Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes, and the soon to be released O'Reilly publication Kubernetes: Up and Running. Follow Hightower on Twitter at @kelseyhightower and Samantha Ming at @EventsPodcast. Links Kuberetes: Up and Running Kubernetes the Hard Way Events Podcast Presents: Vancouver Tech Events Aug 22 - 27, 2017 TUE: Aug 22 - Machine Learning on Googl

Special Guest Alejandro Lujan of ScalaQuest Special guest Alejandro Lujan joins host Drew Ogryzek to discus the programming language Scala, the types of problems Scala, and functional programming languages in general are good at solving versus object oriented languages such as Java, for example. As a professional trainer and consultant for Lightbend Inc. Lujan brings his expertise in both programming and education to an exciting online game, ScalaQuest. Each level focuses on a topic, from values and expressions, to functions, to Monads. As you progress through the game, there are a number of challenges to solve in code, helping to gain familiarity with the Scala programming language and its key concepts. Check out the ScalaQuest kickstarter campaign! Follow Lujan on Twitter at @andanthor and Samantha Ming at @EventsPodcast. Links ScalaQuest Kickstarter Lightbend Blog: ScalaQuest Events Podcast Presents: Vancouver Tech Events Aug 14 - 17, 2017 MON: Aug 14 SEO: How to Drive More Traffic to Your Website (C

Special Guest Brittany Whitmore of Exvera Communications Special guest Brittany Whitmore of Exvera Communications joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss PR in the world of tech, including 3D printing, crowdfunding, virtual reality, and what it means to tell great stories about inspiration and entrepreneurialism. In addition to being a public relations specialist and BC Business Top 30 under 30, Whitmore is quite active in the tech community as founder and executive director of Ted X Gastown Women, resident technology professional at Roundhouse Radio, and more. Follow Whitmore on Twitter at @BritWhitmore and Samantha Ming at @EventsPodcast. Events Podcast Presents: Vancouver Tech Events Aug 8 - 12, 2017 TUE: Aug 8 Slack bots on Kubernetes - Building the future (Google Developers Group | at Slack HQ | 6:00 pm) Vancouver Engineer to Entrepreneur: Startup Basics for Techies (Vancouver Startup Founder 101 | at The Profile | 6:30 p) WED: Aug 9 Crushing it on Social Media (Facebook and LinkedIn) (YVR Startup