Techstars DC Startup Week 2019

Join us for some coffee and light breakfast to kick start the Developer Day at Alley, Powered by Verizon.

Thank you to our breakfast sponsor: Brainworks

Many startups struggle to achieve their AI goal due to the limited resource of Data Scientist and AI experts.  In addition, the difficulty it takes to get a working AI model in a timely fashion.  This session aims to demonstrate how startup's adoption of AI/ML can be as fast and simple as possible.  It will show Prebuilt AI, Customizable AI, Simplified/automated machine learning that beginner to advanced data scientists can use to produce powerful intelligent solutions.

Join us in our quest to achieve successful digital transformation, through looking beyond our own data garden wall and look at the successful outcomes that the marriage of internal and external data provides. Little ink has been spilled about the importance of looking outside one’s garden wall to better understand the world we all operate in. Companies running a tremendous amount of data often get trapped in a frog-in-a-well approach, failing to review external conditions and information and staying stuck in their inside universe. This leads to a limited view on their businesses and industries and eventually to a major setback against competitors who do understand the game of integrated data.

Yet today’s advancement in Big Data can bring headaches even to the best data team a company might have. We have data about everything, but we don’t always know what outside industry data is most relevant for our forecast models, as every industry has its specifics. What we do know is that the initial selection of data paired with inside business intelligence can make or break a successful model.

By 2020, the digital universe is expected to reach 44 zettabytes. That’s information on weather, traffic, location, likes and dislikes, emotions, travel, searches, political opinions, cultural customs, religious beliefs and many more. All things you can leverage to analyze and predict customer consumption patterns. Our panel strongly believes that by combining all these factors, together we can create an Outcomes Driven Economy, to completely change the way our world works and benefit society in a positive and permanent way.

This event is for beginners. It doesn't matter if you've never written a line of code in your life. Flatiron School's Josh Daniell will introduce the 3 key building blocks of the modern web: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
This is a workshop which requires active participation, and you'll be writing code throughout the 90 minute session.

You'll need to bring a laptop and energy!

Lunch will be provided

Join us for a conversation lead by Michelai, Technical.ly Market Editor, on the future with 5G to learn how startups are utilizing and plan to use 5G to improve their technology, speed and reliability. 

GraphQL is supplanting REST as the way browsers and mobile apps interface with servers.  GraphQL is a rich language for apps and services to agree on the structure of all their data, how it can be queried, and how it can be modified.  It has been around since 2012, and powers products like Facebook, Twitter, and Drupal.  AWS AppSync is a serverless, managed GraphQL platform that integrates with other resources in the AWS Cloud.  This talk starts with a fun quiz show game written with AppSync that everyone can play.  We break it down showing snippets of the web and mobile code, the GraphQL, and how AppSync ties it to the cloud database (Dynamo DB).

Data lakes are becoming mainstream as organizations seek to get more value from their data and start to use more advanced analytics, but the technology can be daunting.

This presentation will be a walk-through of some of the challenges and successful approaches for launching a data lake built on open source projects like Apache Spark and cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. This will include addressing some of the technical challenges of getting a Spark cluster up and running, organizing storage for a data lake, and some of the "watch outs" from a performance and scaling perspective.

The tech industry moves fast and breaks things. Our careers are very different from our parent’s—our managers are more likely to be our peers and we are often responsible for our own professional growth. Feedback is a valuable source of information when its done right and a burden if it isn’t, for you and your manager. In this workshop, you will learn how to ‘close the feedback loop’: how to set expectations, analyze results, and improve the quality of feedback going forward. You will leave with a set of tools to help you get the most out of feedback, deal with criticism, and support your future career advancement.