Interface: The Web School partnered with Appsky Labs, an Omaha-based software development company, on a fundraising project with the Great Plains Black History Museum. Together, the organizations hope to raise $3,000 to pay for the development of a new website for the museum.
The Great Plains Black History Museum’s mission is “to preserve, celebrate and educate all people of the contributions and achievements of African Americans throughout the great plains of America.” Last fall, the museum moved into North Omaha’s historic Jewell Building at 2221 N. 24th St.
The new website will help the museum expand its impact in the local community and beyond. Visit the fundraising page to contribute.
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Starting or expanding a career in tech can feel like its own part-time job. AIM’s free Tech Concierge program is here to help.
Tech Concierge is a free service for job seekers to establish a pathway to a successful career in tech. The program offers one-on-one guidance provided by experienced AIM career coaches.
“What an amazing feeling to realize I was able to learn new technology after having been away from that line of work for a period of time,” said Tina Holmes, Tech Concierge Member. “I would not have been able to start the journey I am currently on without the support from AIM and their tech concierge program.
Tech Concierge can also help by offering a variety of resources to support job seekers, including one-on-one career coaching, tutoring services and introductory tech courses.
Find out more about Tech Concierge.
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Rachel Fox comes to Interface Web School with extensive experience as a technical trainer and web developer, and can’t wait to help students pursue their dreams.
She will teach the January Foundations of Web Development course.
“My desire for this class is for students to walk away with the ability to create their online masterpieces,” she says.
Read more about Rachel Fox and Interface: The Web School.
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AIM knows that careers take work to develop and grow, that’s why we’ve been Omaha’s career development portal for over 25 years. Each month, more than 140,000 unique visitors come to Careerlink.com in search of new opportunities.
Now, there’s another way to stay connected to Careerlink. Join our new Facebook group, AIM Careerlink, for even more in-depth career advice, the latest job openings and tech education/networking opportunities.
Our mission is to grow, connect and inspire the tech talent ecosystem. There are countless opportunities happening around the metro for you to network, learn, or just have fun. We’ve rounded up some of our favorite upcoming events below.
Be sure to check out on our full events list to keep you informed on everything that’s happening in tech. Do you have an upcoming event that you want to share with our community? Contact us and your event could be featured on CareerHub.
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We recharge everything these days. From laptops to smartphones, tablets to wearables. So, why not recharge your idea bank for professional inspiration?
Registration is open for AIM Infotec, happening March 27, 2018 at the Embassy Suites La Vista Conference Center. Infotec is the largest annual gathering of technology pros, executives and vendors in the Midwest. Breakout sessions, skill-building workshops, a bustling exhibition floor, and inspiring keynotes from nationally recognized experts will be presented.
Whether it’s your first time attending or you’ve been before, there is always something each attendee takes away from this one-of-a-kind conference.
Visit AIM Infotec to register for more information
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February 6, 5:30 p.m.
Omaha Agile Development: Unpacking Design Thinking
Welcome to Omaha Agile’s first meetup of 2018. We know it’s short notice, but we have an opportunity to learn about a topic that is making more and more of a buzz in the industry. Design Thinking. Businesses are constantly exploring ways to enthrall customers. Oftentimes, capturing the unstated needs/wants leads to creation of new offerings that re-engage and delight the customers. Design thinking is a powerful tool to uncover such needs and wants which helps to build meaningful systems. This session will give you a POV from a practitioners perspective in using design thinking, in a business-technology context.
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February 7, 9 a.m.
1 Million Cups featuring Allie Esch, Dundee Venture Capital
As an associate at Dundee Venture Capital, Allie Esch’s current focus is on sourcing investment opportunities in addition to helping the Dundee VC team analyze the market and industry trends impacting the technology sector. Presentation starts at 9:15 am.
(Recurring every Wednesday)
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February 12, 6:30-7 p.m.
No More Empty Pots – Local food pop-up
Meet foodie friends, try new locally-made products and get to know the people that create them!
RSVP to this free event to get notifications for sneak peeks of the enticing products that will be there in the coming days!
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Starts February 15
AIM Interface School – Java Specialization
This course provides you with all the information and training you need to start a career as a Java developer by providing practical knowledge and experience for real-world situations. You’ll work with the front-end, to the server by creating web pages, to working with databases, and everything in between. You’ll walk away from this course versatile enough to not only write code, but effectively debug too as a promising junior team member and full-stack developer.
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February 16, 8:00 a.m.
I Am Girls Conference presented by The Urban League of Nebraska
“I Am…” Girls Conference, presented by The Urban League of Nebraska, is a day-long event that empowers all girls between the 7th and 12th grade to excel in their education and their individual lives. These girls will meet successful female and male professionals and attend motivational workshops. The conference is held from 8:30 A.M. to 2:30 P.M. on Friday, February 16, 2018 at the College of Saint Mary. Transportation is provided!
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February 20, 6 p.m.
Omaha Java Users Group, Datomic: Rethinking the Database
Omaha’s Java and JVM User Group. For Java Professionals of all languages and frameworks that run in the JVM including Java, Groovy, Grails, Scala, Clojure, JRuby, Android, Javascript, etc. We also cover enterprise and web dev topics such as architecture, testing, security, and scalability. Promoting the Java community, supporting each other, sharing some pizza, and hanging out to socialize after the meetings!
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March 1, 7:30 a.m. – 4 p.m.
YP Summit
During the 2018 YP Summit, our promise is to activate curiosity and cultivate professional, personal and community growth through intentional development, inspiration and empowerment. Over the course of the day, through change-making keynotes and empowering breakouts, we will celebrate differences, foster connections, grow inclusivity and initiate positive, community-enhancing change – all with the goal of bringing a new layer of vibrancy to our community.
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March 5, 5:30 p.m.
Omaha Amazon Web Services Meetup: Deep Dive into Cloud Computing using EC2
This group is a forum to gather and share experiences around Cloud Computing, especially Amazon Web Services. If you have used AWS services (ie EC2, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, Redshift, EMR) or are interested in learning more about how others have, come join our group.
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March 27, 8 a.m.
AIM Infotec 2018
Join 1,000+ of the region’s most talented tech professionals at Infotec 2018, the Silicon Prairie’s premier annual business tech community gathering. AIM Infotec combines the best of big conferences and small networking events into one action-packed experience, focusing on the intersections of technology, business and innovation. This year’s engaging breakout sessions, empowering keynotes and talent mixers will be its best yet.
OMAHA, Neb. – Gautham Pallapa has some closely-held beliefs when it comes to big data, organizational success, and finding your footing in the data science realm.
Pallapa oversees dozens of developers and engineers across multiple areas in his role as vice president of systems and platforms at West Corporation.
He talked with Hot Spots about his career in programming, engineering, data science, and setting people up for success. Here are some of his guiding principles:
-Data by itself does not tell a story.
-Strategic disruption and experimentation lead to progress
-Failure is worth celebrating.
Pallapa’s path in computer science began as a young student with a choice between programming and music.
“I picked BASIC and did animations, and I didn’t go to the music class. That’s where I started,” he recalled.
BASIC led to C, then to C++, and eventually, an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering.
His post-graduate studies were mostly with Java, but also included Python, a language he has come to love.
“When I started switching over to Python, the thing that I fell in love with was the ease with which you could code and write and develop,” he says.
“It’s so extensible, it’s easy, it’s quick to learn. There are so many resources online, it’s quick to compile, it can run anywhere on any POSIX machine, you don’t really have to add a lot of things, it’s not that memory intensive. You can hack some really cool code out quickly,” he says.
Pallapa says preparation for a career in data science should include learning one high-level, object-oriented programming language thoroughly, and he says Python is a great choice.
“The reason you probably need to learn a language like Python is so you optimally start moving the data in event streams over to [the platform]. Having a ‘nozzle’ where you push the data to it at high frequencies. That’s where Python really gives you the bang for the buck,” he says.
From there, he says it’s important for everyone from beginners to board members to know there is a substantial difference between data — and information, knowledge and wisdom.
“Business decisions usually end up being made on data, which probably takes businesses the wrong way. The right way is actually to do it on information,” he says.
The difference, he says, is context.
“I need to understand what was the context in which this data was generated, why did this event happen, what was the action that triggered it. What was the user doing when that event got triggered,” he explains. “Data by itself does not tell a story. We have to tease the story out of it.”
That’s where Pallapa says data visualization becomes so important.
“Sometimes, we as humans find it hard to articulate the patterns in the data, and that’s why data visualization becomes so powerful,” he says. “Your human brain can look at patterns. We’ve been trained through evolution and history to look for patterns. When you display a graph, the reason it appeals to you isn’t just the pretty colors, it helps you articulate what you felt was in your gut.”
And he has a warning for businesses about key performance indicators:
“KPIs should never be raw data. Multiple pieces of data should roll into a key performance indicator. And I think some companies do it the naive way where they say only these different data elements are what we’re going to analyze,” he says. “The number of clicks is a false positive for a KPI.”
Pallapa says the lines between data science, business intelligence and statistics can be blurry.
“They tend to play off each other. Data science, in my mind, is actually the entire scientific realm around data and how you treat it with a scientific approach,” he says. “Business intelligence is more around trying to tease out patterns and information in order to trend and forecast, and if you are getting your ROI or whatever your KPIs are for your business.”
Whatever path a student wants to pursue, Pallapa says there are some basics to build along the way — among them, a portfolio and a Git repository.
“I encourage my candidates to show me their repositories and we go through the code. It also shows the hygiene of the code, how you are coding, the thought process you have, so if you are comfortable enough to share and show the code, that means you are confident of your development skills. That comes off in a very different way to a hiring manager,” he says.
The best way to build a portfolio? Find a problem that annoys you.
“And write an application that solves that problem. You don’t have to solve a world problem, it can be your own personal problem,” he says.
As an example, Pallapa talks about an intern he worked with who wanted a better way to handle the logging duties he was assigned. The intern wrote a program to automate some of those tasks, shared it with others and impressed his managers.
That kind of experimentation can have big payoffs, Pallapa says.
“The concept of experimentation is really dear to my heart. Taking huge, turnkey projects and turning them into continuous experiments to meet our targets,” he says. “So for example, we run three or four experiments in the teams and figure out if we’ve succeeded or we’ve failed. And we celebrate failures here.”
Pallapa says experimentation in a safe environment fosters accelerated learning.
“The failure of one person is valuable learning for the rest of the group,” he says.
Finally, Pallapa says it’s important to have fun along the way. As part of that, he helps organize game nights where West employees work in teams to solve brain-teasing problems.
“My primary belief is happy people are productive people. And my second belief is that strategic disruption leads to progress,” he says.
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Related:
Follow Gautham Pallapa on LinkedIn
Interface Web School’s Fundamentals of Data Science Certificate
Job hunting just got easier thanks to AIM Careerlink’s newly re-designed, mobile-friendly job website. The career site’s simplified features make it easier for job seekers to learn about new job postings and to be found by potential employers.
A recent study found that more than 92 percent of employers are using social media to recruit quality candidates. Did you know that as an AIM Careerlink employer you can leverage social media to advertise your current job openings? Take a look below to see how you can start using social media from your AIM Careerlink account.
