Portland startup, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
In an instant, every company became a remote company. Regardless of culture. Regardless of market. Everyone who managed to survive the instantaneous and cataclysmic downturn was suddenly working from home. And juggling any number of duties in addition to their day job. And just as suddenly, things that used to require a personal touch simply couldn’t.
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Some of us have seen this before. And yet for many of you, this is a whole new experience. An incident occurs. The markets tumble. The economy starts to tank. The bubble pops. And then come the layoffs. It’s sudden, shocking, and paralyzing for folks affected. And it can be hard to figure out where to turn. So given the already escalating number of jobs eliminated in Portland, I thought it would be wise to provide a few resources that may be helpful in this time of need.
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Back in the early days of this generation of the Portland startup community, we used to have a weekly happy hour every Friday. Its origins stemmed from a small group of folks providing peer support for their self hosted WordPress installations in local watering holes. So it was called “Beer and Blog.”
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It happens to the best of them. We start a Slack instance. And then it grows. And folks add channels with the best of intentions. And then some of those channels flourish. While others wither away in anonymity. Creating clutter. And impacting discovery. But worst of all, increasing frustration and a feeling of disconnectedness. Which is entirely counterproductive.
In what now seems like ancient history, the Portland startup community used to have a gathering called Beer and Blog. Back when the community was smaller. And when people actually used to blog more regularly. Back then, it was the way to meet folks from our online community, offline.
Screenshots used to be a fairly convenient way of sharing visual information with support folks and the like. Droplr made taking, marking up, and sharing those screenshots faster and easier. But it wasn’t really until the advent of Slack—and the increased use of screenshots that came with it—for Droplr to truly come into their own. Now, the Bend startup is the third fastest growing app in the Slack app ecosystem.
If there’s one thing on which you can always rely in Portland, it’s that we’re going to be mucking around with the latest and greatest technology. And trying to figure out new—and sometimes entertaining—ways to creatively put that tech to use. We’ve seen a lot of that activity lately with VR/AR/MR. But don’t forget the whole bot thing. Because there’s some interesting stuff happening there too. Read More
There’s a whole bunch of experimentation with bots as of late. Some of it serious. Some of it silly. But it’s all pretty darn compelling. And Portland is no stranger to mucking around with these little buckets of artificial intelligence. Take Mimic, a new bot designed by the creative technologist over at Wieden+Kennedy‘s The Lodge. Read More
If you’re like me, you’re spending more and more time in Slack. Like, it’s becoming your dashboard for all activity. So the more you can pipe in or accomplish within the chrome of Slack, the happier you are. Which is why I’m really happy to see folks mucking with functionality that improves the Slack experience. Like Portland developer Aaron Parecki‘s Squash Reports. Read More
I know that this may come as a surprise, but I get a bunch of questions from folks. Like “You’ve been writing about the Portland startup scene for almost a decade. How is it that you’ve never learned how to use the English language?” And “What do you actually do?” And “A beard? Really?” But one question I get more often than any other is “How do I get involved in the Portland startup scene?” Read More