Community events, one place

GameDay is back this time with a Halloween themed Quest.

First 50 people to arrive will get a free drink ticket!

What is AWS GameDay? Think hackathon meets workshop. It's a hands-on, interactive, team-based experience where you solve real-world cloud challenges in a live AWS environment. You earn points, and the top 3 teams will win prizes. You and your team (2–4 people) will:

• Deploy and troubleshoot live AWS workloads
• Solve architecture and operational challenges
• Earn points on a real-time leaderboard
• Compete in a friendly but intense cloud showdown

This is a beginner-friendly event - even if you have never seen the AWS Console before, you have the chance to win. Strategy and problem-solving skills can trump AWS experience.

Who’s Involved? AWS and industry partners (more info coming soon) power this GameDay. The official AWS GameDay team will stand up and manage the entire environment, provision accounts, and guide the experience. Additionally, we’ll have local AWS employees supporting throughout the night.

What to Expect

• 2–3 hours of immersive, competitive cloud challenges
• Real AWS infrastructure (no simulations)
• Food & refreshments

Whether you're:

• A student exploring cloud,
• A developer looking to sharpen your skills,
• A DevOps engineer who thrives under pressure,
• Or a solutions architect ready to prove it...

This is for you.

What You Need Just bring your charged laptop. We’ll handle the rest. Teams can come pre-formed, or we’ll help match you up.

For years, designers have said they'd do better work if the organization got out of the way. AI is enabling us to test that claim. In his recent Smashing Magazine article, Andy Budd lays out two futures. In the bull case, designers can go from "we should fix this" to "I fixed this, and pushed it live," and need far less permission to act. In the bear case, that same autonomy exposes designers who were better at critique than at owning outcomes while product and engineering learn to route around design entirely.

Which future are you seeing at your company? Is your team gaining agency, or being narrowed to maintaining the design system? What does owning an outcome actually look like when anyone can prototype?

At this month's meetup, we'll dig into both sides and share what's happening in our respective organizations. All are welcome to attend! Whether you're working in UX, looking to get into the field, or just curious, please join us.

To get ready for the discussion, check out the article by Andy Budd: The Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI

Looking forward to the discussion!

〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️ 6:30 PM - Meet & Greet / Pre-networking (In-person only) 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM - Discussion group: Two Sides of Design Autonomy 8:30 PM - SUX "Social UX Meetup" for more socializing (In-person) 〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️〰️ Photo by Marta Nogueira on Pexels

Ai is rewriting the rules of entrepreneurship, and old rules don't apply. Learn how founders are navigating this new climate.

Join Orlando Innovation League for a conversation with Rob Panepinto and Ken Hall on what they are seeing firsthand: where AI is giving entrepreneurs a real edge, where the hype falls short, and what they would do if they were starting a company today.

• Rob Panepinto: Rob brings over 25 years of experience in scaling high-growth companies as an executive, operator, investor, mentor, and entrepreneurial ecosystem leader. Rob also serves as Director of Strategy and Partnerships for the UCF Innovation Districts and Business Incubation System.
• Ken Hall: Ken is a Partner at DeepWork Capital, where he helps source and execute investments and supports the firm's portfolio companies. Before DeepWork, he held corporate development and corporate venture capital roles at IBM in New York City, supporting brands including IBM Watson, Blockchain, and Hybrid Cloud. He chairs Startups for the Orlando Tech Community and mentors founders through programs including Techstars Miami, Endeavor Miami, and leAD Lake Nona.
• Rajiv Menon: Rajiv has led OIL over the past 12 years having served over a 1000 aspiring entrepreneurs through such events as Startup Weekend Orlando, Quick Pitch, Enterprise Reverse Pitch and more. He is also the CEO of Informulate a software innovation consulting company, whose clients include Guidewell Innovation, Massey Services, Orlando Magic and more.

After the panel, we'll break into small roundtable groups to keep the conversation going. Each table works through a few guided prompts, so you can talk through your own business, compare notes with other founders, and pressure-test ideas.

You'll leave with:

• A clearer picture of where AI is creating real opportunities for new and growing businesses
• Practical lessons from people who have built, led, and backed companies
• Specific ideas for your own business, worked through with other founders at your table
• New connections in Orlando's founder and tech community

Join Orlando Devs for a Hacktoberfest 2026 meetup!

From Hacktoberfest

"Hacktoberfest has always been about empowering people to build open software together. For years, that energy was measured by pull requests and developers making their first open-source contributions. But open source was never defined by a PR counter. Open source is a philosophy centered on transparency and collective ownership. In an era where AI tools make low-effort PRs easier than ever to generate, maintainers face unprecedented volume and noise. This year, Hacktoberfest is focused on high-value, meaningful learning: giving everyone the tools and knowledge to experiment and build with open artificial intelligence. By joining Hacktoberfest, online or in-person, you can expect to learn about open-weight models, open source agents, and more. We believe open innovation must be prioritized alongside proprietary tools for an ecosystem to remain healthy and resilient. Instead of counting PRs, you’ll write your first skills.md, build your own open-source agent, fine-tune an open-weight model, or go wherever your curiosity takes you. Hacktoberfest 2026 is about meeting you wherever you are in your open source AI journey because we believe AI belongs to everyone."

https://hacktoberfest.com

This will be a session focused on skills and tools for open source contribution and a preview of the hackathon for the Central Florida Devfest https://devfestflorida.com where you can put those skills and tools to use!

Join us for a fun evening of OTAB | Orlando Tech and Beer - a monthly networking and social event hosted by Accelerate Orlando & Orlando Devs.

First drinks & light bites will be provided thanks to our generous sponsors!

Note we are meeting on a Monday night vs. the usual Tuesday!

Also note our new location, thank you Tactical Brewing for hosting us this month!!! FYI, there's a lot of parking behind the location in the shared Publix parking lot.

Ready to showcase your creativity and ingenuity? Want to see what fun, cool, and innovative projects community members are working on? Then get ready for our Monthly Creative Exchange!

Whether you’re building your first app, navigating your first job, or just trying to make sense of all the data around you — learning SQL will save you hours and make you way more effective.

In this session, we’ll walk through the essentials of SQL in a hands-on, no-pressure format. You’ll connect to a real dataset, write actual queries, and start seeing patterns in data that were just noise before.

We’ll cover:

• Pulling and filtering rows (SELECT, WHERE)
• Sorting and slicing data (ORDER BY, LIMIT)
• Counting, summing, and grouping
• Joining multiple tables to build richer results
• Writing logic into your queries (CASE, filters, basic metrics)

This is a working session. You’ll be querying from the start using a simple browser-based tool.

Who this is for: If you’re early in your dev journey and want to be more fluent in data — this is for you. Even if you’ve never touched SQL. Even if you’ve forgotten everything from that one data class.

If you’re a few steps ahead, come sharpen your skills and help others along.

**Important** Bring a laptop. We will be using a web based tool so nothing to install.

Startup Weekend Orlando brings builders, founders, students, and operators together for a weekend of pitching, prototyping, mentoring, and final presentations.

Startup Weekend Orlando brings builders, founders, students, and operators together for a weekend of pitching, prototyping, mentoring, and final presentations.

Startup Weekend Orlando brings builders, founders, students, and operators together for a weekend of pitching, prototyping, mentoring, and final presentations.

Ready to showcase your creativity and ingenuity? Want to see what fun, cool, and innovative projects community members are working on? Then get ready for our Monthly Creative Exchange!

Curious how AI is actually showing up in the way people build businesses, ship products, and grow their careers?

Join Building Our Tech and Startup Weekend Orlando for an evening of "Skill & Tell," where three Orlando tech leaders share the AI skills they've built and how those skills are changing the way they work. This isn't a lecture on AI theory. It's a hands-on look at real tools, workflows, and strategies from people putting them to work every day.

Orrett Davis, founder of Mighty Orbit and co-founder of Starter Studio and Orlando Tech Meetup, will share how he uses AI to help B2B SaaS and healthtech companies build demand and scale faster, drawing on a decade of growth marketing experience across the Orlando tech ecosystem.

Alex Damis, AI lead at PETE and organizer of Build the Future, will dig into agentic engineering: how he gives AI agents durable memory and structured workspaces so they can carry complex projects forward instead of starting from scratch every time.

Josh Walker, VP of AI and Engineering at a Big 4 consulting firm and co-founder of Building Our Tech, will bring an enterprise lens to the conversation, showing how the AI and cloud concepts powering Fortune 500 platforms can be translated and applied by anyone, no corporate badge required. Whether you're scaling a startup, building your own AI-powered tools, or just trying to figure out where to start, this is your chance to learn directly from people doing the work.

Who should attend Professionals, entrepreneurs, and students who want to build real AI literacy, whether you're just starting out or already experimenting with AI tools at work.