Ending 2023 with tech meetups: designers, tech people & start-up people together

Hello and welcome everyone to the newsletter of digital transformation served weekly. Despite the fact of the holiday and post-holiday and pre-New Year, we are still working, we are still empowering the digital transformation and growing the tech community.

We have news. And quite a lot of them by this week.

At Tuesday, we had the first Edmonton Design Movement meetup organized by Paul Bakhmut at Remedy Cafe. We welcomed numerous talented UX designers, graphic designers, front-end developers, and marketing people, along with everyone passionate about good design and aspiring for better UX, CX or just generally - good experience with human-centered design.

We discovered the table upstairs and assembled it to accommodate everyone, resulting in a fantastic experience. Many newcomers share a vision for high-quality products and are poised to significantly influence the UX community in Edmonton and across Canada. Our preference is for good products, and with the exceptional talent we have here, we are well-equipped to achieve this goal.

We discussed everything. Jobseeking and design-driven companies. Design is not only about making a good poster, we need more companies like Apple - designing their products to satisfy the customer experience with their sound engineering of the click sounds to the smoothness of the interface. We need people to be Apple people. And principles of human-centered design apply for more things than just your phone - it applies to everything from the door handle to the complex industrial machinery. If you share this vision or you would like to go deeper of what design really means, make sure to join this meetup every Tuesday.

Followed by Edmonton Design Movement, we had Edmonton Tech Wednesdays next day! With the revamped format of the event, we now have the guest speakers every Wednesday with no consideration for the holidays. My holidays are tech meetups, as you can tell - I am not a very interesting person. Despite that fact, we had a very interesting speaker Paulina Morgan and she spoke about how marketing automation could make your business grow exponentially.

During the discussions, we had a lot of very interesting questions, one of the questions were: is e-mail marketing good enough for the businesses? And it really depends on who are you trying to target. Marketing automation is great, but you need to automate it in a good direction.

Marketing is also about the customer experience which intertwines with the Edmonton Design Movement, if you are good at social media marketing, your posts are engaging people and that is also automated, then it is a success for you and your business and you don’t have to use the e-mails like I do to write you guys a newsletter that’ll probably go to the spam (hopefully not!).

During the brainstorming and the real situation of job market being really slow lately, we came up with an idea for the Talent Pool of Edmonton Tech Wednesdays. People need jobs and we have a community that could support them in getting their dream jobs. Jobseeking is not easy for anyone, so if there is a chance - I could make it easier even by some little percentage, you always have more chances of the recruiter randomly stumbling upon my page or visiting Edmonton Tech Wednesdays and seeing all those bright minds ready to rumble. We have Andrii, seasoned full-stack developer with the focus in web development, he has plans to build something new in the 2024, so stay tuned and follow him on LinkedIn. We have Alena, a professional photographer, capturing the moments of your lifetime. We have a lot of wonderful people that will be featured on our talent pool, so make sure to check out those events.

If you are a jobseeker - show up to GRETA, get featured on the online list with your headshot, your name, your portfolio and your 1-2 sentence sales pitch to get hired. I encourage you not to limit yourself with our event, but come to the other events that are discoverable in our Telegram group.

Edmonton Tech Wednesdays was not the end of our tech pubcrawling, the next night was Only the Lonely StartupTNT Happy Hour where we gathered a lot of people at 5PM to speak about their ideas for the start-up, game development ideas, how tasty the chicken is at Northern Chicken and how cool it is to finish 2023 with a great tech networking event. We actually had a good number of people at the event, most of them were invited over a week ago and I told them - I’ll be a guest host, let’s go and enjoy the tech party together. I love the cozy tech community we have here where everyone knows each other, so it is never awkward to meet all the new people every night.

And… that’s a wrap! I hope all of you had a lot of fun reading this newsletter as I am having fun writing it every week, if you would like to be featured on the newsletter and tell us your character arc storyline, make sure to reach out to me on LinkedIn or my e-mail [email protected].

See you in 2024 with more updates and I wish for you to accomplish everything you want in 2024, so we can celebrate your success in 2025.

Digital regards and Happy New Year!
Mykola