May we live in interesting times … no, not like that
Several Indy Hackers board members helped lead an AI Summit for Techpoint’s XTern program late last week.
The sessions included a keynote from our Board President, Chris Vannoy, on AI’s place in its historical context and the opportunity it presents for early career professionals.
The talk avoided the FOMO angle so prevalent in such talks - “AI isn’t going to replace you, someone using AI will” - and instead focused on the moment in time when the tools are still being subsidized and are relatively inexpensive as the market remains in its boom cycle.
There are few better times in the adoption of new technology for a curious individual to learn skills. Skills that can help find footing in the bust and adoption cycles to come.
In the Q&A after the talk, many students brought up the ethical, environmental, and societal issues posed by today’s mad rush to develop and use AI tooling.
These are all hard problems, and the core of the talk is that nobody knows where things are going, and early career folks - like those in the room, who are among the best and brightest future engineers, marketers, and business folks in Indiana - have as much right to lead the way forward as any of us.
In the afternoon, we also helped lead workshops, a handy reminder of something those of us in the field for any length of time tend to forget: we skip over the things that seem 'obvious.'
At our monthly Board meeting yesterday, we committed to a new virtual event in the coming months that’s more of an “AI 101” - comparing the different ways engineers are using AI in their workflows today. This event is intended to give a good survey of the landscape for those just starting their careers.
Look for an announcement with specifics in our next newsletter.
Race Complete
We wrapped the Race to $10k, and thanks to you we raised more than $8,000.
That money goes straight back into the community: upcoming events like our December holiday social, speaker events with community partners, and the connections that happen when we get people in a room together.
One of our first endeavors with these funds is to help bootstrap a new Hackathon event - coming in mid-October. Expect more details about this in our next newsletter as well (Ed. Dude, this next newsletter is going to be a banger)
One ask: if your company might want to support the community as a corporate sponsor, reach out to [email protected].
To everyone who gave: thank you! We're looking forward to building on this through the rest of the year.
Meetup. Of. The. Fortnight!
Indy .NET Consortium - July 1, 2026 at 6pm: ooo … a talk about Nullable Reference types in C# … wait, don’t wander off. Over the last few years, a lot of programming mindshare has gone to languages and frameworks that treat null/nil as a, well, non-entity - scrubbing these little friendly gremlins from existence. Expect a lively debate at this talk about how .NET handles null, since nothingness brings out the knives sometimes (Ed. look at wanna-be Nietzsche over here). Theoris, 9000 Keystone Crossing and Virtual
Upcoming Events
Zionsville Code and Coffee - July 1 at 8:00 AM
Broad Ripple Code and Coffee - July 1 at 8:00 AM
Indy .NET Consortium - July 1 at 6:00 PM
Central Indiana Linux Users Group - July 1 at 6:00 PM
Carmel Code and Coffee - July 2 at 7:00 AM
Downtown Code & Coffee - July 2 at 7:00 AM
Code and Tea - July 5 at 4:00 PM
Fishers Code and Coffee - July 7 at 7:00 AM
Zionsville Code and Coffee - July 8 at 8:00 AM
Virtual Code and Coffee - July 8 at 8:00 AM
AgileIndy - July 8 at 6:00 PM
Indy.rb - The Indianapolis Ruby Brigade Meetup - July 8 at 7:00 PM
Carmel Code and Coffee - July 9 at 7:00 AM
Downtown Code & Coffee - July 9 at 7:00 AM
Indy Game Developers Social Hour - July 10 at 6:30 PM
Code and Tea - July 12 at 4:00 PM
Fishers Code and Coffee - July 14 at 7:00 AM
Zionsville Code and Coffee - July 15 at 8:00 AM
Broad Ripple Code and Coffee - July 15 at 8:00 AM
Is there an event you would like to announce here? Let us know at [email protected] and we'll get it added to the calendar.
New on the job board
Senior Data Engineer (100% Remote - USA Only) at Six Feet Up
AWS Cloud Infrastructure & Network Engineering Technical Manager at CleanSlate Technology Group
The IndyHackers job board is free to companies and the community. Our goal is to help as many community members as possible land jobs they love at companies based here in Indiana, growing the community of hackers throughout the state.
If your company is hiring, post your job here.
If you're hunting for a job, the full job board is here or you can follow along in #jobs in our Slack. Or: Just reply to this email with what you're looking for.
One more thing
At the end of my keynote talk, one of the XTerns asked how I ended up working for twenty+ years in technology after being an English major - a detail I had led the talk with.
I’m not sure why, but it led into a telling of my origin story of sorts.
I had a full-ride scholarship to my state school - one of only five awarded to state residents each year.
And I bombed out, hard. I went from a highly structured environment at a rural high school, to a large public university.
I was already struggling with my mental health, I realize in retrospect, and that environmental shift deepened and broadened that struggle.
I bounced from Chemical Engineering, to Political Science, to a smaller school and an English Major with a Professional Writing emphasis.
I left school to start working in newspapers. My wife - bless her heart - made me go back and finish up my degree later. At the school I started off at, and with a catch-all degree that gave me college credits for work experience.
The decades since then have still been a struggle from time to time, sometimes taking it a day at a time, or coasting along for stretches.
I taught myself to code along the way - wanting to make websites and software bits. And then stumbled along from one job to another until I ended up giving a keynote to a group of young people at that same point in life I crashed at so very long ago.
After the talk, several students came up to thank me for the talk, yes, but also for the story.
They shared a bit of their own struggles, and thanked me for sharing mine.
“I know this can feel like the most important time in your life,” I had ended my talk with. “But it really isn’t. Because no time is. You can always change, the past is behind you, and tomorrow is always a fresh day.”
I’m an optimist.
Especially for the future of our community I saw in those XTerns.
We’ll be in great hands.
Chris Vannoy
Board President, Indy Hackers
Thanks to Our Sponsors
