This Giving Tuesday, Help Us Keep Indy's Tech Community Thriving
It's been quite a year, Indy Hackers.
Let's be real — 2025 hasn't been the easiest year to work in tech. Between layoffs, hiring freezes, and shifts in the industry, a lot of folks have felt the uncertainty. That's exactly why community matters more than ever. And we're proud of what we've built together this year.
Here's what YOUR Indy Hackers community accomplished in 2025:
Weekly Code & Coffee meetups all across central Indiana—and we launched a brand new location in Zionsville this year!
Two professional development workshops with Brooksource: a resume workshop and a mock interview workshop to help job seekers put their best foot forward
Sponsorship and mentorship for college students like Purdue University’s Computer Science Club Hackathon (Hack Indy)—our Board members shared expertise and encouraged the next generation of Hoosier technologists,
Knowledge-sharing, connecting students and early career professionals with real-world practitioners
Book club for those who like to nerd out beyond the keyboard
Game nights because sometimes you just need to hang out
An active Slack community where people ask questions, share job leads, and support each other every single day
A biweekly (ish) newsletter keeping you connected to what's happening in Indy tech
Connections to other tech groups around town, because we're stronger together
All of this is powered by an all-volunteer board and community leaders—people who show up week after week because they believe in this community.
This Giving Tuesday (and beyond), we're asking for your support.
Your donation helps us cover costs for our community, fund future programming, and keep growing what we offer. We have big plans for 2026, and every contribution — big or small — makes a difference.
We want to see Hoosiers thrive in tech, no matter what the industry throws at us. Thank you for being part of this community.
P.S. Don't miss our Holiday Social! Details here — it's going to be a great way to close out the year together.
We need to get a count into our venue later this week, so register soon if you want to join us!
Meetup of the Fortnight
Certified LeSS Practitioner Workshop
Tuesday, December 16⋅8:30am – 6:00pm
The Certified LeSS Practitioner (CLP) course is an in-depth course covering the LeSS principles, framework and rules, and guides. It provides essential information for adopting and improving upon LeSS within your product development group. The course contains an overview of LeSS, stories on LeSS adoptions, exercises and extensive LeSS Q&A to ensure we discuss the topics most of interest to the participants.
This is a system modeling variant of a CLP. A great deal of time is spent in small groups at large whiteboards modeling how various organizational design choices influence outcomes. From this perspective, it is as much of a framework agnostic organizational design workshop, as it is a course on LeSS.
Instructors: James Carpenter and Gene Gendel
Upcoming Community Events
Many meetups are taking time off for the holidays, but look for things to pick up again in the new year!
Fishers Code and Coffee - December 2 at 7:00 AM
Zionsville Code and Coffee - December 3 at 8:00 AM
Broad Ripple Code and Coffee - December 3 at 8:00 AM
Central Indiana Linux Users Group - December 3 at 6:00 PM
Carmel Code and Coffee - December 4 at 7:00 AM
Downtown Code & Coffee - December 4 at 7:00 AM
Code and Tea - December 7 at 4:00 PM
Virtual Code and Coffee - December 10 at 8:00 AM
Indy Game Developers Social Hour - December 11 at 7:30 PM
Indy Hackers Holiday Social 2025 - December 13 at 7:00 PM
Certified LeSS Practitioner Workshop - December 15-17 at 8:30 AM
CoderDojo Indy - December 20 at 11:00 AM
Indy .NET Consortium - January 7 at 6:00 PM
Indy.js - January 20th at 7:00 PM
IndyAWS - January 20th at 7:00 PM
AgileIndy - January 14th at 6:00 PM
Is there an event you would like to announce here? Let us know at newsletter@indyhackers.org and we’ll get it added to the calendar.
New on the Job Board
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 Last Thing
“What’s the money for?”
If your inbox is anything like mine, this isn’t the first Giving Tuesday email that’s hit you today.
Every nonprofit under the sun is emailing folks today. We’re not very different. We’re members of the community working on our community as volunteers.
And we’re emailing you to ask for your help.
And that question at the top is an important one we need to answer for folks.
This year, we’re planning on expanding the mission and footprint of Indy Hackers.
First, we’d like to expand outside of central Indiana. There are great technology folks and companies in every corner of the state. Whether it’s spinning up more Code and Coffees, supporting local meetups, or hosting live events, we want to build our community in places like Fort Wayne, West Lafayette, Evansville, Bloomington, Muncie, South Bend and Terre Haute.
This connects to our expanding mission.
Indy Hackers has always been a supporter of our community of technology folks. And we’ll continue to prioritize this.
The last few years have been challenging for many of the career fields our community supports - software engineering, customer success, and marketing.
We’ve been in enough business spaces over the last year to realize that our fields need not just support, but advocacy.
We need to encourage businesses to invest in hiring humans.
We need to help shape the narrative of what it means to work in this industry.
We need to help grow the opportunities for not just ourselves, but for the future engineers, customer support folks, and marketers that are graduating from Indiana colleges every year.
We’ll talk more about this at the Holiday Social and beyond, but that’s what the money is for.
Your donation starts a Code and Coffee in Bloomington, funds more career programming, supports existing meetups, keeps our community running, and allows us to advocate for more opportunities for our community here in Indiana.
It’s time to start growing.
Chris Vannoy
Board President, Indy Hackers
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