Boston Tech Meetup Guide 2018

Businesses in technology are booming all over the world, but no city grabs tech by the horns like Boston, Massachusetts!

Why Boston?

Boston seems well adapted to meet the challenges of being a tech hub city long before the boom that we’re seeing today. This beautiful city is home to dozens of colleges and universities that educate and incubate the talent of the region. Going above and beyond the call of duty, many of these same schools also provide support by offering space, networking contacts, and funding for local startups and technology groups. City initiatives like We BOS, a group supporting women entrepreneurs, have taken root alongside numerous meetups, hackathons, conferences, and boot camps.

So where is all the action? Here is a list of some of the active technology groups in the Boston area. If you’re doing tech in Boston, these are a great place to start.

AI, Machine Learning, and Data Science

Big Data Boston – Big Data Boston hosts monthly informal networking sessions and periodic talks for people of all skill levels.

Boston AI Meetup – Meets roughly monthly for a combination of talks and hands-on practice You can expect to talk about machine learning algorithms and practice making a chatbot.

Boston AI Tech Talks Group – This group boasts multiple engaging talks per month. Typical topics include Facebook machine learning, Google’s Dialogflow, and Deep Learning.

Boston Machine Learning – Monthly meetups for, you guessed it, machine learning! This group seeks to support newcomers to the field by putting them in contact with the experts that they invite to speak at their events. Recent topics include visual intelligence, recommendation systems, and limiting test bias.

Connect AI – If you’re looking to learn about AI and machine learning via a series of projects, this is definitely the group for you. Connect AI hosts weekly meetups with hands-on team projects. Offline discussions are via email and their private Slack. (Contact them to request access!)

Data Scientists for Gender Diversity – This new group seeks to support minorities in tech by providing an inclusive learning environment for women, genderqueer, and non-binary individuals who are pumped about data science. (Allies are welcome, too!)

Deep Learning in Production – Deep learning powers Google search results and handwriting recognition. If you’re interested in learning how to deploy production-ready deep learning systems, this is definitely the group for you. Even if you are not in the Boston area, fear not! This group live streams their Meetup events for all to enjoy far and wide.

Code Schools, Bootcamps, and other learning opportunities

Code for Boston – A self-described “Civic Technology meetup,” Code for Boston brings together developers, designers, data geeks, and creative citizen activists to solve real-world problems.

General Assembly Boston – General Assembly’s Boston chapter organizes free events that broadly discuss web development and other relevant topics including women (tech) entrepreneurs, data science, and UI/UX. Note that attendees need to register via the links provided in the Meetup event listing rather than in Meetup itself.

Learn to Code Thinkful Boston – Hosts several meetups per month on introductory web development and machine learning. Example workshops include Data Science with Python, Introduction to HTML & CSS, and Introduction to JavaScript. Thinkful also hosts tech talks and happy hours throughout the year.

Girl Develop It Boston – Girl Develop It is a national organization devoted to providing affordable classes to women starting careers in software development.

She Geeks Out – She Geeks Out builds and maintains spaces for women to network with each other and with local companies. They also have a wonderful podcast that is definitely worth a listen!

Tech in Motion Boston – Tech in Motion organizes a variety of talks, social mixers, and networking events for the local community. Just this year, they’ve discussed remote tech teams, cryptocurrency, and AI. They are also currently celebrating reaching the 10k member mark, which makes them one of the largest groups on this list.

Women Who Code Boston – Women Who Code helps women around the country become leaders in technology, not only as engineers but also as managers and executives. Check out their website for job listings near Boston!

DevOps

BosOps – BosOps, or Boston Ops, hosts informal group-learning meetups over coffee (or whatever the group likes) and boasts one of the most vibrant Slack channels I’ve ever seen.

Boston DevOps – Join Boston DevOps if you’re looking for the perfect balance of depth and variety. Here you’ll learn about things like infrastructure security, complexity theory, scale, and culture shift. 

Technology-Specific Groups

Boston AWS Meetup – Dive into microservices, security, automation, and logging at any of Boston AWS’s numerous monthly meetups.

Docker Boston – Local Docker group hosts bi-monthly talks where members and guest lecturers discuss their latest Docker projects and insights. Recent topics included using containers in production, standardizing factory data with Docker, and persistent storage.

Boston ELK Stack – Running Elasticsearch in production? Join us in the Boston ELK Stack group to discuss things like monitoring, using Kafka in production with Elasticsearch, Kibana visualizations. (This group is supported by Logz.io’s Community effort, which has its own Community Slack with ELK users and admins across the world. We’d love to have you!)

Boston Google Developer Group – GDG hosts an average of 1-2 meetups per month on a variety of topics, typically (but not always) Google-centric. Recent talks have included an event about the human aspect of VR, building modern Java (Spring) applications, machine learning, and reviewing Google I/O.

Greater Boston UseR Group – These monthly meetups teach numerous applications of the R language. Recent talks have covered how to use R to analyze song lyrics, scientific norms, and how to use R for statistical inference.

Elasticsearch Boston – Elastic’s Boston Meetup group is an excellent place to discuss Elastic’s latest features, Beats, and how Elastic customers have implemented their solutions.

BostonJS – BostonJS holds meetups roughly once a month for discussions about JavaScript and building applications. Most recently, the group’s talks have touched on VR, natural language processing, React360, and web applications.

Boston Kubernetes Meetup – This group brings Kubernetes developers together roughly every 6 weeks. They’ve covered service mesh, testing environments, and the secrets of maintaining a Kubernetes cluster.

Boston Python User Group – Enjoy a mix of in-depth presentations, small batches of 5- to 10-minute lightning talks, and informal project nights. They meet several times a month.

Boston React Native – BRN supports people looking to learn about React, a JavaScript UI library. Talks feature topics like writing apps for Apple’s App Store and how to build universal components. They also host several social and networking events, which should help anyone in the area meet new people they can jive with.

Boston Red Hat User Group – RHUG provides a place for people to learn about everything Open Source and connect with an expansive community. Topics covered include Ansible, Containers, IaaS and PaaS frameworks, Open Source SaaS solutions, and more!

Boston Unity Group (BUG) – This monthly meetup group talks about Unity development. Topics include project fragmentation with VR, UI/UX best practices, and cinematic production. This group is active on social media and connects via a Google Group, linked below.]

All the Rest

Boston CQRS ES – This group holds monthly meetups to discuss Command Query Responsibility Segregation/Event Sourcing design pattern. What more could you ask for?

Boston EdTech – This meetup is geared toward K-12 educators, researchers, librarians, and anyone else who is passionate about teaching tech. It meets around twice a month and combines guest speakers with hands-on workshops.

Boston New Technology – Boston New Technology brings entrepreneurs and engineers together into one of the largest tech networking groups in Boston.

Boston Virtual Reality – Meets monthly to host talks on topics relevant to AR/VR. Recent talks include AR Cyberarts exhibits, technology for monitoring physical reactions to AR/VR technology, and numerous member talks with varying topics.

HackerNest Boston Tech Socials – A sharp contrast to the structured, topic-driven groups in this lineup, HackerNest Tech Socials focuses on people instead. Their tech events connect people of all skill levels and disciplines to share their interests, passions, and projects over food and drinks.

Ministry of Testing Boston – Whether you’re a testing specialist or just trying to beef up your testing toolset, the Ministry of Testing has an event for you. Recently, talk topics have included Gherkin, Appium, and Google’s software testing, and the group meets about twice a month.

Serverless Boston – If you’re looking to learn about Serverless, look no further! This group covers a broad spectrum of infrastructure serverless technologies including AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions. Meetups are monthly with guest speakers from Oracle, AWS, and Google.

We hope to see you!

As you can see, we love the Boston tech community here at Logz.io. Its strength and adaptability are among the reasons that our co-founders, Asaf Yigal and Tomer Levy, were initially attracted to the area. After spending time in Boston for prior successful ventures, they decided that Boston was the ideal place for the Logz.io US office. Drawing on the local talent pool has provided us with an amazing group of people with diverse backgrounds and ideas that has and will continue to bolster the company for years to come.

If you find your way in Boston please feel free to reach out to us on Twitter (@logzio) and let us know what groups you’re attending—who knows? We might even see you there!