What's happening in Des Moines tech

*SaltStack: Configuration Management From Cloud Images to Developer Desktops*

Configuration management doesn’t stop at servers. On Wednesday, September 23rd, DevOpsDSM welcomes John Lengeling from Source Allies for a look at how SaltStack can provide a consistent approach to configuration across cloud infrastructure, servers, and developer workstations.

John will explore SaltStack’s architecture and how it can be used to build Azure images and AWS AMIs, manage server configurations, and provision developer desktops. He’ll also discuss how Infrastructure as Code and configuration automation can help teams reduce drift, improve consistency, speed up onboarding, and maintain reliable environments across platforms.

This session will offer a broader look at what configuration management can accomplish across an organization.
DevOpsDSM meets from 6–7pm, hosted at Source Allies. Food and drinks provided.

Speaker Bio: John Lengeling is a DevOps Engineer with more than 25 years of experience supporting embedded systems development and R&D organizations. His expertise includes infrastructure automation, CI/CD, cloud platforms, Infrastructure as Code, and configuration management. He focuses on helping engineering teams improve productivity, consistency, and scalability through automation and modern DevOps practices.

Pyowa returns on Tuesday, September 22nd from 5:30-7pm for a hands-on evening of Python coding with “Pybites Coding Exercises.”

Instead of a traditional presentation, this meetup will give attendees time to work through coding exercises using Pybites, experiment with different approaches, and learn alongside other members of the local Python community.

Bring your laptop and work through challenges independently or pair with others! The evening is an opportunity to sharpen your skills, practice problem-solving, and learn from fellow developers.

Hosted in person at Source Allies. Food and drinks provided.

ProductTank Des Moines/Ames invites you to our End of Summer
Networking mixer

* Tuesday, Sept 22nd
* 4:30 - 6 pm
* Big Grove Brewery
* Address: 555 17th St, Des Moines, IA 50309
* Pay your own way; come as you are!

Grab a beverage and unwind with fellow Product folks as we move into Fall!
Casual conversation about Product, Tech, and Design.

Join the Central Iowa Java User Group on Wednesday, September 16th from 5:30 – 7pm at Source Allies for food, drinks, and conversation at a CIJUG social! No presentations. No coding sessions. Just a chance to spend some time with our local CIJUG members.

Our regular meetups give us opportunities to learn about Java, the JVM, software engineering, and new technologies. This month, we're setting the technical topics aside and making time to get to know the people who make up our community.
Come meet other developers from around Iowa, catch up with people you've met at past CIJUG events, make some new connections, and talk about whatever is on your mind. Java is optional.

It doesn’t matter if you've been attending CIJUG for years or have never been to one of our events before, you’re welcome to stop by.

Wednesday, September 16th, 2026
5:30 to 7:00 PM
Hosted at Source Allies
Food and drinks will be provided – hope to see you there!

We’ll explore the real world tradeoffs of parallel processing through a case study of an AI pipeline that processes and analyzes large volumes of user-submitted political opinions. The system performs moderation, embedding generation, and downstream analysis using a distributed, event-driven architecture built on AWS.

In this session attendees will learn how to design scalable, resilient pipelines using parallel processing while avoiding common pitfalls like rate limits, throttling, and cascading failures. They’ll leave with practical patterns for building fault-tolerant systems, balancing throughput with external constraints, and handling partial failures gracefully.

We’ll break down how parallelism improves throughput and responsiveness, while also examining the less obvious challenges it introduces, such as rate limiting, back pressure, partial failures, and data consistency.

While the case study uses AWS services, the architectural principles are cloud-agnostic and applicable to any distributed system handling high-throughput workloads.

***

See you at the next DSM AI Event:
5:30 - 6:00 - Socializing/Networking
6:00 - Speaker begins

Migrating an application from one programming language to another has traditionally been a time-consuming and risky process. But what changes when AI becomes part of the development team?
DSM Web Geeks welcomes Daryle Foulke on Monday, September 14th from 6:30-8pm for a look at migrating a TypeScript application to Python with modern AI coding assistants. Through a live demonstration, Daryle will walk through the migration process, showing where AI can accelerate the translation of business logic and application structure and where human expertise remains essential. He’ll also cover some of the challenges developers can encounter along the way, including type-system differences, package ecosystem mismatches, and async programming differences between Node.js and Python.
You’ll learn approaches for prompting AI coding assistants, validating generated code with tests, and breaking a migration into small, verifiable increments.

Speaker Bio: Daryle is a Software Engineer at Source Allies with experience across cloud technologies and full-stack development. His technical background includes AWS, Python, Java, TypeScript, GraphQL, Terraform, and PostgreSQL, along with experience building enterprise software and working directly with clients.

Event Details:
Monday, September 14th
6:30 to 8pm
Hosted at Source Allies and streamed online
Food and drinks provided for in-person attendees

Check out https://www.dsmwebgeeks.com/ for details on this and all future events.

We meet the second Monday of every month. Our topics focus on new trends and techniques in web development.

Most teams relearn the same lessons over and over. Every investigation ends in a chat window or a one off notebook, and the hard won context evaporates the moment it closes. Knowledge Graphs turn an organization's scattered, hard-won expertise into a durable, machine-readable asset that both people and AI agents can use; continuously mined, source-attributed, and self-improving. Every answer you find once, you never have to find again. Learn once. Know forever.

Join Everette Petsinger, Data Scientist at John Deere, to see how it works and how your life will be changed forever.

Join us for an exciting DM Mobile Engineering Meetup at Source Allies! Calling all mobile enthusiasts, professionals, students, and software engineers to come together for our next meetup on Sep 9, 2026, from 5:30 to 7 PM - 4501 NW Urbandale Dr, Urbandale, IA 50322. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting your journey in iOS or Android development, this event promises insightful discussions and opportunities to connect with like-minded individuals.
Topic

* From Code to Pixel: How Mobile Frameworks Actually Render UI

Speaker

* Mahmoud Eraqi

Why Attend?

* Networking: Connect with professionals and peers in the mobile development industry.
* Learning: Gain insights, tips, and tricks from experienced developers. Hear from other developers about their career journeys, challenges, and achievements, and get tips and advice on how to succeed in the industry.
* Inspiration: Chat about the latest trends, best practices, and emerging technologies shaping the mobile landscape while being a part of a vibrant community of mobile engineers.
* Opportunities: Learn more about how to get into mobile development, skills you need and what the employers are looking for. Meet software engineers from the Des Moines area who are focused in mobile technologies and how they apply those skills in their own industry.
* Connections: Don't miss out on this chance to expand your skills, forge valuable connections, and be a part of the thriving mobile development scene in central Iowa!

Don’t miss this opportunity to grow and learn! To express interest in this event, please register here on MeetUp.

Event Directions:
The event is hosted at 4501 NW Urbandale Dr, Urbandale, IA 50322. There is plenty of parking space around the building. Once you enter the building, follow the directions to the event space.

Agenda
No technical agenda! Come join us at Gilroy's to catch up, start up new conversations, and enjoy each other's company!

We will have appetizers to enjoy on the patio, so if you have the time, stop by and say hello!

05:30pm-07:30pm - Social Time

Platinum Sponsor – QCI
Since 1995, QCI has grown to be one of the largest, Iowa-based, technology consulting firms, one client at a time. There is no secret to our success. We simply hire the best people and support a culture that is obsessed with delivering excellent service to our clients. In QCI, our clients have a partner that is large enough to provide highly skilled consultants across a wide area of expertise. Our dedication to client service has resulted in a long-term relationships through which we understand that placing the interests of our clients first is the key to being a trusted partner.

For more information, visit https://www.qci.com

Platinum Sponsor – Source Allies
Source Allies is a local technical consultancy who values collaboration, craftsmanship, and an ownership mentality. We provide a home to our teammates where we encourage each other to grow not only technically, but as peers & consultants. This is evident in the quality software we deliver to clients.

Learn about our “ownership mentality” at: https://www.sourceallies.com

Launching a SaaS product takes much more than writing great code. Before customers can sign up, there are business, financial, security, and infrastructure decisions that all have to happen in the right order. Miss a dependency, and you can lose days untangling problems that could have been avoided.

Join us on Tuesday, August 26th, as Travis Smith presents "The SaaS Startup Dependency Graph." Travis will walk through the real sequence of tasks involved in launching a SaaS business, from forming an LLC and obtaining an EIN to setting up banking, cloud identity, payment processing, and a secure production environment. Along the way, he'll highlight the privacy, identity, and architectural decisions that are easiest to make early and most costly to change later.

Whether you're building a side project, launching a startup, or just interested in the operational side of software delivery, this session goes well beyond just the code.

As always, we'll have time for questions, discussion, and networking with fellow members of the DevOpsDSM community.

Hosted at Source Allies from 6:00–7:00 PM, with food, drinks, and a live stream available for remote attendees.

Roboflow: Building a Real-Time Computer Vision Checkout with Python

Computer vision has become more accessible than ever, but what does it take to build a complete, real-time application from camera to customer?

Join Pyowa on Tuesday, August 25th, as Zac Crane presents "Roboflow." In this session, Zac will demonstrate a computer vision project that uses Python to recognize concession stand items and calculate an order total in real time.

You'll get a behind-the-scenes look at how Python and Roboflow work together to connect a camera feed, edge computing, an object detection model, pricing logic, and WebSocket communication that instantly sends the running total to a phone display. Along the way, Zac will share lessons learned while building an end-to-end computer vision application that bridges machine learning and real-world software engineering.

As always, we'll wrap up with time for questions, discussion, and networking with fellow members of the Pyowa community.
Join us from 5:30-7pm hosted at Source Allies. Food, drinks, and great conversation are included.

For decades, our industry has predicted that the next wave of technology would replace software developers. From COBOL to the dot-com boom, DevOps, and now AI, each shift has promised to fundamentally change our profession.
Yet developers are still here.

The difference is that every wave has demanded new skills, not fewer developers. As AI continues to reshape software engineering, one thing has become increasingly clear: the developers who thrive will be the ones who understand the fundamentals.

Join CIJUG as Dustin Thostenson explores why design patterns, system thinking, effective communication, testing, and quality engineering remain just as important today as they've ever been. Rather than focusing on AI tools themselves, this session examines how developers can avoid common pitfalls like AI-generated technical debt, missed business outcomes, and systems that become increasingly difficult to understand and maintain.
You'll learn practical approaches to defining problems clearly, designing systems with well-defined responsibilities, and writing tests that build confidence instead of simply checking boxes.

About the Speaker
Dustin Thostenson is an independent consultant leading Delta3Consulting. Over the course of his career, he has served as a developer, mentor, trainer, and agile coach, with a passion for helping people grow and teams deliver better outcomes. Dustin also helps lead the Iowa .NET User Group and is an active volunteer in the Central Iowa technology community.

Event Details
Thursday, August 20th, 2026
5:30 PM to 7:00 PM
Hosted at Source Allies
Food and drinks will be provided.

AI agents are getting good at taking action. The hard part isn't making them capable, it's knowing when to make them stop.

In this talk we'll walk through the full spectrum of human-in-the-loop patterns, from lightweight inline confirmations to out-of-band permission gates to handing your agent a wallet with real money in it and more. Each pattern fits a different level of consequence, and knowing which to reach for is what separates demo agents from production ones. We'll cover the honest tradeoffs of latency, user experience, and trust so you can make the right call for your specific use case.

The entire talk is built around various live demos that escalate in stakes with every step. You'll leave with a mental model and working reference architecture you can apply the same day.

_____________________________
Join us for the next DSM AI Group!

5:30 - 6:00 - Socializing/Networking
6:00 - Speaker begins

What if the PM’s job isn’t to write — it’s to ask the right questions? In this session, we explore how one team is using AI not to automate product management, but to make it sharper.

Come for a demonstration of the tooling Jon Harcey uses every day to build production products.

Attendees will leave with: a new frame for AI as a thinking partner (not a replacement), practical guidance on enterprise-safe AI infrastructure, and a workflow they can adapt for their own team immediately.

Thanks to our sponsor: Source Allies

4:30 - 5:00 Networking
5:00 - 6:00 Presentation

Join the Web Geeks March Meetup on Monday, August 10th, 6:30-8pm at Source Allies for a Coding Dojo!

Are you ready to dive into a collaborative coding challenge and explore new trends and techniques in software development? Web Geeks invites you to our next tech meetup where learning, experimentation, and community are at the forefront.

What’s Happening?
In the spirit of a traditional coding kata done the old-fashioned dojo way, we'll break into groups based on the computers available—so please remember to bring your own laptop. Each group will be given 60 minutes to tackle a fun and challenging coding problem using any means necessary. Whether you're keen to explore a new tech stack, experiment with an unfamiliar framework, or sharpen your TDD skills, this is your opportunity to learn by doing!

The Dojo Experience
Collaborative Challenge: Work with peers in small groups, exchange ideas, and learn from one another as you work through the coding kata.

Safe to Fail, Safe to Learn: At Web Geeks, we value the learning journey over the destination. We're not looking for the perfect solution—just a thoughtful approach and a willingness to experiment.

Community Presentations: At the end of the session, each group will share their results. This isn’t about who got it “right” but about discussing your thought process, the challenges you encountered, and the lessons you learned along the way.

Bring your computer and your curiosity. We will see you in the dojo!

Check out https://www.dsmwebgeeks.com/ for details on this and all future events.

We meet the second Monday of every month. Our topics focus on new trends and techniques in web development.

How do you turn noisy, inconsistent public health data into something genuinely informative?

Aaron Hall with Source Allies walks us through the development of Sick Risk, a system that computes illness risk scores by zip code using CDC wastewater surveillance data. He will focus on extracting a stable, interpretable signal from messy real-world data, and the tradeoffs involved in doing so.

Along the way, he will explore the Python-based, cloud-hosted architecture behind the application.

Finally, he taks a look at how modern AI coding assistants accelerated development, without drifting into "AI slop."

Hosted at Source Allies, Tuesday, July 28th 5:30p-7pm. In-person or streamed online.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Aaron Hall

GenAI & Data Science Consulting at Source Allies.
Aaron Hall is a hands-on AI engineer building real-world systems at the edge of modern machine learning. As a consultant at Source Allies, he ships production-ready solutions using generative AI and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), focusing on what actually works beyond the demos. Previously, he was a Data Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, applying machine learning at scale across high-performance computing environments and contributing to open-source ML infrastructure. With a PhD in Physics and experience spanning national labs, research, and full-stack development, Aaron brings a rare blend of technical depth and pragmatic engineering, helping teams turn powerful models into reliable, high-impact products.

The Des Moines Data for Good group has been utilizing their talents to help our community over the past several years. We will get to hear about their work and impact, a deep dive into a recent project and hear about opportunities to join the group. This is an event you don't want to miss!

For more information about this group, check out their website.
https://www.dsmdataforgood.com/

DevOpsDSM returns on Wednesday, July 22nd from 6 to 7pm for a Lightning Talks night at Source Allies.

Lightning talks are a chance to hear several quick presentations, giving everyone exposure to a variety of ideas, technologies, and real-world experiences. The format keeps the evening fast-paced while creating plenty of opportunities to discover something new.

This month's speakers include Austin Adamson, Joel Miller, Kyle Wagner, and Mason Spree. Our Lightning Talks will cover a wide range of topics, including deploying a simple LLM pipeline on Kubernetes with Seldon Core, using time series databases for observability, logging, and metrics, exploring why software engineering remains essential in an AI-driven world, and lessons learned from building and maintaining synthetic tests for platform and site reliability engineering. After the presentations, there will be plenty of time for questions, discussion, and sharing experiences with fellow attendees.

Whether you're looking for practical takeaways, new perspectives, or simply an opportunity to connect with fellow practitioners, Lightning Talks are a great way to spend an evening with the local DevOps community, and learn at lightning speed! We will also be having a giveaway for a 1 year GitKracken subscription for in-person attendees.

Food and drinks will be provided.
Hosted in person at Source Allies and streamed online. RSVP so we can get a head count!

Modern cloud-native development is often less about writing code and more about "YAML plumbing." Between IaC templates, secret management, and Kubernetes manifests, the actual application logic gets buried under layers of infrastructure configuration. Why does our tooling force us to think about VPCs and subnets when we just want to connect a service to a database?

AI-assisted development has come a long way from simple autocomplete, but most developers are only scratching the surface of what's possible today. Join us as Kyle Hoehns demonstrates how modern AI development tools have evolved from helpful coding assistants into capable agents that can help build complete features with minimal human intervention. Drawing from more than a year of daily use on real client projects, Kyle will share his insights into how these tools fit into modern software development workflows.

This session is completely hands-on. Starting with an empty project, Kyle will build a real REST API feature live using tools such as Claude Code and GitHub Copilot. Along the way, you'll see how AI agents can assist with implementation, testing, iteration, and feature development while still keeping developers in control of the process.

Speaker Bio:
Kyle Hoehns
Software Engineer and Teammate Pipeline Architect at Source Allies
Kyle is a seasoned software engineer with more than a decade of experience developing and implementing complex software solutions. With a strong background in backend technologies, including Java and Go, he has delivered scalable and efficient systems across multiple industries. Kyle is passionate about solving problems, improving developer experiences, and believes in not taking himself too seriously.

Event Details:
*Date:* Thursday, July 16th, 2026
*Time:* 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM
*Location:* Source Allies
Food and drinks will be provided.

What are companies actually looking for when they review your resume? Has the rise of AI coding assistants changed hiring expectations for developers? Are degrees still important? What skills stand out in today's market?

DSM Web Geeks is hosting a panel discussion focused on the current state of hiring in software development and technology roles. Let's share our perspectives on what employers are looking for, how hiring practices are evolving, and how candidates can better position themselves in a rapidly changing industry.

This will be an open conversation with opportunities for audience Q&A, making it a great chance to ask questions about resumes, interviewing, technical skills, career growth, and the impact of AI on hiring.

Whether you're actively job searching, considering your next career move, hiring for your own team, or simply curious about how the technology job market is changing, you'll leave with valuable insights from professionals working in the field every day.

Monday, July 13th
6:30 to 8:00 PM
Hosted at Source Allies and also online.

For those unable to join us physically, worry not! This event, as well as future gatherings, will be expertly streamed on our Twitch channel at twitch.tv/dsmwebgeeks. Tune in from wherever you are and be a part of the DSM Web Geeks community.

Check out https://www.dsmwebgeeks.com/ for details on this and all future events.

We meet the second Monday of every month. Our topics focus on new trends and techniques in web development.