Have you ever wanted to learn website design or programming, mobile development, game creation, or any other useful topic not taught in Georgia Tech’s academic classes? GT ACM’s new TechTopics program offers you a guide to these and many more interesting subjects. Taught by industry professionals, GT instructors, and students such as yourselves, these informal “classes” teach everything from the basics to the advanced. Look for many engaging TechTopics classes to be taught throughout this semester and into the future.
Our first TechTopics series will introduce you to web development with PHP, one of the most widely used web scripting languages. Taught by student Blair Daly, a CS teaching assistant and creator of several successful online communities, this series will introduce PHP and help you get started with this exciting technology. This series is targeted at beginners, so don’t be afraid to come and learn something new, even if you haven’t touched web development before. Classes will begin the week ending in February 13, but the exact day and time will be determined by responses to the sign-up form. We will be following up with more advanced classes later in the semester.
This series will consist an hour-long meeting once a week for 5 weeks, moving from the basics to the intermediate topics. While it is not mandatory to attend every class, and there is no grading or homework, we strongly encourage you to come to each session, as they build upon each other. Please fill out the sign-up form to get started, and let us know what schedule works best for you.
Sorry, registration is now closed.
Thanks for coming out to the PowerPlan Info Session! If you are interested in working for them, send your cover letter (optional), resume, and academic transcripts to: Amy Arra at aarra@pwrplan.com
Photos from the event are on Flickr here: GTACM PowerPlan info session
Date/Time: Thursday 6:30pm-7:30pm
Description: See below for more about them.
Food: Junior’s!
And here’s a note from PowerPlan:
My name is Matt Crye with PowerPlan Consultants. PowerPlan is a medium sized consulting and software company specializing in providing financial systems to very large, capital intensive companies such as utilities (Southern Company), telecoms (AT&T), railroads (Norfolk Southern), and petrochemical (Chevron) companies. Although we have clients located across the US and Canada, we are principally located in Atlanta. In 2009 we had revenues of $38 million, 125 clients, and a staff of 75 consultants.
PowerPlan Consultants provides an excellent and exciting environment for career development. As the recognized leader in financial systems for some of the largest and most asset intensive corporations in the US, our consultants develop and maintain broad skill sets including accounting, software design and development, change management, and process design. We are a compact and efficient team, with individuals assuming responsibilities and roles suited to their nature and talents.
To summarize, PowerPlant Consultants offers an opportunity for candidates to become part of an entrepreneurial business at a key moment in its history:
• We’re the leader within our market segment, recognized as best-in-class and have significant momentum to win remaining market share;
• We’re small enough for you to establish yourself quickly as a key member of the team;
• We have product dominance in several areas, resulting in natural opportunities for growth in adjacent products, services and vertical markets.
Over the years, PowerPlan has hired many outstanding individuals from Georgia Tech principally with backgrounds in Industrial Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or Mathematics. Specifically, we seek candidates with the following characteristics:
- Strong Analytical Skills
- Self Motivated – Entrepreneurial
- Proven Leadership Ability
- Good People Skills
- Must Have Excellent Grades – 3.5+
- Demonstrated Ability to Learn
We are experiencing exceptional growth and have immediate positions for May and December 2010 graduates. In the last 18 months we have hired 12 engineering graduates with an average GPA of over 3.65. They represent the top of their class.
Please reply to Amy Arra at aarra@pwrplan.com with an attached resume and an electronic copy of your academic transcripts to be considered for a preliminary interview. We look forward to meeting you in person.
Best Regards,
Matt Crye
Firm Overview and Technology Overview
Thursday January 28th, 2010
11:05am-11:55am
Van Leer C240
Description:
Citadel is a leading global institution with a diverse business platform that is built on a foundation of exceptional talent and technology. Our deep bench of talent embodies a culture of dedication and commitment.
To capitalize on tomorrow’s opportunity, we must uncover meaningful insights that transcend today’s markets. But we cannot gain these insights alone—we collaborate with our clients to define opportunities together. The opportunity to innovate, perform, and excel. The opportunity to set new standards of market efficiency, client success, and institutional excellence. The opportunity to see in new ways and execute upon new ideas. For our clients. For our partners. For the market as a whole.
Google UX Information Session by Henderik Mueller (GT HCI MS alum)
Wednesday 5:30pm (food at 6pm)
Klaus 1116
Google Tech Talk by Bruce Johnson
Wednesday 6:30pm
Klaus 1116
Hi again (for the last time),
A couple people have asked me for the minutes/notes from last night’s meeting since they weren’t able to make it, so I thought I’d go ahead and share them with everyone.
The most important point is that Roger Pincombe and Neiloy Mukerjee are the new co-coordinators (or whatever titles they select) of the program. Roger and Neiloy will probably reachable at topics@gtacm.org soon. Expect all future emails to come from them.
The major points below are the items as they appeared on the agenda, and the minor points are what we discussed and decided.
- Class Format and Scheduling
- 1 class per week
- 1 or 1.5 hours per class
- Up to 5 weeks at most
- Might avoid scheduling 6-7:30 PM on Tuesdays because of CS mentor meeting
- Might avoid scheduling Wednesdays for fraternity meetings
- Friday starting around 4PM, Saturday around 12PM-2PM, and Sunday evenings were agreed upon as the best times for this semester. (Things may change in the Fall due to football gamedays)
- Topic: Intro to PHP
- Our first class will be an introduction to PHP, a very popular web programming language, taught by Blair Daly.
- Blair is a former CS teaching assistant and has created multiple successful online communities.
- This class will take place later this month or early Februrary
- Do you know anything that you’d like to teach?
- Ajai knows a few people that he thinks would like to teach topics on Ruby (possibly on Rails) development, as well as a person that already teaches “How to not be a Social Media Douchebag” somewhere else
- A couple of gaming strategy classes were mentioned as fun breaks from standard classes
- Discussed limiting sillier classes to just a couple per semester
- Is there anything you’d like to learn that isn’t already in our scope of recruiting?
- Not really. In previous meetings, surveys, and polls, it looks like we’ve gathered pretty much all the popular ideas.
- Patrick is graduating and moving away, so the program needs a new coordinator
- Roger Pincombe and Neiloy Mukerjee both stepped up and decided that they might be most effective working together to spearhead the program. From here on out, all TechTopics information will most likely come from them, and all questions should be directed to them.
- We probably need a website, even if just a simple one, to manage registration and scheduling.
- Ajai volunteered to do this. He plans to do it by adding some functionality to the current GTACM wordpress installation (gtacm.org)
Soon, we should have a mailing list ready for anyone that is interested in our TechTopics program.
We did not discuss this as in-depth, but we plan to have Kristin Marsicano, instructor in the College of Computing, teach a topic on Android Development soon as well. Hopefully, we’ll get it going as an immediate second class.
Anyway, that ends my time at Tech, and I hope you guys get this off to a great start this semester. 
–
Patrick Eisenmann
Former TechTopics Coordinator
GT Association for Computing Machinery
gtacm.org
Hi Everyone,
I’m Patrick Eisenmann from the GT Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery. If you’ve expressed interest in teaching or taking classes in our TechTopics program (which we had been calling Options Classes/Saturday Classes/SIGoptions), then you’ll be excited to hear we”re having a meeting today Tuesday, January 12th in (Edit: CoC 52) at 6PM. (Location may change, but we’ll email and post a sign if it does)
In case you’ve forgotten, TechTopics is a series of lectures taught by students, faculty, or external companies on a variety of topics that most students won’t get in regular classes. This includes languages like PHP, Perl, Ruby, Objective-C, and Javascript; frameworks like jQuery, YUI, GWT, and Rails; and mobile apps for all smart phone platforms. There is, of course, room for many more topics, I’m just listing what’s been popular in discussions
The purpose of the meeting will be to:
- Finalize the format of the classes / Get your input
- Discuss the first class that we’ve already planned (Topic: Intro to PHP)
- Encourage anyone who might want to teach to follow through and plan a class
- Select a new leader of the TechTopics program, since I’ve graduated
- Eat our food
I hope to see everyone there!
–
Patrick Eisenmann
TechTopics Coordinator
GT Association for Computing Machinery
gtacm.org
Officer elections: if you’re a curent officer or paying member, you get to judge who will help run and grow GTACM in the future! Only paid members and officers can vote, but ***anyone can run for a position***, even if you haven’t been involved with us before. It’s not especially formal- you’ll have to tell a little bit about yourself and why you’re interested in the position.
This will be tonight (11/23) at 7pm in Klaus 1447.
We’re going to list the available officer positions and describe their responsibilities. You’ll have a chance to ask questions and know what you’re getting into! Then we’ll go through the positions and elect people.
We won’t have food. Sorry! And we do understand that Lockheed Martin is having an event at the same time, so we plan on having this event again either later this semester or at the beginning of the next one if you didn’t get a chance to come this time.
Our first members meeting this semester is going to be Thursday 11/19 @ 7pm and is open to everyone! Members meetings are to showcase all of the teams and projects in our organization and to promote our available leadership positions with a variety of roles and time commitments. If you’re interested in getting involved in any way, stop by!
Many of our officers will be graduating soon, so there are some great opportunities to get really involved! If you’re interested in developing your leadership abilities and other important skills, or if you come to our events and enjoy them, please take some time on Thursday to learn about how you can help, especially if you enjoy running social events. Pizza will be served!
Palantir will be presenting information about their company and then performing some technical demos on Wednesday, 11/18 @ 6:30pm in Klaus 1116. Free Wingnuts!
Here’s some more details:
Speaker: Ari Gesher, Senior Software Engineer at Palantir Technologies.
Ari will discuss how Palantir Technologies is revolutionizing the analysis of hard and important problems that face our world today, as well as showing off a live demo of Palantir’s software.
Palantir Technologies is working to radically change how groups analyze information. Founded in 2004 by a handful of PayPal alumni and Stanford computer scientists, Palantir Technologies has doubled in size every year while retaining early-stage values: a startup culture, strong work ethic, and rigorous hiring standards. Palantir currently offer two products: Palantir Government and Palantir Finance. Both are platforms for integrating, visualizing, and analyzing the world’s information. They support many kinds of data including structured, unstructured, relational, temporal, and geospatial. Their products are built for real analysis with a focus on security, scalability, ease of use, and collaboration.
