Hacktoberfest 2026: DSM Web Geeks Hack Day

Let’s get hacking!
Join DSM Web Geeks on Monday, October 12th at 6:30 PM at Source Allies as we celebrate Hacktoberfest with an evening of open source, collaboration, and coding.

Hacktoberfest is a celebration of open source that brings developers together to contribute, learn, and support the projects and communities that make so much of modern software possible. Whether you’ve contributed to dozens of open source projects or have never opened a pull request before, you’re welcome to join us.

What’s Happening?
We’ll kick things off with a quick introduction to contributing to open source, including how to find a project, choose an issue, and work through the contribution and pull request process.

*Then we’ll start hacking!*

Bring your laptop and a project you’d like to contribute to, or join up with other developers at the event. We’ll have time to work individually, pair with others, ask questions, and share what we’re working on.

Have an open source project of your own that could use some help? Bring it! We’d love to give local maintainers a chance to introduce their projects and connect with potential contributors.

You don’t need to be an open source expert to participate. Documentation improvements, bug fixes, tests, accessibility improvements, and small features can all be valuable contributions. This is a chance to learn the contribution process in a friendly environment and meet other developers along the way.

What to Bring
Bring a laptop and anything else you need to code comfortably. If you already have a GitHub account, make sure you can log in before the event.

Don’t have a project in mind? That’s okay. We’ll help you find something to work on when you arrive.

*Food and drinks will be provided.*

About Hacktoberfest
Hacktoberfest is an annual celebration of open source software that encourages developers to contribute to open source projects and helps maintainers grow the communities ar

We are thrilled to welcome Joel Tosi — co-author of Signals & Levers (ITRevolution, September 2026), Coaching for Learning, and Create Your Dojo — who helps organizations evolve through learning by blending systems thinking, agile, lean, and DevOps practices. He joins ProductTank Des Moines ahead of his Tech Fuse Des Moines keynote.

Special thanks to F&G for sponsoring the venue and for having a senior leader kick off and welcome the group.

Overview:
Software delivery is influenced by a myriad of factors - internal ability to execute, customer demands, and an every shifting market for starters. But software delivery is also full of illusions, making it more and more difficult to see what is actually happening!

In this session, we will look at 3 of the most common illusions - Illusion of Progress, Illusion of Predictability, and Illusion of Control. We will explore the signals that tell us we are under these illusions and, most importantly, how to break free.

Want to understand why all of those meetings aren't helping? What about all of that planning? How about why all that agile stuff you are doing (in your own special way) seems to make things slower? And how about that eternal debate around tech debt vs shipping features?

Note: Guests need to register 48 hours in advance of the meeting.

Schedule:
4:30 - 5:00 Kickoff, Welcome and Networking
5:00 - 6:00 Session

This event is hosted by Iowa State University and is not affiliated with the Des Moines Data & Analytics Community group.

This event does includes a cost. You must register with ISU to attend.
ISU Event Details

This year’s event will focus on leading change with business analytics. Through real-world case studies and practitioner insights, speakers will share how organizations move from insight to action, from analysis to implementation, and from data-informed thinking to measurable business results.

As AI and advanced analytics capabilities continue to expand, many organizations are looking for ways to deliver greater business impact while helping their teams develop broader skills and stronger collaboration practices.

Principal Financial has been experimenting with a model that brings business intelligence analysts, analytics engineers, and data scientists together to work as an integrated team on shared business challenges. While still early in the journey, they are already seeing changes in how work gets done, how knowledge is shared, and how individuals approach problem-solving.
This session would explore:

* Why we chose to create cross-disciplinary teams.
* How the model works in practice.
* The role of T-shaped learning in developing more adaptable analytics professionals.
* How collaboration between BI, analytics engineering, and data science influences solution design and delivery.
* Examples of knowledge transfer and skill development occurring across disciplines.
* Early lessons learned, successes, and challenges.
* Observed changes in team behaviors, decision-making, and ownership.
* How integrated teams may help organizations scale AI and advanced analytics capabilities more effectively rate with peers.

What happens when a software developer decides to build a physical product?

In this session, Levi Rosol will share the story behind GridSmith—a modular tabletop terrain system that started as a personal frustration with existing products and evolved into a real business. Along the way, AI became much more than a coding assistant. It became a design partner, a CAD tutor, a rubber duck, a technical writer, a marketing assistant, and an endless source of ideas.

We'll explore the entire journey: identifying the problem worth solving, designing hundreds of iterations of a physical product, learning OpenSCAD through AI-assisted development, optimizing for 3D printing and manufacturing, building an e-commerce website through "vibe coding," and launching a product that people can actually buy.

This isn't a session about replacing developers with AI. It's about how modern AI tools dramatically lower the barrier between an idea and a finished product, allowing a single person to wear the hats of engineer, product designer, manufacturer, and entrepreneur.

Whether you're a developer, maker, or simply curious about what AI can enable, you'll leave with practical insights, honest lessons learned, and hopefully the confidence to start building that idea you've been putting off.

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Join us for the next DSM AI Group!
5:30 - 6:00 - Socializing/Networking
6:00 - Speaker begins

CIJUG returns on Thursday, October 22nd from 5:30 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 Nathan Halko, folks from Des Moines Charity Hackathons, Adam Horning as well as Ben DeMouth from Source Allies. Following the presentations, there will be time for questions, discussion, and conversation with the speakers and other members of the Java community.

Whether you're looking for useful 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 tech peers, and learn at lightning speed!

Hosted in person at Source Allies. RSVP so we can get a head count! Food/Drinks provided.

Pyowa returns to Source Allies on Tuesday, October 27th from 5:30–7pm with Dave Keller presenting a hands-on look at fraud detection, machine learning, and the importance of questioning results that seem a little too good.

In this session, Dave will explore his work using the Elliptic Bitcoin transaction dataset to investigate fraud detection. When his initial models produced near-perfect performance, it raised an important question: was the model actually learning meaningful patterns, or was data leakage influencing the results?

Dave will walk through rebuilding the experiment with a temporal train/validation/test split and establishing logistic regression and Random Forest baselines. He’ll also cover how statistical techniques including Spearman correlation, mutual information, and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests helped investigate relationships between features and time.

Rather than chasing the highest possible model score, this talk is about questioning results, testing alternative explanations, and understanding what the evidence does and does not support.

Hosted at Source Allies. Food and drinks will be provided.

Speaker Bio: Dave is a court researcher and aspiring data scientist with a background in mathematics. He is currently pursuing the MITx MicroMasters in Statistics and Data Science and develops projects focused on machine learning, fraud detection, graph analytics, and Python.

Human in the Loop: Orchestrating Agents for Safety

As AI agents take on more complex tasks and workflows, where and how should people remain part of the process?
Join DevOpsDSM on Wednesday, October 28th for Ethan Spoestra’s presentation, “Human in the Loop: Orchestrating Agents for Safety.”

The session will explore the intersection of AI agents, orchestration, human involvement, and safety, with a focus on the role people can play as increasingly capable agents become part of software and operational workflows.

Come learn, ask questions, and continue the conversation with the tech community. DevOpsDSM meets from 6–7pm at Source Allies. Food and drinks will be provided.

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.

Join us for the next DSM AI Group!

Topic and Speaker will be announced closer to the posted date.