Orlando Devs Hacktoberfest kickoff: hands-on coding, civic hacking, and more!

Name: Orlando Devs Hacktoberfest kickoff: hands-on coding, civic hacking, and more!
Start: 2025-09-29T18:30:00-04:00
End: 2025-09-29T20:30:00-04:00
Location: UCF Downtown

Schedule

Mon Sep 29 2025 at 06:30 pm to 08:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

UCF Downtown | Orlando, FL

Join the Orlando Devs to kick off Hacktoberfest!

https://hacktoberfest.com is a monthlong global celebration of open source. It's a great opportunity for hands-on learning, practical software development, and engagement with a global software community.

This is our third career-focused event, and attendees will get hands-on experience with coding and be presented opportunities to grow their portfolios through collaboration on projects.

This session will kick off Orlando Devs Hacktoberfest engagement with an orientation to Hacktoberfest and a discussion of the ways to contribute, prizes to earn, and more. We'll share the exciting restart of Open Orlando, Central Florida's own open data and open source community, and we'll preview the month of engagements.

We'll have a talk from Michael Rosario, organizer of the Google Developers Group, where he'll focus on hands-on demonstrations and practical examples of open source tools and how they contribute to rapid software development. This is a chance for attendees to learn new methods and tools and how they might be incorporated throughout Hacktoberfest and ultimately used at the end-of-October DevFest hackathon!

Speaker talk: The Power of Many: How Open Source Collaboration Drives Product Innovation

Description: Launching a lean product quickly is one of the biggest challenges for any maker. This talk will explore the core motivations and practical tools for integrating open source into your product or service to drastically reduce your time-to-market. We’ll dive into why some of the smartest makers are choosing to innovate in the open, and how that decision fuels a virtuous cycle of even greater progress. Drawing on real-world examples from the explosive world of generative AI, we'll show how projects like Hugging Face, LangChain, and open source GenAI have reshaped the product landscape. You'll leave with tangible strategies to leverage the "Power of Many" for your next big idea.