FAQs

Deaf in the Cloud – this is a virtual user group that encompasses all deaf and signers into one spot to give presentations on a topic of your choosing, give each other feedback, help our career trajectories, and simply have a good time with the technology we know and love! I do want us to focus on cloud development, data science, and serverless technologies since I’d like us to follow industry trends for better knowledge transfer and leveraging our skills to jump into upcoming technologies.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Does deaf mean hard of hearing too? Of course, deaf is a word that represent ANY form of hearing loss. We’re not going to say every single terminiology representing some form of hearing loss. Besides, we’d like our PowerPoint slides simple and brief.

When will the first meeting happen? Hasn’t been decided yet. I want to get a general consensus first.

How will we meet? I’m actually unsure how this will happen. I figure at a minimum, we’d use video conferencing software that is supported by both Windows and Mac browsers allowing optimal participation. Feedback are welcome.

Why virtually? The deaf population isn’t robust enough to support a technical user group in one region, except maybe DC/MD/VA.

Is there a prefered technology? No, the user group is technically agnostic. If we were to discuss architecture on the Amazon Web Services platform, there will be analogies on Azure or Google Cloud. If one person talks Python, while another participant prefers nodejs, there’ll be similar libraries uses between the two scripting languages.

Do we have a board or committee? Yes, we will implement a board and committee to run the user group and to provide oversight over operations. This is all purely voluntary.

Who will present? You will! As soon you’re passionate about something and want to share what you’ve learn, please ask to present! We would limit presentations to the length of a classroom hour; 50 minutes. If there is a shorter presentation, that’d be great since we’d have some time for Q&A.

How did you make this site? I’m using Pelican which is a Python-based site generator hosted via Github Pages. I hope to move it elsewhere and have it set up with a little more bells and whistles to make it modernized. I’m NOT a designer and since the site is functional, I figure it’s fine for now until we have volunteers to beautify this. (see, I admit to my shortcomings!)