Best 2018 Chicago Tech Events for Students

I’ve lived in Chicago three years so here are my favorite tech meetups and recurring events in terms of my interest and availability to students in general. Most require an RSVP.

• If you’re a student in higher education in Illinois, (and even if you’re not,) then I highly recommend signing up for Illinois Tech Association and their newsletter.
  • Webinars and networking events, talent portal job board.
  • When subscribing, choose the “Insider” newsletter for early notice of events.
  • Coming soon is a code challenge competition this fall, 2018 ITA Tech Challenge.
  • Anita Borg Institute Chicago chapter hosts the 3rd Annual diversiTECH Hiring Fair August 15 2018 at The Connectory, 5th Floor of Merchandise Mart.
• Chi Hack Night
  • Civic Hacking and guest presentations, food, coding, meeting people.
  • They coordinate via Twitter/website.
  • You must RSVP with your name (and show ID) to attend.
• Chicago Digital Accessibility & Inclusive Design:
  • a11ychi on Meetup and @a11ychi on GitHub and Twitter.
• Chicago Ruby
  • Hack Night scheduled this Wednesday night,tomorrow in fact.

• Girl Develop It

• Illinois JUG Chicago && Chicago JUG

• Nerd Therapy
  • at the Nerdery, worth a visit just to see their office space.
• Tech In Motion
  • They host annual gatherings and tons other events.

• 8th Light University

• React Chicago on Meetup
  • Next event Lightning / Short Talks is on Wednesday, August 29, 2018.
• BLUE1647 Meetup - Tech, Entrepreneurship & Social Innovation
  • Currently no events, but a great place to visit, also on Twitter.
• Built In Chicago on Meetup
  • Use Meetup page to coordinate events. You receive specific instructions to attend on event descriptions.
  • Also the Built in Chicago site itself, part of the BuiltIn network. It’s useful.
• Super useful calendar of Chicago Tech Events, also on Twitter.

From jQuery to Vanilla JavaScript

No disrespect to jQuery, a phenomenal and lasting tool, but I saw fit to extirpate it from my blog’s code. I set about untying it from the underpins until coming to the last remaining use case, simply opening external links in their own window/tab. The problem was recreating the ready() function to know when page content has finished loading, without requiring all the machinery of jQuery.

Existing jQuery snippet:

jQuery(function ($) {
  //Change target attribute of external links
  var domain_root = document.location.protocol + '//' + document.location.host;
  var all_links = $('a').each(function (index, element) {
    if (element.href.substr(0, domain_root.length) !== domain_root) {
      element.target = '_blank';
    }
  });
});

Replaced by Vanilla JavaScript snippet:

var domReady = function(callback) {
    document.readyState === "interactive" || document.readyState === "complete" ? callback() : document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", callback);
};

domReady(function() {

  var links = document.links;

  for (var i = 0; i < links.length; i++) {
    if (links[i].hostname != window.location.hostname) {
      links[i].target = '_blank';
    }
  }
});

Now using domReady() as vanilla JS analogue to jQuery’s ready() function.

Shout out to beeker.io for providing a complete solution!

Another Word on Google Analytics

Almost a year ago I wrote a post about keeping Google Analytics (GA) data clear of perturbations such as spam and other tomfoolery. It is now time to revisit the topic, since reports have surfaced in the past weeks of just this sort of activity happening.

I checked my GA dashboard and am happy to report my filters from a year ago seem to have served to deter the very actions being reported¹.

What’s really going on?

In my reports there is no sign of the dreaded new language ‘Secret.ɢoogle.com’ nor unauthorized redirects to my page. To fully understand why these “attacks,” are occurring, check out the excellent posts² by Carlos Escalera, which explain in detail the modus operandi of our bad actor in this instance.

It appears to be some sort of bizarre guerrilla marketing tactic, which although may be causing a few headaches and require some extensive re-tooling by GA engineers, is thankfully not quite the caliber of the massive denial-of-service (DoS) attack experienced October 2016 on a major U.S. DNS provider.

To recap, nefariousness abounds, but as always being proactive with safety now can save loads of trouble in the future. Enabling filters on GA to make sure only actual traffic and legitimate referral hits get reported can help shield data from unwanted noise or worse.

The latest information points to Google working to prevent this action from being carried out on their service³, although new reports are stating the spam is being carried out now in a slightly different manner⁴. As so often happens the best solution is for devs to protect themselves.

In closing I’d like to point out the October 2016 attack⁵ which disrupted much of U.S. web service was a stark reminder of a fundamental tenant of computer science: a sufficiently large system is in constant state of partial failure. The design principle of robustness directs us to write software capable of functioning even if a large portion of the system fails. Although these two incidents are very different, they both serve to illustrate the fact we still have far to go in making the Internet a more robust system.