Hudson Valley Can Code

Join us for our June in-person meetup — a rich two-part evening covering the human side of tech collaboration and the latest breakthroughs straight from Google I/O 2025.
Part 1 · Talk Your Social Style Is Showing! Reframing Communication to Improve Collaboration Michael Ackerbauer, Managing Director & Principal, Change Catalyst — Ackerbauer Laboratories
If you work with teams, you already know that small behavioral cues can quietly derail even the best creative work — and that most people misread them, especially under pressure.
This session gives you a practical framework for understanding how people show up differently in collaborative settings. You'll learn to decode the signals of creative tension, build what Michael calls a "versatility bridge," and create the conditions for real participative safety and trust.
You'll leave with:

• A sharper ability to identify and reframe Social Style behavioral cues
• Tools to decode tension signals and navigate them more effectively
• Concrete strategies to reduce friction and strengthen inclusive teamwork

Part 2 · Google I/O Extended What Just Happened at Google I/O — and Why It Matters John Sturman, John Pole & Yulia Ovchinnikova
Fresh from attending Google I/O, John and Yulia will walk us through the summit's biggest AI and developer announcements — what caught their attention, what surprised them, and what it means for builders and technologists in the Hudson Valley.
🍕 Light refreshments | 🤝 Open networking from 5:45 PM
Free to attend — RSVP here
Questions? Join our community on Slack
We welcome you to give a lightning talk, or share your professional achievements, tips and tricks. We welcome AI enthusiasts showing their AI projects and following their live development. Ongoing 2026 call for speakers is available for your submission. Feel free to add as many talks as interested. These talks will be considered for our community meetups and can lead to your speakers engagement with our DevFest this Fall.
Join our chapter GDG Hudson: https://gdg.community.dev/gdg-hudson/
Join our community at HVTechFest slack channel
Local tech professionals get-together in person on a monthly basis, alternating local municipalities. All these smaller size meet ups culminate with the two-day professional developers conference, DevFest Troy on October 23-24th, 2026. We will provide more details about this event as we move forward.
We are looking forward to seeing you there.

Couldn't make it to Mountain View? We've got you covered — and then some.
Join us for our Google I/O Extended session, where we go past the keynote headlines to explore what this year's announcements actually mean for developers, builders, and technologists in the Hudson Valley. This is a hands-on, builder-focused evening with three speakers bringing different angles on the same pivotal moment in AI development.
🏆 And we have something extra to celebrate. GDG Hudson Valley just received a Google Innovation Award — one of the highest recognitions a GDG chapter can earn. We'll take a moment to mark this milestone together as a community. This award belongs to every member who has shown up, built things, and pushed our chapter forward. Thank you.
Part 1 · I/O Recap: Firsthand from the Summit Summit John Sturman & Yulia Ovchinnikova
John and Yulia attended Google I/O in person and will share what caught their attention, what surprised them, and what's worth your focus. We'll cover the big picture: Gemini 2.5, new reasoning capabilities, Veo 3, Imagen 4, and the expanding role of AI across Search and Workspace — plus what it all signals for the road ahead.
Alfred Lazarus will share his perspective and provide a lightning talk about the AI development trends and use cases changing the landscape.
Part 2 · Deep Dive: Google Antigravity 2.0 & ADK 2.0 — Live Demos
John Krupavaram Pole Bhakthavatsalam has been in the lab with these tools since they dropped, and he's bringing live demos. Antigravity 2.0 moves well beyond an AI code editor — it's now a full agentic development platform with a desktop app, CLI, SDK, and Managed Agents tier. ADK 2.0, released for general availability on May 19, introduces a graph-based Workflow Runtime that transitions agent development into a new execution architecture — and John will show you what that looks like in practice.
If you're a developer wondering whether these tools actually change how you work, this is the session to see.
You'll walk away with:

• A clear picture of what Antigravity 2.0 is (and isn't) relative to tools you already use
• A practical sense of how ADK 2.0's multi-agent framework works
• Insight into where autonomous software development is headed — and how to start experimenting today

Open Q&A and community discussion to follow.
🆓 Free to attend — RSVP here or through GDG platform
💬 Join the conversation in Slack
We welcome you to give a lightning talk, or share your professional achievements, tips and tricks. We welcome AI enthusiasts showing their AI projects and following their live development. Ongoing 2026 call for speakers is available for your submission. Feel free to add as many talks as interested. These talks will be considered for our community meetups and can lead to your speakers engagement with our DevFest this Fall.
Join our chapter GDG Hudson: https://gdg.community.dev/gdg-hudson/
Join our community at HVTechFest slack channel
Local tech professionals get-together in person on a monthly basis, alternating local municipalities. All these smaller size meet ups culminate with the two-day professional developers conference, DevFest Troy on October 23-24th, 2026. We will provide more details about this event as we move forward.
We are looking forward to seeing you there.

Doors open 5:30 PM · Main program 6:00–8:00 PM · Networking continues after
📍 The Ellis, Newburgh, NY · theellisnewburgh.com · @the.ellis.newburgh

This one is different.
No formal agenda. No slides-only presentations. Just makers, builders, tinkerers, musicians, and dreamers gathering in one of the coolest creative spaces in the Hudson Valley — The Ellis in Newburgh — to show each other what they're working on.
If you've built something, broken something, coded something, soldered something, composed something, or just found something fascinating — this is your stage.

We're looking for people who want to bring:
🤖 A robot — your favorite bot, build, or mechanical curiosity. Show it off. Let people poke at it.
💻 A project demo — anything running on a laptop, a Raspberry Pi, or a breadboard. We'll have a projector. You bring the wow.
🎨 A creative project — physical or digital. Art, design, interactive installation, generative work — if you made it, we want to see it.
🎵 Music — bring tracks, an instrument, or a live set. The Ellis is a creative space and we want the energy to match.
Want to present or show something?

Fill out our Call for Speakers form and tell us what you're bringing — we'll be in touch to find the right format for you:
👉 forms.gle/SykEozKgmKae8xgV6
Spots are limited, so don't wait.

The vibe:
Arrive from 5:30 PM for early mingling. The main program runs 6:00–8:00 PM, with open networking continuing after. Weather permitting, we'll spill out into The Ellis backyard — one of Newburgh's most unexpected outdoor spaces.

🍹 Cash bar available — come thirsty.

This is a community evening — part tech meetup, part maker fair, part creative gathering. Bring a friend who doesn't think of themselves as "a tech person." They'll fit right in.

🌀 Something Bigger Is Brewing
We're working on something we're calling AI-infused entertainment — a concept that blends technology, creativity, and live experience in ways the Hudson Valley hasn't seen yet.
We believe the most interesting things happen at the edges: where a coder meets a musician, where a robotics builder meets a visual artist, where AI tools meet human creative instinct.
If you're a creative, performer, venue, or maker in the Hudson Valley who's been thinking along these lines — we want to meet you. This event is part of how we find each other.
Come with your ideas. Leave with co-conspirators.
🆓 Free to attend — RSVP is mandatory
Join our chapter GDG Hudson: https://gdg.community.dev/gdg-hudson/
Join our community at HVTechFest slack channel
* * *
Local tech professionals get-together in person on a monthly basis, alternating local municipalities. All these smaller size meet ups culminate with the two-day professional developers conference, DevFest Troy on October 23-24th, 2026. We will provide more details about this event as we move forward.

We are looking forward to seeing you there.