I’m painfully aware that nobody reads documentation, and I’ve taken steps to ensure that the docs I’m writing are clear, easy to follow, and get to the point ASAP. You won’t need a Ph.D. to read what I’m writing, unless it means “Push here, devops.” I’m trying to make it that simple.
Welcome to the another Global Nerdy Saturday “picdump!” It’s the weekly article where I post the technology- and work-related memes, pictures, and cartoons floating around the internet that I found interesting or relevant this week. Share and enjoy!
Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, January 13 through Sunday, January 19, 2025! This list includes both in-person and online events.
Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. at Hays, Tampa: The topic is OKRs — objectives and key results. they’re not just a goal-setting framework, but a powerful tool for driving focus, alignment, and measurable outcomes in product management. In this session, we will discuss how OKRs can significantly sharpen your product strategy to create meaningful and impactful results for your teams.
Thursday evening at 6:00 p.m. at Computer Coach, Tampa: Join Tampa Bay User Experience for a year of reflection. As we enter 2025, it is time to look back on what we have done, celebrate together, learn together, and talk about what 2025 might look like.
Rob will share some highlights from the year. Then, we will switch gears and you will have the opportunity to share what you want from the group in 2025.
Thursday evening at 6:00 p.m. at Magnanimous Brewing, Tampa: Join Tampa M365 for an awesome social gathering at Magnanimous in Seminole Heights on Florida Ave., where you can enjoy beers, socialize, and network with awesome local techies. Whether you’re new to Microsoft 365 or an experienced M365 IT Pro / Developer, this event is a great opportunity to meet new faces and get to know your local counterparts!
Thursday evening at 7:00 p.m. at 5406 Hoover Blvd STE 10, Tampa:
Curious about how hackers think? Want to explore the mindset that drives innovation, creativity, and problem-solving in the digital age? Join us for “The Hacker’s Mindset w/ Outlier”, hosted by Neon Temple!
Dive deep into the world of ethical hacking, critical thinking, and strategies that will challenge the way you approach problems. Whether you’re a cybersecurity pro, a tech enthusiast, or just curious, this event is for YOU!
Thursday evening at 7:00 p.m. at Wind Rover Brewery, Tampa: Tampa Bay Agile & Clearly Agile are bringing the happy hour version of Lean Coffee to your area! Drinking not required!
Lean Beer is an alternative to the early morning Lean Coffees, for folks who can’t always join us at 7:30AM. Lean Beer is a great place to ask questions and share your stories of using Agile and Lean software approaches, over an adult beverage, if you choose. We discuss any topics on Agile and Lean that are of interest to whomever is gathered. You suggest the topics, then we prioritize that list democratically, through a good ole’ fashion vote. We manage our discussions via time boxes, and a Roman vote (drinks up/drinks down). Vegas rules apply!
We are a non-formal group, like to loosen our ties and roll up our sleeves at the end of a long day, and gather with other like-minded Agile Practitioners to exchange ideas and information. Come see what Lean Beer is all about and get your Agile on.
Tuesday morning at 10:00 a.m. at Joffrey’s Coffee & Tea Company, Tampa: Tampa Bay Techies is holding their monthly study group and tech meetup!
This is a space to socialize, show off your current projects, ask questions with others studying for similar topics, and enjoy a nice cup of coffee! ☕✨
Whether you just started studying, about to take an exam, or still trying to figure out which certification path to take, our study groups are the perfect setting to share knowledge, learn some new study tips & tricks, and ask questions to current industry professionals.
Although they schedule the study session from 10am-1pm, attendees are free to come and go as they please.
How do I put this list together? It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.
In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.
What goes into this list? I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
️ Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
I’ve only gotten back into PowerShell recently, so I was unaware that they have a cartoon mascot that I think of as “PowerShell Gambit.” The mascot appears at the start and completion of its installer, and now I call out PowerShell commands as I type them in my terrible approximation of Channing Tatum’s cajun accent in the Deadpool and Wolverine movie.
Jennifer Reif is a Developer Relations Engineer at Neo4j, who will walk through what a graph database is and how it can transform your applications and data.
Graphs are different from other types of databases because they store relationships between data points. This makes them ideal for applications where the connections between data provides additional context, improving decision-making with existing data.
Join us to learn how to leverage graph databases in your applications and AI projects. Jennifer will talk about creating, querying, and displaying data and learn how to integrate a graph database into applications. Finally, she will discuss how graph databases can be used in AI applications and the strengths they bring to the table. Live code will demonstrate these concepts in action.
PackfilesTampa-based Packfiles is a project management and software platform founded this year. After meeting and working together in Tampa Bay, co-founders Rob Bremer and Charlton Trezevant — the creator of the software developer meetup group and nonprofit Tampa Devs — wanted to create a tool that eliminates the need for service firms during the coding file migration process, which developers utilize for efficiency.
The tool seeks to simply and controllably migrate files to Microsoft-owned platform GitHub, a popular tool for software developers that hosts code for collaboration and storage. In an ecosystem where successful startups are all about fulfilling a need, the co-founders’ experience collaborating at their prior company to help found one of the premier GitHub Professional Services practices in the United States will be key as they continue to build the platform.
Okay, that’s the layperson’s explanation. What does Packfiles actually do?
Packfiles’ SaaS, called Warp, is a GitHub migration service. Normally, the process of migrating repositories from Azure DevOps to GitHub involves a complex process that requires a fair bit of planning, a number of shell scripts with limited support, and tedious, error-prone manual work.
It looks like this:
Warp is built on Packfiles cofounders Rob Bremer’s and Charlton Trezevant’s experience with performing these migrations. It automates the lion’s share of the process, and once you’ve done the necessary configurations, Azure DevOps-to-GitHub migrations end up looking like this:
In case you were wondering, that’s an actual screen capture of what I did to migrate a repository from Azure DevOps to GitHub, and if it looks like the comments section from a GitHub issue, that’s because it is! In Warp, you use GitHub to migrate to GitHub:
Warp creates a GitHub repository called Migration HQ, which represents the migration-to-GitHub project.
Each Migration HQ issue represents a repository to be migrated.
You enter Warp commands in the issue comments. For example, in the issue representing a repository that I wanted to migrate, I entered the “slash command” /migrate to start the migration process for that repository. Warp first replied in a follow-up comment to tell me that the migration was in progress, and then notified me in another follow-up comment that the migration was complete and provided a link to the repository’s new GitHub location.
Who’s going to use Packfiles’ Warp?
Warp’s target market, as you’ve probably figured out, is organizations who use currently Azure DevOps and want to switch to GitHub.
And who uses Azure DevOps? It turns out there’s a little club of businesses call the Fortune 500, and 85% of them are on Azure DevOps.
This leads to a follow-up question: What makes you think organizations want to move from Azure DevOps to GitHub?
My unofficial answer would be: Have you tried using Azure DevOps?
My more-official answer’s a little more serious, and it’s a citation of a Reddit thread in r/devops from a mere 14 hours ago at the time of writing:
Finally, there’s the reaction that Rob, Charlton, and the rest of the Packfiles team got at the 2024 edition of GitHub Universe, the conference for all things GitHub. They were approached by companies of all sizes, including some very large ones you’ve definitely heard of.
Simply put, Warp solves a problem that most people don’t even know exists, but a lot of organizations need solved.
What will I be doing at Packfiles?
Long story short: I’ll be doing whatever Packfiles needs me to do. A lot of it will involve creating their documentation and developer/devops relations material, as well as technical sales and support.
The work I’ll be doing, especially in the beginning, will be collaborating very closely with Charlton, who’s lead developer and CTO, as well as with developer Justin Linn (whom I’ve been on not one, but two editions of StartupBus), so I’ll be working at least three days a week at Packfiles’ office at Tampa’s premier coworking/incubator space, Embarc Collective. Here’s what I see when I enter the place:
Luckily, it’s a quick drive from my place; in fact, it would take me 35 minutes to bike there, which I’ll do when the weather’s nice.
And here’s my desk at the office:
I’ve been working with Packfiles for the past couple of weeks, and I’m enjoying working there, being “in the room where it happens,” and also seeing the other folks at Tampa Bay’s startups at Embarc Collective.
This should be an interesting year. Keep watching this space for more!
It’s a Raspberry Pi 500, which takes a Raspberry Pi 5, the latest generation of the “Internet of Things” tiny computer, and puts it into a keyboard chassis. I probably have more than enough computers, but I love Raspberry Pis, and this 1980s-style “all-in-one” form factor was impossible to resist, especially with its $90 price tag.
I put it on. my main desk and hooked it up to the secondary monitor with an HDMI splitter so that my MacBook and the Pi 500 can share it. Here’s what it looks like on my desk:
Setup was straightforward: the Pi 500 comes with a 32 GB A2-class MicroSD card, which acts as its “hard drive.” I plugged it into a MicroSD-to-USB adapter, plugged into my MacBook, and used the Raspberry Pi Imager app to load the latest version of the Raspberry Pi OS, which is based on Debian, onto the card.
In case you need a reminder that we live in an age of technological wonders, here’s the MicroSD card, posed beside a U.S. quarter coin for scale:
I was a bit concerned about the “feel” of the keyboard based on its “chiclet” style, but it’s actually not bad. It feels like a mid-level “wintel” laptop keyboard, and I think the feel of the Pi 500 keyboard feels better than the one on my Windows machine, a 2020-edition Acer Nitro 5 (nice machine, but I despise its keyboard and trackpad).
What it’s for
I already have computers that can run circles around the Pi 500 — an M1 MacBook pro and a Windows gaming laptop powered by a 10th-gen i5. What possible use could the Pi 500 possibly serve for me?
Here are my excuses — er, reasons:
As a server for mobile apps or client applications that I’m running on my Mac and Windows machines.
As a “bare-bones” computer for sharpening some rusty C++ skills and learning Go. No fancy IDEs — it’s just Visual Studio Code and the command line.
Because it’s fun.
Maybe that last reason is the most important — it’s just fun to play with the Pi 500, and that form factor makes me feel nostalgic for the days when I’d play games that I entered from BASIC source code published in Creative Computing or COMPUTE! magazine.
Watch this space
I’ll write more about my experiences with the Raspberry Pi 500 here, so watch this space if you’re curious about this fun, inexpensive platform!
