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What I’m Up To

Joey de Villa’s content portfolio post (August 2024 edition)

Because I’m in the middle of a job search — like about 1 in 11 techies who’ve been laid off since that start of 2023, I’ve been asked for links to my portfolio. Here’s the current version of my content portfolio as of August 2024, which showcases my developer relations / tech advocate / technical writing experience.

Table of contents

Current projects

Creating the Python for AI course for Kodeco

I’m currently contracted to create the first of several new courses for Kodeco that will be available in October. Kodeco is expanding beyond their usual mobile development tutorials and into tutorials covering the development of AI applications.

My course will be a thorough introduction to Python for experienced programmers who want to get into AI development.

Teaching Python for Computer Coach

I’m nearly done teaching an online 40-hour / five-week / two-nights-per-week introductory Python course for Tampa Bay’s go-to tech training center, Computer Coach (it will conclude on August 14). This course is aimed at people who are new to programming, but by the end of the course, they’ll have built Python applications in Jupyter Notebook, command-line applications, and even web apps in Flask!

The Global Nerdy YouTube channel

I’ve recently been working on building up the Global Nerdy YouTube channel, where I plan to post long-form videos on technology, software development, and life as a developer.

I published this video in July 2024, the first in a series on surviving the recent tech industry layoffs:

In response to the recent CrowdStrike outage, I posted this video explaining how it happened:

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Recent work

Unified.to

I had a short contract stint as the Developer Advocate for Toronto-based startup Unified.to during April and May 2024. My first assignment at Unified.to was to write their 2024 State of SaaS APIs, a 44-page white paper on various aspects of how APIs are designed and implemented. It covered a wide range of topics, including:

  • API designs and specification formats
  • API documentation — generated manually, or with automated tools?
  • URLs in APIs: static base URLS, custom domain-/subdomain-based URLs, and versioned URLs
  • Data centers
  • Authorization and authentication
  • Webhooks
  • Pagination
  • Glossary

Here are a couple of screenshots from the 2024 State of SaaS APIs, which you can download for free from Unified.to:

In addition to the 2024 State of SaaS APIs paper, I wrote articles for their blog at the rate of about one per week, including What is a Unified API?, for which I also made the diagrams (pictured below):

From the article What is a Unified API?
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From the article What is a Unified API?
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From the article What is a Unified API?
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From the article What is a Unified API?
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From the article What is a Unified API?
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From the article What is a Unified API?
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My other articles for Unified.to are:

From the article Introducing Unified.to’s Messaging API.
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From the article Introducing Unified.to’s Messaging API.
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From the article Introducing Unified.to’s KMS API.
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From the article Introducing Unified.to’s KMS API.
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From the article Introducing Unified.to’s GenAI API.
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From the article Introducing Unified.to’s GenAI API.
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From the article Introducing Unified.to’s GenAI API.
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I also created a couple of tutorial videos for their channel:

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Auth0 by Okta

In my most recent full-time position, I was a member of Auth0 by Okta’s Content team in their Developer Engagement group. I was there for over three years, and my primary responsibility was to create content for mobile developers — articles, tutorials, videos, and other material.

Prior to my arrival at Auth0, there hadn’t been much new content for mobile developers for the prior three years, during which time Apple and Google had made significant changes to iOS and Android.

During my tenure as Senior Developer Advocate, I started writing Auth0’s first new mobile development articles in years, focusing on native iOS and Android development. For React Native and Flutter, I worked with guest authors to produce articles for developers building mobiel apps with those platforms. I also worked with the Developer Experience and SDK teams to update some long-neglected “quickstart” toolkits to help mobile developers become acquainted with Auth0’s “login as a service” more quickly and easily.

In my three years at Auth0, I brought the mobile development section of the Auth0 development blog from 0 pageviews/month to 20,000 pageviews/month.

I ended up producing one long-form article a month that bore my name on the byline (I ended up rewriting or ghost-writing a number of guest articles as well). My Auth0 articles are listed below, with some annotations for notable articles.

From the articles Introduction to Date and Time Programming in Swift, Part 2 and Date and Time Calculations in Swift, Part 1.

Not all of my articles were about the Auth0 platform. I wrote some articles simply to gain the attention from mobile developers and on mobile development topics I felt didn’t receive enough attention.

My series of articles on working with dates and times in the Swift programming language remains popular among iOS developers — in fact, in Google searches for the search terms swift dates times still rank my articles in the top five:

From the article JavaScript and Photos: Read, Edit, and Erase Location and Other Exif Metadata.

I also wrote articles that went outside my usual topic of mobile development, including these two articles, which are still in the top five results for searches on EXIF and Python and EXIF and JavaScript:

From my Auth0 blog author’s page.

Here are my other Auth0 articles:

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Kodeco (formerly RayWenderlich.com)

I learned mobile development from reading the first edition of The iOS Apprentice, a book produced by RayWenderlich.com (which eventually became Kodeco), the premier mobile development tutorial site, and I’ve been a fan ever since.

So when they put out a call for authors for Android articles, I took it as an opportunity to learn Android development so that I could be a contributor to the site. They gave me a choice of assignments that I could take on for my “audition,” and I chose one of the trickier ones: “Write an article showing how to make an augmented reality Android app.”

The result was Augmented Reality in Android with Google’s Face API (screenshots from the app a re pictured above).

Thanks to my success with that augmented reality article, I was selected to be the technical editor for their book ARKIt by Tutorials. I was also selected to make not one, but two presentations at their RWDevCon 2018 conference: a two-hour presentation and a four-hour deep dive:

These presentations were the top two most highly-rated presentations at the conference.

When they sought out authors for the 8th edition of The iOS Apprentice, I threw my hat in the ring because I wanted to revise the book that taught me mobile development. Shortly after I was selected as one of the co-authors, Apple introduced the new SwiftUI framework, which necessitated completely rewriting major portions of the book.

I have also written the following articles for Kodeco, the most recent one in March 2024:

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Presentations from the past 12 months

In November 2023, I gave an hour-long presentation to the Tampa Devs group that explained how computers work “under the hood.” I starting by explaining what transistors are and how they work, worked up to microprocessors, and finally covered programming in assembly language:

In February 2024, I gave a presentation on getting into AI development at the Civo Navigate North America 2024 conference. My time slot was on Day 1, immediately after the opening keynote:

Based on the success of my AI talk at Civo Navigate North America, the Austin Forum on Technology and Society invited me to give a more in-depth online version of the talk for their “AI April” event in April 2024:

A few days after the “backdoor” to the xz Utils utility was discovered, I proposed giving a last-minute lightning talk about the incident to the organizers of the BSides Tampa 2024 cybersecurity conference in April 2024. It ended up turning into a full presentation:

As a result of the response to my presentation at Civo Navigate North America 2024, Civo also invited me to give a lightning talk at Civo Navigate Local Tampa 2024 in April 2024:

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Past work

My tech blog, Global Nerdy

I’ve been publishing Global Nerdy, my personal blog on technology, tech news, and software development since August 2006. To this day, it gets about 30,000 pageviews per month.

Here’s a sampling of articles on Global Nerdy:

From the article Build your first app for GM’s Next Generation Infotainment (NGI) in-car platform.
From the article Demonstrating map, filter, and reduce in Swift using food emoji.
From the article Better to be roughly right than precisely wrong: Rounding numbers with Swift.
From the article How GPS works, and how to make the most of it.

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My short-lived children’s show, Developer Jr.

And finally, while this is from a while back, I’m including it in this portfolio simply because I’m sure no other candidate will be able to show you something like this: my short-lived children’s show about technology. Just like Sesame Street, there’s a puppet co-host:

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