Here’s what’s happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for developers, technologists, and tech entrepreneurs this week.
Monday, March 13
- Amateur radio technician classes (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
- DIY SEO Meetup (The Iron Yard, 6:00 p.m.)
Tuesday, March 14
This Tuesday, the Tampa Bay Alexa & Lex Developers Meetup holds its inaugural gathering at CoWork Tampa, where the topic will be Build Your First Alexa Skill.
An Alexa Skill is a voice interaction capability for Amazon’s Alexa voice service, which runs on various Amazon devices including the Echo, Echo Dot, Tap, Fire TV, and Fire Tablet, as well as some non-Amazon devices such as the Triby Bluetooth speaker. They’re similar to voice commands to the computer on Star Trek: there are Alexa Skills to tell you what the local weather is, play music, set an alarm or timer, answer health questions with the help of WebMD, plan vacations with the assistance of Kayak, order pizza, check stock prices or your bank balance, and more.
In this first meetup, they’ll do a step-by-step walkthrough that will show you how to create a simple Alexa skill. While knowing how to code will be helpful, coding skills aren’t absolutely necessary. Bring a laptop, and make sure you have an AWS account and an account for the Amazon developer portal. An Alexa device isn’t required — you can test Alexa skills via the developer portal, and there’s an iOS/Mac OS app that lets you use Alexa without an Alexa device.
The Tampa Bay Alexa & Lex Developers Meetup will take place at CoWork Tampa (3104 North Armenia Ave, Suite 2, Tampa) at 6:30 p.m.. Pizza and drinks will be provided.
Ybor Tech’s OpenHack is your monthly opportunity to get together with local techies at New World Brewery and socialize over craft beer (you buy) and pizza (they provide) at Ybor City’s most laid-back bar!
OpenHack Ybor takes place at New World Brewery (1313 8th Avenue, Ybor City, Tampa) at 6:30 p.m.. Pizza will be provided, drinks and other food are available.
Also happening on Tuesday:
- Code Katas: Group code challenges (The Iron Yard, 6:15 p.m.)
- BarCamp Sarasota-Bradenton’s Network & Learn (Station 2 Innovation Center, 11:30 a.m.)
- Raspberry Pi classes for beginner, intermediate, and advanced users / Talk about Raspberry Pi (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
- Weekly Open Make Night / Pi Day celebration (Tampa Hackerspace, 6:00 p.m.)
Wednesday, March 15
- Free crash course: What/Why/How to .NET (The Iron Yard, 6:30 p.m.)
- Laser cutter orientation (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
- Microsoft PowerBI Meetup with Vishal Pawar – Top Steps to teach yourself PowerBI (Microsoft, 6:00 p.m.)
- Office 365 – Understanding Azure AD and Federation with Douglas Pyle (Microsoft, 7:00 p.m.)
- Open Code (The Iron Yard, 7:00 p.m.)
Thursday, March 16
Lean Beer is the evening version of Lean Coffee, where people gather to discuss Lean and Agile practices over their adult beverage of choice. Participants propose discussion topics, discussions are timeboxed agile-style, and the conversation and company are always informative and lively.
Lean Beer for All Things Agile will take place at The Station Grill (1001 W Cass St, Tampa) at 6:00 p.m..
Also happening on Thursday:
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2017, Azure and IoT with Art Garcia (Microsoft, 7:00 p.m.)
- (Monthly) Azure User Group (Wolters Kluwer, 6:00 p.m.)
- Tampa PowerShell User Group (Microsoft, 6:00 p.m.)
- Tampa.rb: St Pete Side – Coder Night! (Malwarebytes, 7:00 p.m.)
Friday, March 17
- Lean Coffee for All Things Agile (Brandon/Riverview) (Panera at Brandown Town Center Mall, 7:30 a.m.)
- Lean Coffee for All Things Agile (Sarasota Location) (Panera at Town Center Mall, 7:30 a.m.)
Saturday, March 18
- Game night (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
- Tampa Bay Tech Events’ Shamrock Scavenger Crawl (starts at Curtis Hixon Park, 4:00 p.m.)
Want a Tampa Bay area tech event announced?
If you’ve got tech event in or near the Tampa Bay area that you’d like to see announced here, drop me a line at joey@globalnerdy.com and let me know the details!
2 replies on “What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech scene (week of Monday, March 13, 2017)”
[…] Summit, Embarc Collective, and the Suncoast Developers Guild, but even on the smaller scale. Just look at my first “What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech scene” post from a mere three ye… versus the list below to see how we’ve grown and […]
[…] years ago, I put together my first “What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech scene” post here on Global Nerdy. What started as a little project to give me an additional edge over other […]