It’s been way too long since I’ve held a Tampa iOS Meetup. Between the pandemic and all sorts of employment issues arising thanks to the pandemic, I managed to hold just one Tampa iOS Meetup in 2020. It’s a shame, especially since Tampa iOS Meetup made the list of Tampa’s top ten tech meetup groups for 2019.
At the same time, while I’ve wanted to keep covering iOS, I also wanted to expand into other portable platforms, namely programming Android, smart watches, Raspberry Pi, and Arduino devices.
I’m going to scratch these two itches by re-tooling Tampa iOS Meetup into a new meetup called Programmers of Portables, or PoP for short. If you want to know what kind of platforms and programming this meetup will cover, just read its motto: “If it fits in your hand, it’s on-brand!”
Some of the topics I’m planning for this year:
- iOS and watchOS programming with Swift
- Android programming with Kotlin
- Cross-platform mobile programming with Flutter
- Raspberry Pi programming with Python
- Arduino programming with Arduino’s C-like programming language
- Wearables (after all, “portable” is related to the French verb porter, which means “to wear”)
I’m going to keep the beginner-friendly focus with this revamped meetup, but don’t let “beginner-friendly” fool you into thinking that it means “simple”! In some of my “beginner-friendly” classes, we wrote:
- Our own version of Frogger,
- the iPhone version of Google’s Tilt Brush, the 3-D AR “paint” application
- our own version of the IKEA Place AR app,
- a machine learning app that tried to identify common objects,
- a machine learning app that tried to identify the kind of room your were in, and
- a machine learning app that could identify various members of the Avengers.
My plan is to return to regular meetups, which will be Zoom-based until the pandemic gets under control.
I’ll announce the first meetup shortly. In the meantime, let me know what topics you’d like me to cover at PoP. You can do it in the comments for this post, or on my Twitter or LinkedIn accounts.