Category: Current Events

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, June 15, 2020)

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date June 13, 2020

Greetings, Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds! Welcome to the June 15, 2020 edition of the list! Here’s this week’s list of online-only events for techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds based in an around the Tampa Bay area. Keep an eye on this post; I update it when I hear about new events, it’s always changing. Stay safe, stay connected, and #MakeItTampaBay!

Suncoast Developer Group’s Summer 2020 Hackathon: Friday to Sunday

Don’t forget that Suncoast Developers Guild is holding an online Summer Solstice Hackathon this coming weekend! It starts on the afternoon of Friday, June 19th and runs through Sunday the 21st. As they put it, it’s an opportunity to “spend the longest day of the year solving the hardest challenges of 2020 with fellow developers, designers, and champions of economic development in our region.”

There will be three key themes for this hackathon:

Pandemic preparedness and recovery: Every day in this region, software developers are solving problems for non-profits, businesses, families, and communities. As COVID-19 has shown us, this recovery depends on solving problems in creative ways. How can we best be prepared for the next pandemic?

Inclusion, diversity, and intersectionality in the tech workforce: Yes, Houston, we have a problem. When a workforce does not represent the communities it serves, it causes harm and hampers vibrant solutions. SDG’s is working to change this; come and help us.

Building a smarter, more connected Tampa Bay: Developers understand both sustainability and problem-solving. Harness our power by solving a Smart City challenge that will elevate us all. Can we build IoT and Smart City solutions that help our region’s residents without hurting their privacy?

There will be three cash prizes for each theme: $1000 for the main prize, $750 for the runner-up, and $250 for the solo participant. That’s nine prizes in total!

Once again, this event will happen online. You can hack in the comfort of your own home — all hanging out will be done on Discord. Registration and participation is free-as-in-beer.

This is a great way to put your skills to good use and test them, get connected with the Tampa Bay community, and make Tampa Bay a better place in which to live, work, and play. Find out more at the Summer Solstice Hackathon site at hack.suncoast.io!

Monday, June 15

Tuesday, June 16

Wednesday, June 17

Thursday, June 18

Friday, June 19

Saturday, June 20

Sunday, June 21

Do you have an upcoming event that you’d like to see on this list?

If you know of an upcoming event that you think should appear on this list, please let me know!

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Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, June 8, 2020)

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date June 6, 2020

Greetings, Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds! Welcome to the June 8, 2020 edition of the list! Here’s this week’s list of online-only events for techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds based in an around the Tampa Bay area. Keep an eye on this post; I update it when I hear about new events, it’s always changing. Stay safe, stay connected, and #MakeItTampaBay!

When will this list include in-person events?

The answer, for now, is “not just yet.”

This past week, Florida has had two consecutive days with more than a thousand new cases per day…

…and in our particular neck of the woods, we’ve seen the highest total of new cases for the week:

With these numbers in mind, I’m opting to list only those events that I know are online only for the time being.

Monday, June 8

Tuesday, June 9

Wednesday, June 10

Thursday, June 11

Friday, June 12

No online events are listed…yet!

Saturday, June 13

Sunday, June 14

Tampa-Orlando Software QA/DEV Meetup — Quick start to build web applications with Node.js (Free Online Class) @ 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM

Current Events Tampa Bay

Announcing the Suncoast Developers Guild Summer Solstice Hackathon (June 19 – 21, online)!

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date June 3, 2020

Hey, Tampa Bay developers — here’s a chance to build something awesome together! Suncoast Developers Guild is holding an online Summer Solstice Hackathon, and it’s happening in just a couple of weeks: June 19th through 21st! As they put it, it’s an opportunity to “spend the longest day of the year solving the hardest challenges of 2020 with fellow developers, designers, and champions of economic development in our region.”

There will be three key themes for this hackathon:

There will be three cash prizes for each theme: $1000 for the main prize, $750 for the runner-up, and $250 for the solo participant. That’s nine prizes in total!

Once again, this event will happen online. You can hack in the comfort of your own home — all hanging out will be done on Discord. Registration and participation is free-as-in-beer.

Current Events

A reminder to the folks who work at Facebook

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date June 2, 2020
1 Comment on A reminder to the folks who work at Facebook

Tap the image to see it at full size.

In addition to the fact that having my own blogs lets me control and own my own content and “look and feel”, add links and additional interactive content, and not be under anyone else’s editorial control, there’s a reason I don’t use Facebook (or any other social media platform) as my primary way of messaging the world: so I rely on amoral, self-serving jackholes like Mark Zuckerberg as little as possible. For me, Facebook’s true purpose is to point you to my newest articles.

Context

“If you enable a scumbag, then you are a scumbag” is tip #99 in the 20th Anniversary Edition of The Pragmatic Programmer. Andy and Dave talk about it in their interview on the Code Newbie podcast. They say that it’s a reminder of the power that software has over people’s lives these days, and “as programmers we are blessed and cursed with the fact that we are creating the new world. The world is now formed largely in code and that’s incredible responsibility and obviously it’s being misused.”
New York Times: Zuckerberg Defends Hands-Off Approach to Trump’s Posts. Timothy Aveni, a Facebook software engineer who resigned after Mr. Zuckerberg’s decision to leave up Mr. Trump’s posts, said on his Facebook page on Monday that the company wasn’t enforcing its own rules to ban speech that promotes violence. “Facebook will keep moving the goalposts every time Trump escalates, finding excuse after excuse not to act on increasingly dangerous rhetoric,” Mr. Aveni said.
Yahoo! Finance: Trump Had A ‘Productive’ Call With Facebook CEO Day After He Signed Executive Order Targeting Social Media: Report. “I know many people are upset that we’ve left the President’s posts up, but our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies,” the Facebook CEO said in a statement Friday. I disagree strongly with how the President spoke about this, but I believe people should be able to see this for themselves, because ultimately accountability for those in positions of power can only happen when their speech is scrutinized out in the open,” he added.
CNBC: Civil rights leaders say they’re ‘disappointed and stunned’ after call with Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Sandberg. “We are disappointed and stunned by Mark’s incomprehensible explanations for allowing the Trump posts to remain up,” wrote the leaders, Rashad Robinson of Color of Change, Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference and Sherrilyn Ifill of LDF. “He did not demonstrate understanding of historic or modern-day voter suppression and he refuses to acknowledge how Facebook is facilitating Trump’s call for violence against protesters. Mark is setting a very dangerous precedent for other voices who would say similar harmful things on Facebook.”
Recode: Mark Zuckerberg on leaked audio: Trump’s looting and shooting reference “has no history of being read as a dog whistle”. Firstly: wrong — it has a racist history. Two: Only six people were involved in Facebook’s process on this decision, including policy VP Joel Kaplan, who has come under scrutiny for reportedly stymieing efforts to reduce polarization on the platform and openly supporting Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his controversial Senate hearings. Notably missing from the decision-making process was Facebook’s head of integrity, Guy Rosen, who is tasked with overseeing efforts around general user safety on the platform.
The Verge: How to think about polarization on Facebook. “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” […] Fixing the polarization problem would be difficult, requiring Facebook to rethink some of its core products. Most notably, the project forced Facebook to consider how it prioritized “user engagement”—a metric involving time spent, likes, shares and comments that for years had been the lodestar of its system.”

Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, June 1, 2020)

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date May 30, 2020

Creative Commons photo by Dhaval Jani. Tap the photo to see the source.

Greetings, Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds! Welcome to the June 1, 2020 edition of the list! Here’s this week’s list of online-only events for techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds based in an around the Tampa Bay area. Keep an eye on this post; I update it when I hear about new events, it’s always changing. Stay safe, stay connected, and #MakeItTampaBay!

For the time being, I’m limiting this list to online events. I know that there’s a lot of frustration about staying at home and staying six feet apart from people outside your own “house bubble,” but rather than follow the advice of armchair epidemiologists and assorted online “Monday morning quarterbacks”, I’m going with the public health official whom I trust the most: my sister, Dr. Eileen deVilla, Medical Officer for Health for Toronto (here’s an interview with her from Friday, May 29).

Monday, June 1

Tuesday, June 2

Wednesday, June 3

Thursday, June 4

Friday, June 5

Saturday, June 6

R-Ladies Tampa — TBD (Online Session) @ 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Sunday, June 7

There aren’t any tech, entrepreneur, or nerd events scheduled…yet!

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!

Current Events Programming

Android Studio 4 is available right now!

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date May 29, 2020

Android Studio 4.0 was released to the stable channel yesterday, which means that everyone — not just developers on the bleeding edge — can get their hands on it! You can download it here.

Want a video overview of what’s new? Here you go:

Among the goodies in this new version of the IDE are:

Motion editor: Lets you define your animations between MotionLayout states in a more Flash-like way, instead of having to spec them in XML, which is rather clunky.
New layout inspector: A much better way to see how the UI is laid out on your app’s screens.
Layout validation: You can now more easily see how your app will look on different screen sizes at different resolutions:
“Desugaring” extended to Java language APIs: Just as Android Gradle supported Java 8 language features for all API levels so that you can use lambdas and other modern Java goodies on Android projects that target old SDKs, it now supports Java language APIs. Until now, only the more recent SDKs supported APIs like java.util.stream, java.util.function and java.time.

Download Android Studio 4 here!

Current Events Tampa Bay

Tampa Bay’s Geek Breakfast happens online tomorrow morning!

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date May 27, 2020

Someday, we who attend Tampa Bay’s Geek Breakfast will reconvene at Jimbo’s Pit Bar-B-Q, and I will have my customary stack o’ hotcakes or biscuits and gravy washed down with a half-dozen cups of coffee. Until that happens, Geek Breakfast continues online, and it’s happening tomorrow from 8:00 to 9:30 a.m. See you there!

Here’s the Zoom link.