Category: Current Events

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Current Events Tampa Bay Uncategorized

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech scene (week of Monday, April 3, 2017)

Here’s what’s happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for developers, technologists, and tech entrepreneurs this week.

Monday, April 3

Tuesday, April 4

Wednesday, April 5

Thursday, April 6

Friday, April 7

Saturday, April 8:

Sunday, April 9:

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Current Events Tampa Bay Uncategorized

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech scene (week of Monday, March 27, 2017)

Here’s what’s happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for developers, technologists, and tech entrepreneurs this week.

Monday, March 27

Tuesday, March 28

Tampa iOS Meetup is my Meetup group aimed at people new to software development or new to iOS development. Rather than study just a single aspect of iOS development, each Tampa iOS Meetup session is devoted to developing a complete app, and learning various things along the way.

On Tuesday, we’ll build a relaxation/mindfulness app at Tampa iOS Meetup, and in the process, learn about:

  • Error handling in Swift: responding to errors gracefully rather than having the app come to a crashing halt and annoying the user.
  • Playing sounds: Playing both short sound cues and effects, as well as longer recordings.
  • Auto layout: Building user interfaces that adjust themselves to the screen size, from the (relatively) tiny iPhone 4S all the way to the large iPad Pro.

Join me, next Tuesday, March 28th at 6:30 p.m. at the Wolters Kluwer office (1410 N Westshore Blvd, Tampa) in Westshore for Tampa iOS Meetup’s session on building a guided meditation audio app! We’ll provide food and drink — bring your Mac laptop, and be ready to code!

To register for this event, visit the event page. Registration is free! Please register by Monday, March 27th at 12 noon so that we can determine how much food and drink we’ll need.

 

Tuesday’s events:

Wednesday, March 29

Microsoft is hosting virtual bootcamps on building IoT solutions this week, where they’ll talk about Windows 10, Azure, and how they fit with IoT, complete with presentations and hands-on labs led by Microsoft presenters as well as these IoT industry speakers:

You can catch these bootcamps in the company of other Tampa Bay area people interested in IoT at Tampa Hackerspace — check out their events, which are taking place Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

 

Wednesday’s events:

Thursday, March 30

Google has reached out to the TampaDev Meetup group and offered a free half-day seminar on the Google Cloud Platform. They’ll talk about the platform, Compute Engine, Kubernetes, Google data storage and data warehousing. This event will take place on Thursday morning and include breakfast.

 

Thursday’s events:

Friday, March 31

Saturday, April 1

Sunday, April 2

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Current Events Tampa Bay Uncategorized

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech scene (week of Monday, March 20, 2017)

Here’s what’s happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for developers, technologists, and tech entrepreneurs this week.

Monday, March 20

Tuesday, March 21

Wednesday, March 22

Thursday, March 23

Friday, March 24

Saturday, March 25

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Current Events Tampa Bay Uncategorized

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech scene (week of Monday, March 13, 2017)

Here’s what’s happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for developers, technologists, and tech entrepreneurs this week.

Monday, March 13

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:

Wednesday, March 15

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:

Friday, March 17

Saturday, March 18

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!

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Current Events Tampa Bay Uncategorized

Try out GM’s in-car infotainment API at the “Makers Hustle Harder” hackathon in Tampa this week!

General Motors is hosting “Makers Hustle Harder” hackathon events in just three cities in the U.S., Tampa is one of them, and it’s happening this week! This is Tampa Bay developers’ chance to try out GM’s NGI (Next Generation Infotainment) API, which lets you build infotainment applications for the touchscreen interfaces on GM vehicles, with access to real-time data from over 350 data sources.

Makers Hustle Harder is an all-week event that starts with a kickoff meeting on Monday, February 27 at 6:00 p.m. at Tampa Hackerspace. That’s when teams (2 to 4 developers per team) will be finalized and participants will get an introduction to the hackathon, as well as NGI.

From Tuesday, February 28th through Friday, March 3rd, teams will work remotely on the their projects. Participants will be able to get live support from the GM teams from 6:00 p.m. through 9:00 p.m. on those days.

The final day of the hackathon will be an in-person event at Tampa Hackerspace on Saturday, March 4th from 9:00 a.m. through 6:00 p.m., with people putting the finishing touches on their projects and making final pitches at 4:00 p.m..

The grand prize will be a trip to GM headquarters in Detroit for all the members of the winning team. There will also be prizes for runners-up.

GM’s NGI SDK in action. Click the photo to read TechCrunch’s story on it.

Apps written using the NGI SDK are written on Node.js using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and run on 8-inch (diagonal) touchscreen in GM vehicles. GM’s native APIs give developers access to all sorts of car info, including:

  • Instrument panel measurements, such as trip odometer, orientation, and vehicle speed
  • GPS and navigation data
  • Audio playback and streaming
  • Status information, such as presence of passengers or if the windows are open or closed
  • Vehicle features, such as radio or backup camera
  • Performance and maintenance data, such as oil life and tire pressure
  • Warning indicators, such as a burnt-out lightbulb or low washer fluid
  • Internet data via OnStar’s 4G LTE

The NGI SDK also has a system that simulates real vehicle data so that you can test your apps on your development machine.

GM’s Director of Application Ecosystem and Development Ed Wrenbeck says that the NGI SDK makes it possible for developers to create apps ready for testing in as little time as a week. He also says that the API opens up a world of possibilities: “If you were somebody like a map provider, for example, you could actually read the suspension data coming off the vehicle and use it to determine where potholes were at in the street, for example. Just one example of some of the unusual ways that you can use data that GM provides uniquely, that other OEMs just don’t provide via their infotainment systems.”

Heavy Metal Racing, an NGI-based racing videogame that uses the Corvette’s steering wheel as a controller.

Here’s a video showing highlights from an earlier NGI hackathon:

How to participate

  1. Make sure you register for the hackathon at the official registration page.
  2. It would also help with planning if you RSVP at the Meetup.com pages for Monday’s kickoff meeting and Saturday’s full-day event.
  3. Get GM’s NGI SDK and documentation from their developer site.
  4. Assemble a team beforehand or find a team that needs developers at Monday’s kickoff. Each team must have at least one representative present at the kickoff.
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Current Events Tampa Bay Uncategorized

The Tampa Bay tech scene, February 7 – 17, 2017

Figures in map show incoming LinkedIn members per 10,000 LinkedIn users. For example, for every 10,000 LinkedIn members in the Tampa Bay area, 48.7 have moved in since December.
Click the map to see the source article.

According to LinkedIn’s February 2017 workforce report, the Tampa Bay area is one of the top 10 U.S. cities that recently gained the most workers. That’s one of the reasons why there’s a lot happening in the local tech scene, and here’s what’s happening over the next couple of weeks…

St. Pete .NET’s Using Docker for development and production (Tuesday, February 7)

Using Docker for development and production: “We are going to explore how we can leverage Docker for use while we develop our applications as well as once we are ready to deploy. We will discuss creating a container that will allow us to work on our .NET Core application in a way that incorporates live rebuilds, debugging, and continuous testing.”

Tampa Bay Android Developer Group’s monthly meetup (Tuesday, February 7)

 The Tampa Bay Android Developers Group holds its monthly “30-minute talks, roundtable and socializing” meetup at The Iron Yard on the first Tuesday of the month, which is this Tuesday.

MADTampa’s Windows Developer Day get-together (Wednesday, February 8)

 The Mobile App Development Tampa group — MADTampa for short — is hosting an event where you can watch Microsoft’s big Windows Developer Day livestream at the Tampa Microsoft office. Join the Fustino Brothers and watch the livestream to see:

  • What’s new with Windows developer tooling: UWP tooling, BASH, Developer mode, and more
  • Learn about the latest XAML advancements, and how UWP helps you build Windows apps that are more personal and productive
  • Hear the developer story behind the recent announcements of Cortana skills and the new Windows mixed reality headsets
  • We’ll also close out the event with a live Q&A panel, where anyone can ask their questions
  • RSVP for this event at EventBrite
  • 12:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. @ Microsoft Tampa (5426 Bay Center Dr. in Tampa, Suite 700)

Suncoast Developers Guild’s Open Code (Wednesday, February 8)

 Every Wednesday, the Suncoast Developers Guild holds an Open Code night in The Iron Yard. It’s a great opportunity to work on your projects and meet other local developers in a fantastic space (The Iron Yard is in a lovely old factory building).

Tampa Bay UX’s How to be a badass designer in 2017 (Thursday, February 9)

 The Tampa Bay UX Meetup this Thursday will feature Krissy Scoufis talking about how to be a badass designer in 2017. She’ll talk about hot UX topics including:

Tampa Bay Cocoaheads’ talk on making Swift and Objective-C work together and book giveaway (Thursday, February 9)

 Another Tampa Bay Meetup that covers iOS development — Chris Woodard’s Tampa Bay Cocoaheads — is holding its first meetup of the year on Thursday. The topic of the evening will be making Swift and Objective-C work together, based on his experiences migrating a large codebase.

This meetup will feature a giveaway: autographed copies of Swift Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide and iOS Development: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide.

Demo Day at The Iron Yard (Friday, February 10)

 The Iron Yard is a coding school, and on Friday, its 6th cohort will present their capstone Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and .NET projects. These projects are the culmination of their 12 weeks of intensive training. They’ll present them to an audience of local tech companies, engineers, and supporters of the tech community, after which they’ll be happy to personally demonstrate their projects to you. There’ll be drinks and appetizers, too!

Tampa Bay Startup Week 2017 (week of Monday, February 13 through Friday, February 17)

It’s that time of the year again: Tampa Bay Startup Week! It’s a week-long series of events for local entrepreneurs, techies, and interested parties to get together, learn, chat, conspire, and break bread and clink glasses. Visit their site and see (and sign up for) events that you might be interested in!

Ybor Tech’s February OpenHack (Tuesday, February 14)

 One of my favorite local events is Ybor Tech’s OpenHack, which is simply an excuse for local developers, techies, entrepreneurs, and other similar people to get together at New World Brewery in Ybor City to enjoy pizza, beer (or cider), and each other’s company.

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Current Events Florida Tampa Bay

Scenes from Saturday’s Tampa Xamarin Dev Days event

early-crowd

A good number of people arrived early to get Xamarin set up on their laptops.
Photo by Joey deVilla.

The Tampa edition of Xamarin Dev Days — a worldwide series of meetups where developers can learn about the Xamarin cross-platform development environment — took place this Saturday, and it was a successful gathering with about 70 developers in attendance.

Xamarin Dev Days are all-day events that introduce developers to Xamarin, with presentations in the morning, and hands-on workshops in the afternoon. They’re facilitated by experienced Xamarin users and evangelists, and since Microsoft acquired Xamarin, Mircosoft evangelists and MVPs have been running these events.

This was the agenda:

 Time  What’s happening
9:00 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. Registration and breakfast, which SMARTRAC and SMART COSMOS (the company and platform I represent) provided!
9:30 a.m. – 10:10 a.m. Intro to Xamarin presentation (here are the slides, in PDF format)
10:20 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Cross-platform Xamarin with Xamarin.Forms presentation (here are the slides, in PDF format)
11:10 a.m. – 11:50 a.m. Cloud Xamarin with Azure presentation (here are the slides, in PDF format)
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Lunch
1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. Hands-on lab

early-crowd-2

Another photo of the early arrivals.
Photo by Joey deVilla.

Getting people to spend their entire Saturday in a boardroom or lecture hall isn’t an easy task even when it’s cold and miserable outside. It’s even trickier in Tampa in November, when the temperatures are spring-like and there isn’t a cloud in the sky:

img_3965-1

The view from the drive leading to Tampa’s Microsoft office, taken on the morning of Tampa’s Xamarin Dev Days.
Photo by Joey deVilla.

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The view from the parking lot in from of Microsoft’s Tampa office, taken on the morning of Xamarin Dev Days.
Photo by Joey deVilla.

The very least a Saturday event can do — especially in a sub-tropical paradise like Tampa Bay — is feed its attendees. Michael Stark, one of the Dev Days facilitators and organizer of the Tampa Bay Xamarin User Group, reached out to me and asked if SMARTRAC (the company for whom I work as Technology Evangelist and whose SMART COSMOS platform I promote) could sponsor breakfast. We were more than happy to do so, and thus nearly 70 developers did not go hungry that morning:

bagel-breakfast

The breakfast bounty provided by SMARTRAC.
Photo by Michael Stark. Click the photo to see the source.

Joe Healy, Microsoft Premier Developer Consultant and Developer Evangelist for the area, asked me if I could play a couple of accordion numbers to kick off the event, and I was more than happy to do so.

joey-devilla-xamarin-tampa-accordion-1

joey-devilla-xamarin-tampa-accordion-2

Here’s Joe giving a shout-out to SMARTRAC / SMART COSMOS for providing breakfast, which was followed by my quick explanation of what SMARTRAC and SMART COSMOS are:

joe-healy-smartcosmos-slide

Here’s a close-up of that “Good news, everyone!” slide:

good-news-everyone

With the preliminaries out of the way, we spent the rest of the day getting down to the business of learning about Xamarin, which runs on both Windows and Mac OS, and can be used to develop front ends for Android, iOS, Mac OS, Windows, and Azure:

daniel-jerome-photo-1

Photo by Daniel Jerome. Click the photo to see the source.

For those of us on the Mac, we worked on the current stable edition of Xamarin Studio, the Mac OS-based Xamarin development environment, pictured below:

xamarin-studio-for-mac

It’ll eventually be rebranded as Visual Studio for Mac, the preview version of which is shown below:

visual-studio-for-mac

If you’re on Windows, you’ll be using Xamarin’s features from within Visual Studio.

The event went quite nicely, with many local developers not just learning more about Xamarin, mobile, and cloud development, but also about their peers. Over breakfast, lunch, and breaks, I got a chance to talk to a lot of people about all sorts of topics, including:

  • Business and industrial applications of RFID technology. As a result of the couple of minutes I got at the start of the day as a sponsor’s representative, a couple of people approached me to talk about RFID tags and inlays and how they could be used in their businesses.
  • The current situation in India, a couple of weeks after their radical demonetization, where two of the most-used currency notes, the 500- and 1000-Rupee bills, were taken out of circulation. To get an idea of what this is like, imagine the $10 and $20 bills in the U.S. suddenly being declared invalid.
  • How Microsoft seems different now: bash on Ubuntu on Windows, development software for the Mac (Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio for Mac) and even Linux (Visual Studio Code), interesting new hardware such as Surface Studio and Surface Dial — it’s not the same company as it was five years ago, and that’s a good thing.
  • Developer opportunities in the Tampa Bay area. This always comes up at these gatherings.

While the event ended at 4 that afternoon, the gathering didn’t — a number of us regrouped at the Brick House for more conversation, accompanied by beer, food, and Jägermeister reps handing out free samples and taking promotional photos, which is why the last photo in this article has their branding:

jagermeister

My thanks to Joe Healy, Michael Stark, Jim Blizzard, Bill Reiss, and Brian Kassay for putting on a great event!