Since March 13, 2017, I’ve posted a weekly list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas. I’ve continued to do this to this day, with me typically assembling the list on Thursday and posting it on Friday.
Today is Thursday, so I’m assembling the list — or more accurately, a Jupyter notebook running some Python code I wrote is scraping various sites and creating a checklist like the one you see in the screenshot above.
Back when I first started the list, I used to put it together manually, but as Tampa Bay’s tech scene and events grew, so did the list. It wasn’t long before assembling the list was eating up the better part of an afternoon, and that’s when I decided to add some automation to the process.
The checklist contains likely candidates for inclusion in the list, and each item in the list is checked by default. The checklist is there to allow me to apply my final judgement as to what goes and doesn’t go into the list.
There’s a hug “deny” list of key words and phrases that cause an event to not make it into the checklist because it doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “tech, entrepreneur, or nerd.” For example, events with the words “real estate” don’t make it into the list — they often contain the word “developer,” which my code is looking for, but that’s not the right kind of developer event for the list.
Would any of you be curious as to what’s in my tech events list-creating code and how it works? Would you like me to do a presentation at a local meetup or on YouTube explaining how it works? Let me know.
