Category: Programming

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Conferences Programming Tampa Bay

Tampa Code Camp is back and looking for speakers — Saturday, October 8!

Tampa Code Camp is back! Tampa Bay’s annual (at least until the pandemic) FREE coding conference returns to Keiser University’s Tampa campus on Saturday, October 8 for a full day of coding and tech sessions. And that means they need speakers, and you could be one of them!

Tampa Code Camp’s sessions have these levels…

  • Beginner
  • Intermediate
  • Expert
  • Advanced

…and fall into these categories:

  • Azure
  • Development
  • Operations
  • DevOps
  • Devices
  • Soft Skills
  • AI

The call for speakers closes on September 30, but that’s no excuse to procrastinate. If you’ve got an idea for a talk, submit it at the Tampa Code Camp call for speakers page!

For more details, or to let them know that you’ll be attending, visit the Tampa Code Camp 2022 Meetup page.

Categories
Career Programming What I’m Up To

I’m teaching another 5-week / 10-evening Python course starting September 7th!

If you’re getting this feeling…

…and you’d rather have this feeling…

Creative Commons image by Nick Youngson — CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free.
Click here to see the source.

…then the course I’m teaching might help:

a close up of text and logo over a white background
Graohic: Computer Coach Training Center logo

I’ve been programming in Python since 1999, and I’ll be teaching Computer Coach’s upcoming 10-week online Learning Python course!

The “TL;DR:”

  • What: An introductory Python course!
  • Where: Online, via Zoom.
  • When: Monday and Wednesday evenings, from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., starting Wednesday, September 7th.
  • How to enroll or find out more: Contact Computer Coach’s Kasandra Perez at kasandra@computercoach.com or (813)-254-6459 to find out more about the course or register.

What will you get out of this course?

The biggest things that you’ll get out of this course are the tools to succeed in a tech career, namely:

  • An introduction to the most-used and most useful parts of the Python programming language,
  • a solid basis in programming principles,
  • and a bag of tricks that you can use in your tech career.

The course will use one of the best books on Python out there: Automate the Boring Stuff with Python by Al Sweigart (whom I had the pleasure of meeting in person earlier this year at PyCon):

…but we won’t just stick to the book. We’ll look at all sorts of programming examples and tricks, based on your suggestions or needs. These include (and aren’t limited to):

  • CoverTron: My generator for cover letters for job applications. I actually used it in my last job search!
  • Tampa Bay Tech Events Transmogrifier: Every week, I put together a list of tech events for Tampa Bay, culled from Eventbrite and Meetup. It would take me hours to do it by hand, but it’s so much quicker with the automated help of a couple of Python scripts.
  • Find out when and where a digital photo was taken: When you take a picture with your phone or a present-day digital camera, that picture has EXIF data embedded in it, with the date, time, and location where the photo was taken. I’ll show you how to extract that info!
  • Editing photos: If you were assigned the task of shrinking a set of 100 photos by 25% (or any other similar basic photo editing task), you could do it manually, or you could make Python do it.
  • Creating interactive documents with Jupyter Notebook: It’s more than just a Python tool used by data scientists, Nobel Prize winners, and Netflix, but a useful programming environment and operations platform for everyday tasks!
  • Writing web applications with Flask: Just a Python makes programming much easier, the Python-powered Flask framework makes programming web applications much easier.
  • Passing interview coding tests: Learn how to deal with the most dreaded part of the interview for a programming job, and why Python is a key part of my coding interview strategy.
  • Using databases: Using databases is a key part of programming, and luckily, Python comes with a built-in database!
  • Data science: This is a giant topic and could easily take up the time to do this course three times, but I’d be happy to go over the basics.
  • Interactive storytelling and games: Python’s quite good at this, and I can walk you through the PyGame framework and Ren’Py interactive story system.
  • Mobile app development: Yes, there are ways to do mobile app development in Python.

What happens in the course?

Photo: Woman’s hands typing on Mac laptop.

This is not a passive course! This isn’t the kind of course where the instructor lectures over slides while you take notes (or pretend to take notes while surfing the web or checking your social media feeds). In this course, you’ll follow along as I write code on my screen. You’ll actively take part in the learning process, entering code, experimenting, making mistakes, correcting those mistakes, and producing working applications. You will learn by doing. At the end of each session, you’ll have a collection of little Python programs that you wrote, and which you can use as the basis for your own work.

The course will start at the most basic level by walking you through the process of downloading and installing the necessary tools to start Python programming. From there, you’ll learn the building blocks of the Python programming language:

  • Control structures that determine what your programs do,
  • Data structures to store the information that your programs act on,
  • Functions and objects to organize your code, and
  • Using libraries as building blocks for your applications.

Better still, you’ll learn how to think like a programmer. You’ll learn how to look at a goal and learn how you could write a program to meet it, and how that program could be improved or enhanced. You’ll learn skills that will serve you well as you take up other programming languages, and even learn a little bit about the inner workings of computers, operating systems, and the internet.

What will you need for the course?

Nothing fancy:

How do you sign up for the course or find out more?

Once again, you’ll want to contact Computer Coach’s Kasandra Perez at Contact Kasandra Perez at kasandra@computercoach.com or (813)-254-6459 to find out more about the course or register.

Categories
Current Events Humor Programming

The “anti-party technology” Python option that Airbnb overlooked

Album cover for “The Best of Bread”

Airbnb is deploying “anti-party technology” to prevent a growing (and expensive!) customer problem: people using them to book houses to hold large parties in. This Fast Company article provides a short — and probably not complete — list of methods Airbnb is using to prevent people who are avoiding trashing their own place by trashing someone else’s place.

None of these methods is perfect, and there’s still a chance that someone who plans to throw a party gets past their filters. They’ll need some technological solutions that can kill a party in its early stages, and I have a Python-powered solution.

With a Raspberry Pi connected to the internet and tucked safely away in the the attic or locked closet and hooked to in-wall or in-ceiling speakers, you can remotely run this simple Python script that will stop any party dead in its tracks:

# party_killer.py

import webbrowser

# Open YouTube and play Bread’s greatest hits
webbrowser.open_new_tab("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A-5qocjnoY&t=0")

Don’t believe me? Just give this a listen:

If you’re not Airbnb but a beginning Python programmer, you just learned how to use Python to open a new browser tab to a specific web page.

Update

It took a trip down memory lane, but I found it: the skit where I got the idea that Bread’s greatest hits will kill a party. It’s the “Party Stoppers” ad from the old Seattle-based comedy show, Almost Live:

The gag about Bread starts at 1:30.

Categories
Career Programming Tampa Bay

Tampa’s LT3 Labs helps students discover tech careers

New tech lab opens in north Tampa, helping students discover careers in computer science

LT3 Labs — where “LT3” is short for “Learning Tomorrow’s Technology Today” — is a brand-new space in the Rithm @ Uptown zone at Tampa’s University Mall with a program where young people not only learn the skills, but the confidence required to choose technology as a career.

The 8-week program, called PATH, is geared toward high schoolers who typically wouldn’t pursue careers in coding. CEO Chris Morancie says that the goals are to help students discover a love for tech beyond merely using it, address the skilled worker shortage, and ameliorate income inequality. They’re graduating their first PATH program cohort next week.

Want to find out more? Here’s a local news piece on LT3:

Categories
Humor Programming

We’ve all been the one on the left

Categories
Podcasts Process Programming Tampa Bay

If you’re part of a software team, you should be watching “Arguing Agile!”

Photo: Still frame from an “Arguing Agile” featuring Brian Orlando and Om Patel with guest Stormy Dickson.

If you work on a team that produces software, and especially if it’s supposed to be an agile team, do yourself a favor and check out Arguing Agile, the YouTube channel and podcast produced and presented by Tampa Bay’s own Brian Orlando and Om Patel.

They’ve been really hard at work on this project, gathering interesting guests to talk about important topics in software development, from leadership, career progression, and knowing when it’s time to quit, to handling conflict and dealing with gatekeeping, to estimations and acceptance criteria, and so many other topics!

Here’s the latest set of videos/podcasts from Arguing Agile:

And just for kicks, here are the episodes featuring The Missus and me!

Categories
Career Programming

My “How to solve coding interview” articles so far…

Meme: Coding alone (picture of not-too-bright Spider-Man villain The Rhino with stupid smirk) vs. Coding in an interview (exact same picture of not-too-bright Spider-Man villain The Rhino with stupid smirk).

Are you trying to pivot into a programming job? Are you part of the Great Resignation and looking for your next coding gig? Are you learning coding and looking for examples of how to solve programming problems?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you might want to check out my series of articles on this blog in which I show you how to solve coding problems that tech companies have been known to ask in interviews.

Here’s what I’ve written so far: