Category: Tampa Bay

It’s a busy week for techies in the Tampa Bay area! Here’s what’s happening for developers, technologists, and tech entrepreneurs…

Monday, April 17

• Tampa Bay DevOps April Meetup (The Patio Tampa, 6:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Hackerspace 3D printer orientation (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.)

Tuesday, April 18

• Techbyte Luncheon – Company Culture Series #3 (Polo Grill and Bar, Bradenton, 11:30 a.m.)
• Entrepreneurs & Startups – Bradenton Networking & Education — Connecting Women Entrepreneurs & CEOs to Encourage, Empathize & Inspire (Station 2 Innovation Center, Bradenton, 5:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.)
• PMI Florida Suncoast Project Management Meetup — Want to learn Agile through playing some fun games? (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Hackerspace Weekly Open Make Night (Tampa Hackerspace, 6:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.)
• Girl Develop It — Intro to Git/Github + Command Line Basics (Beginner Level) (The Iron Yard, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.)
• Code for Tampa Bay Brigade — TREP Talks – Sponsored by Hillsborough County EDi2 (Hillsborough County ECC, 6:30 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Agile — Architecting for Agility (KForce, 6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Social Media Meetup — Windows 10 Latest Update with Doc (Tampa Bay Technology Center, 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.)

Wednesday, April 19

That’s right: this Wednesday, I’ll be giving a presentation for GDG Sun Coast on Google Mobile Vision, the Face API, and using them to create a Snapchat Lens-like augmented reality app! Space is limited, so if you’re interested in this one, register now!

• Front End Design Conference (The Palladium Theater, 8:00 a.m.)
• ENGAGE – A Network for Evolving Entrepreneurs (8:30 a.m.)
• Tampa Bay Wave SOF Leadership Series – Build and Lead Your Team Like a Green Beret (Tampa Bay WaVE, 5:30 p.m.)
• Florida IT Professionals — Data Models, DAX & Dashboards: The Journey From Excel to Power BI (Microsoft, 6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay AWS April Meetup: Happy Hour Social (The Patio Tampa, 6:00 p.m.)
• Kick Off Party for the Front End Design Conference (The Iron Yard, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.)
• The Suncoast Linux Users Group — SLUG Pinellas (Pinellas Park Public Library, 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.)
• The Iron Yard — Free Crash Course – .NET on a Mac (The Iron Yard, 6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.)
• GDG Sun Coast — Android and Augmented Reality (Tampa Bay WaVE. 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.)
• Florida IT Professionals — Office 365 – Skype for Business Online Calling (Microsoft, 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.)
• Women in Linux — Linux? Understanding Infrastructure. (Intro) (7:00 p.m.)
• The Suncoast Developers Guild — Open Code – St Petersburg (The Iron Yard, 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Geek Association — Karaoke and Games @ PJ Dolans (Pj Dolan’s Irish Pub & Grille, 8:00 p.m. – 1:00 a.m.)

Thursday, April 20

• Tampa Bay Technology Sales Professionals — Tech Sales Pros April Meeting (New Horizons, 7:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.)
• Tampa Bay Tech — Florida IT Apprenticeship Dialogue (SPC EpiCenter Collaborative Labs, Largo, 7:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Professional Networking Meetup — Happy Hour Networking – Cigars, Fine Wines and Brews (Long Ash Cigar Bar, 5:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.)
• Lean Beer for All Things Agile (Bad Monkey, 6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.)
• TampaDev — (Monthly) Azure User Group (Wolters Kluwer, 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.)
• Florida IT Professionals — Tampa PowerShell User Group (Microsoft, 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.)
• Tampa SEO and Internet Marketing Monthly Meetup with Steve Scott (Peabody’s Billiards and Games, 6:00 p.m.)
• Tech on Tap Meetup (Coppertail Brewery, 6:00 p.m.)
• WordPress Meetup at The Iron Yard (The Iron Yard, 6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay WordPress — Speaking Client: Explaining Tech Stuff to Non-Tech People Pt. 1 (The Iron Yard, 6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.)
• DefCon 813 — Cybersecurity WITI (Women in Tech Int’l) Social & Panel Discussion (6:00 p.m.)
• Florida IT Professionals — Microsoft Azure Cognitive Service with Michelle Eubanks (Microsoft, 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.)
• Amazon Sellers in the Tampa Bay Area — Grab Dinner and Talk! (7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Qlikview User Group — Monthly ‘Qlik Pick’ Meeting (7:00 p.m.)
• The Tampa Ruby Brigade — Tampa.rb: Tampa Side – Mystery Meetup! (Andy Beverly School, 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Python — Big Data Python: Getting Familiar with Numpy and Pandas (Salesforce Tampa, 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Hackerspace — THS Woodworkers Guild (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Cocoaheads — DIY Augmented Reality, Part 1 (ActSoft Inc., 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Geek Association — Geek Social (Ford’s Garage, 8:00 p.m.)

Friday, April 21

• Lean Coffee for All Things Agile (Brandon/Riverview)­ (Panera @ Brandon Town Center Mall, 7:30 a.m. – 8:30 a.m.)
• Lean Coffee for All Things Agile (Sarasota Location) (Panera @ Town Center Mall,7:30 a.m. – 8:30 a.m.)

Saturday, April 22

• Global Azure Bootcamp (Microsoft, 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.)
• MR103 Aerial Drone Workshop (Tampa Hackerspace, 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.)
• Milling Class 2/3 (Members Only) (Tampa Hackerspace, 1:30 p.m.)
• Nerd Night Out — Karaoke Night! (Fat Cat Tavern, 8:30 p.m.)

 

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

Monday, April 10

• Tampa Bay Data Science Group: Data Science in Action (Wolters Kluwer, 6:00 p.m. – 7:45 p.m.)
• Clearwater/St. Petersburg Unity User Group: Using user feedback to enhance your game (AgiteThought, 6:00 p.m.)

Tuesday, April 11

• Amazon’s AWSome Day (Tampa Convention Center, 8:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Tech: STEM Business Summit (University Student Center – USF St Petersburg, 8:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Cloud Foundry Meetup: Event-Driven Microservices w/Kenny Bastani, Spring developer advocate (
  Masonite’s Ybor city development center, 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.)
• BarCamp Sarasota Network & Learn (Station 2 Innovation Center 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Drones: Open Fly Day on the Weekday! (R.E. Olds Park, 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Hackerspace: Weekly Open Make Night (Tampa Hackerspace, 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.)
• Pinellas Hack Shack weekday improvements (6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.)
• Code Katas (The Iron Yard, 6:15 p.m.)
• Tampa eMarketing Groups: Learn About Podcasting and How to Monetize Your Interest! (McAlister’s Deli, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Social Media Meetup: Web Entrepreneurs (Tampa Bay Technology Center, 7:00 p.m.)

Wednesday, April 12

• Tampa Bay Agile: PO Group: Product Roadmaps – connect strategy w/execution (Healthesystems, 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay UAS and Drone University: Saint Petersburg College UAS Meetup- April Meeting (St. Petersburg College EpiCenter, 6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Inventors Council – www.tbic.us Weekly Meetup (Tampa Bay Technology Center, 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Hackerspace: Introduction to Fusion 360 (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
• The Suncoast Linux Users Group (HDR, 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Bitcoineers (Kahuna’s Bar and Grill, 7:00 p.m.)
• Suncoast Developers Guild: Open Code (The Iron Yard, 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.)

Thursday, April 13

• DIY SEO for Small-Medium Businesses St. Pete: SEO Lesson 4: WordPress Yoast SEO Plugin (The Iron Yard, 6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.)
• Front-End Design Meetup: CSS in JavaScript with Christopher Wallis (The Iron Yard, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.)
• NodeSchool @ The Iron Yard (The Iron Yard, 7:00 p.m.)
• THS Woodworkers Guild (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)

Friday, April 14

• Lean Coffee for All Things Agile, Waters Location (Panera Bread, 7:30 a.m. – 8:30 a.m.)
• Homebrew Computing (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)

 

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

Monday, April 3

• Tampa Bay Alexa and Lex Developers — Build Your First Alexa Skill (Tampa Hackerspace, 6:30 p.m.)
• Code for Tampa Bay Monthly Meetup (Tampa Bay ECC, 6:30 p.m.)
• Brandon Emarketing Groups — Internet Marketing for Business Owners (Sabor a Mexico, Brandon, 7:00 p.m.)

Tuesday, April 4

• Tampa Bay Tech — Florida Business Analytics Forum (USF Muma College of Business, 11:00 a.m.)
• Tampa Hackerspace Member Meeting (Tampa Hackerspace, 6:00 p.m.)
• SPC IT Career Exploration Networking Event & Job Fair (SPC Seminole Campus Conference Center, Seminole, 6:00 p.m.)
• Nerd Night Out — Trivia Night (O’Brien’s Irish Pub, 6:45 p.m.)
• St. Pete .NET Meetup — Caching in .NET Core for Fun and Profit with John Callaway (The Iron Yard, 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Android Developers Group/Google Developers Group Sun Coast — Lightning Round Talks (The Iron Yard, 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay WordPress — An Introduction to WordPress (Complete I.T. Computer Repair & Network Solutions, Lutz, 7:30 p.m.)

Wednesday, April 5

• PMI Florida Suncoast Project Management Meetup — Professional Development Day: Leadership Success through Managing Projects (St. Petersburg College EpiCenter, Clearwater, 8:30 a.m.)
• Technology Networking Meetup (Ulele, 6:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Scrum Masters Guild’s April 2017 Meetup (Vology, 6:00 p.m.)
• Iron Yard’s Free Crash Course – Tomorrow’s Javascript, Today (The Iron Yard, 6:15 p.m.)
• Open Code (The Iron Yard, 7:00 p.m.)
• Women in Linux — Linux? Understanding Infrastructure Intro (7:00 p.m.)

Thursday, April 6

• Tampa# C# and .NET Meetup — Coffee & Code (11:00 a.m.)
• Tampa Bay Drupal User Group Meeting (Panera, Clearwater, 6:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay WordPress Meetup — St Pete: Networking & Freeform Working Meeting (The Iron Yard, 6:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Internet of Things Developer Group (Microsoft Office, 6:30 p.m.)
• Florida Salesforce Developer Group — Anatomy of APEX (The Iron Yard, 7:00 p.m.)
• PHP as a Social Activity — The Corner Workbench (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Hackerspace Woodworkers Guild (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
• Suncoast.js — Becoming an A11y & NodeBots: JavaScript Robotics (The Iron Yard, 7:00 p.m.)

Friday, April 7

• Lean Coffee for All Things Agile, St Petersburg (Panera, Clearwater, 7:30 a.m.)
• Tampa Bay WaVE — So You Think You Can Mentor? (Tampa Bay WaVE, 12:00 p.m.)
• The Iron Yard Open House and Station House REVEAL: Diversity of the Arts (The Iron Yard, 5:00 p.m.)

Saturday, April 8:

• Orlando Code Camp 2017 (Seminole State College, Sanford, 8:00 a.m.)
• Girl Develop It: Introduction to HTML + CSS (The Iron Yard, 9:00 a.m.)

Sunday, April 9:

• Kid’s Open Make Day (Tampa Hackerspace, 1:00 p.m.)
• Cosplay Workshop (Tampa Hackerspace, 4:30 p.m.)

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

Monday, March 27

• Amateur Radio Technician Classes (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
• DefCon 813 — Social & DC813 Gear

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:

• BarCamp Sarasota-Bradenton Network & Learn (Station 2 Innovation, Bradenton, 11:30 a.m.)
• Code Katas — Let’s get together and do some more advanced code challenges! (The Iron Yard, 7:00 p.m.)
• Functional Ybor — Building a React/Redux-like Architecture w/ Inferno, Most, & FP Tools/Techniques (Robert W. Saunders, Sr. Public Library, 6:30 p.m.)
• Microsoft IoT Bootcamp, enterprise track (Tampa Hackerspace, 10:30 a.m.)
• Tampa Bay Agile — “Stranger In a Strange Land: An Agilists Tragedy of Working in a Waterfall Shop” (Valpak, 6:30 p.m.)
• Tampa JUG — Trends in Middleware Platform(J2EE) Monitoring Automation (Citigroup Center, 6:30 p.m.)
• Weekly Open Make Night (Tampa Hackerspace, 6:00 p.m.)

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:

• Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi founder
• Adam Benzion, Hackster.io CEO
• Zach Supalia, Particle CEO

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:

• Microsoft IoT Bootcamp, commercial makers track (Tampa Hackerspace, 10:30 a.m.)
• Open Code (The Iron Yard, 7:00 p.m.)
• ReactJS Tampa Bay — Building a React/Redux-like Architecture w/ Inferno, Most, & FP Tools/Techniques (AgileThought, 6:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Geek Association — Geek Social (The Lucky Dill in Palm Harbor, 8:00 p.m.)

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:

• Google Cloud Platform Roadshow in Florida – FREE EVENT (USF, 8:00 a.m.)
• March 2017 Startup Xchange (Green Bench Brewing Co., 5:00 p.m.)
• Microsoft IoT Bootcamp, enterprise and commercial maker tracks (Tampa Hackerspace, 10:30 a.m.)
• Suncoast iOS — Manage your external libraries with CocoaPods (Tampa Bay WaVE, 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Software Craftsmanship Meetup — Craftsmanship Group Discussion – Anything (Lee Roy Selmon’s @ Boy Scout Blvd., 6:30 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Tech Events — Geek Breakfast (Jimbo’s Pit Bar-B-Q, 7:30 a.m.)
• THS Woodworkers Guild (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)

Friday, March 31

• Homebrew Computing (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
• March 2017 Homebrew Hillsborough (Tampa Hackerspace, 8:30 a.m.)

Saturday, April 1

• Cigar City Multirotors — Meet, Greet and Fly! (Hamilton Park, Town ’n’ Country, 10:30 a.m.)
• Girl Develop IT Tampa Bay — RESCHEDULED: Intermediate HTML + CSS (The Iron Yard, 9:00 a.m.)
• Kakkoii-Otaku Clan — Ghost in the Shell (7:30 p.m.)
• Nerd Night Out — Ghost in the Shell (Regal Cinemas Park Place Stadium 16 RPX Movie Theater, 2:30 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Bitcoin — Synoc Labs Presents: Introduction to Blockchains by Joe Blankenship (Synoc Lab @ Synergy Internet Business Center, 5:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Tech Events — Ladies Meetup (Cheap Restaurant and Bar, 6:00 p.m.)

Sunday, April 2

• Tampa Drones Meetup — Open Fly Day – Fly what you have! (Sheffield Disc Golf Park, Oldsmar, 11:00 a.m.)

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

Monday, March 20

• Amateur radio technician classes (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
• Code for Tampa Bay Brigade mid-month gathering (Bryan Glazer Family JCC, 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay DevOps March Meetup (Healthesystems, 6:00 p.m.)
• Sarasota/Bradenton Women Entrepreneurs Meetup — Where are you spending your time? (Square 1 Burgers, 11:30 a.m.)

Tuesday, March 21

• Barcamp Sarasota-Bradenton Network & Learn (Station 2 Innovation Center, Bradenton, 5:30 p.m.)
• Entrepreneurs and Startups Bradenton — Network & Learn – Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Launch Event (Station 2 Innovation Center, 5:30 p.m.)
• Girl Develop It: Career Workshop – Create a Killer Resume (The Iron Yard, 6:15 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay SharePoint User Group (TBSPUG) Meeting (Vaco Technology, 5:30 p.m.)
• Valpak Agile Tour (Valpak, 11:00 a.m.)
• Weekly Open Make Night (Tampa Hackerspace, 6:00 p.m.)
• Ybor |> Elixir March Meeting (Location TBD, 6:30 p.m.)

Wednesday, March 22

• Clearwater / Tampa Social Networking Meetup — WordPress (Tampa Bay Computer Society, 7:00 p.m.)
• Florida Podcasters Association — World Premiere of “The Messengers: A Podcast Documentary Movie” (Tampa Theatre, 7:00 p.m.)
• Free Crash Course- Chrome Developer Tools: How it Can Fit Into Your Dev Workflow (The Iron Yard, 6:30 p.m.)
• Learn to Pick Locks (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
• Open Code (The Iron Yard, 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Agile — Product Owner Group: Hands On Design Thinking Workshop by Edgehopper (KForce, 6:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Joomla User Group March Meeting (CoWork Ybor/Blind Tiger Cafe, 6:30 p.m.)
• Women in Linux — Understanding Infrastructure (Intro) (Location available to members only, 7:00 p.m.)

Thursday, March 23

• Code Lakeland — Optimizing the Engineering Job Hunt 101: From Both Sides of the Interview (Catapult, Lakeland, 6:00 p.m.)
• Entrepreneurs and startups – Bradenton Networking & Education – Competitive Benchmarking – Webinar (10:30 a.m.)
• Geek Breakfast (Jimbo’s Pit Bar-B-Q, 7:30 a.m.)
• Girl Develop It: Intro to Web Typography (The Iron Yard, 6:30 p.m.)
• Open Make Night/Open House (St. Pete Makers, 6:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay AWS March Meetup: Member intro’s, Amazon Q&A and customer use case (Sogeti Tampa, 6:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay WordPress — WordPress Best Practices: Themes, Plugins, and Images (Complete I.T. Computer Repair & Network Solutions, 7:30 p.m.)
• Tampa Hackerspace 3D printer orientation (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Hackerspace Woodworkers Guild (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa SEO and Internet Marketing Monthly Meetup with Steve Scott (Peabody’s Billiards and Games, 6:00 p.m.)

Friday, March 24

• Lean Coffee for All Things Agile (Westshore) (Panera, 7:30 a.m.)

Saturday, March 25

• MR103 Aerial Drone Workshop (Tampa Hackerspace, 1:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Tech Events – Ladies’ Meetup! (Cheap Restaurant and Bar, 6:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Voice Control Systems Meetup (Temple Terrace Library, 11:30 a.m.)

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

Monday, March 13

• Amateur radio technician classes (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
• DIY SEO Meetup (The Iron Yard, 6:00 p.m.)

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:

• Code Katas: Group code challenges (The Iron Yard, 6:15 p.m.)
• BarCamp Sarasota-Bradenton’s Network & Learn (Station 2 Innovation Center, 11:30 a.m.)
• Raspberry Pi classes for beginner, intermediate, and advanced users / Talk about Raspberry Pi (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
• Weekly Open Make Night / Pi Day celebration (Tampa Hackerspace, 6:00 p.m.)

Wednesday, March 15

• Free crash course: What/Why/How to .NET (The Iron Yard, 6:30 p.m.)
• Laser cutter orientation (Tampa Hackerspace,  7:00 p.m.)
• Microsoft PowerBI Meetup with Vishal Pawar – Top Steps to teach yourself PowerBI (Microsoft, 6:00 p.m.)
• Office 365 – Understanding Azure AD and Federation with Douglas Pyle (Microsoft, 7:00 p.m.)
• Open Code (The Iron Yard, 7:00 p.m.)

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:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2017, Azure and IoT with Art Garcia (Microsoft, 7:00 p.m.)
• (Monthly) Azure User Group (Wolters Kluwer, 6:00 p.m.)
• Tampa PowerShell User Group (Microsoft, 6:00 p.m.)
• Tampa.rb: St Pete Side – Coder Night! (Malwarebytes, 7:00 p.m.)

Friday, March 17

• Lean Coffee for All Things Agile (Brandon/Riverview) (Panera at Brandown Town Center Mall, 7:30 a.m.)
• Lean Coffee for All Things Agile (Sarasota Location) (Panera at Town Center Mall, 7:30 a.m.)

Saturday, March 18

• Game night (Tampa Hackerspace, 7:00 p.m.)
• Tampa Bay Tech Events’ Shamrock Scavenger Crawl (starts at Curtis Hixon Park, 4:00 p.m.)

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!

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.