Category: Uncategorized

The Hack Hospitality hackathon takes place in St. Petersburg, Florida this weekend, starting on Friday, August 25 at 6:00 p.m. and ending on Sunday, August 27, 2017 at 9:00 p.m.. The hackathon will bring together two groups that normally don’t overlap — techies and the hospitality industry — with the purpose of coming up with applications that the hospitality industry will find useful.

If you’re a techie — a programmer, a UX/UI/graphic designer, an information architect, a technical project or product manager, or in any other job related to making software — and you’re interested in spending the weekend brainstorming and building applications for a key Tampa Bay area industry, come join us at Station House / The Iron Yard in downtown St. Pete.

The term “hospitality industry” is a broad one, and it refers to service industry fields including:

• Lodging — hotels, motels, bed and breakfasts and the like
• Restaurants, bars, and other places that serve food and drink
• Transportation, particularly the kind used by visitors and tourists
• Tourism, which is a blanket term covering promoting the area to visitors, and attractions aimed at visitors, including theme parks
• Cruise lines, which you could view as a combination of lodging, restaurants, transportation, and tourism

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the Leisure and Hospitality category accounts for 154,000 jobs in Tampa/St. Pete/Clearwater. That accounts for about 12% of total non-farm wage and salary employment in the area. Simply put, hospitality is a key part of our local economy.

The hospitality industry doesn’t always make use of the latest technology. The tech they use often comes from a mish-mash of vendors and often doesn’t connect well. They also don’t have much exposure to the tech industry, and Hack Hospitality aims to fix that by bringing the two groups together to create practical, useful, and usable solutions.

Here’s Hack Hospitality’s schedule:

There will be a number of prizes for the solutions that are judged to be the best, including gift cards for local businesses, swag, and more to be announced as the hackathon draws closer.

The grand prize will be provided by my employer, Sourcetoad: $3,000 in cash! Not bad for a weekend’s work.

There’s a big upside to a hackathon with the hospitality industry: great food! Ciccio Restaurant Group (the people behind Green Lemon, Daily Eats, and other places) and Saltblock Hospitality Group will be providing the food for the event.

The hackathon venue alone is almost reason enough to go:

• The Station House is a St. Pete institution. Part coworking space, part café/restaturant, part lounge, part yoga studio, part event space, it’s five floors of awesome in a beautiful brick building located in the heart of downtown St. Petersburg. They’re providing a beautiful, comfortable space in which to have the hackathon.
• Also participating is The Iron Yard Tampa Bay, who occupy the Station House’s third floor. The Iron Yard is more than just a “bootcamp”-style coding school; it’s the social heart and soul of the St. Pete tech scene, thanks their opening their space in the evenings to the tech community for meetups and get-togethers, and their involvement in tech and civic events.

I’ll be there — not as a competitor, but as a mentor and a representative of Sourcetoad, who are a major sponsor at the event. I hope to see you there!

Want to participate in Hack Hospitality? It’s easy! Go to TampaBayHackathon.com to find out more, or if you like, you can go straight to the registration page.

There’s a $20-per-person registration fee, but you’ll get so much for it: 7 meals, a lot of caffeine, some alcohol, a t-shirt, swag, a shot at a $3,000 grand prize, a possible new side gig or even full-time gig, and a chance to hang out with other Tampa Bay techies.

See you at Hack Hospitality!

Here’s an idea for a great geek weekend:

• Orlando, Florida in mid-November, when the high temperature is typically  78°F/25°C and the lows are 57°F/14°C
• An all-day Saturday conference with some of the best presenters presenting hot new topics in the fantastic setting of a Disney resort
• An admission fee of only $100 (at least until September 1st)
• A free Sunday so you can check out the local attractions, including the Epcot International Food and Wine Festival

It’s happening on Saturday, November 11th at Disney’s Contemporary Resort, and it’s called DevFest Florida!

Organized by the Space Coast, Central Florida, and Sun Coast Google Developer Groups, DevFest Florida is a day-long conference with over two dozen speakers and sessions in three tracks talking about the latest development topics with a Google-y bent. There’s web development, cloud development, mobile development, IoT development, VR and AR, and more, in a fantastic setting in a nice climate, all for a mere hundred bucks!

The conference’s timing is excellent. Just as much of the northern hemisphere is settling into winter, Florida is getting into a temperate groove with warm (but not too hot) days and cool (but not too cold) evenings. There’s also the 2017 edition of the Epcot International Food and Wine Festival, which overlaps DevFest Florida. Since the conference takes place on a Saturday and only on that Saturday, you can take in the Festival on Friday and Sunday!

Of course, one of the reasons you’ll want to attend the conferences are the speakers — check them out! One of them is my Sourcetoad coworker, Connor Tumbleson, who’ll talk about Attacking an Android application…

…and Yours Truly will also be there, with a talk aimed at web developers who are wondering if it’s safe to dip their toe into the native Android development pool.

Sourcetoad, where I work, is a proud sponsor of DevFest Florida. We’re also big fans, so you’ll see a lot of us there!

It’s a lot of geeky conference bang for a hundred bucks, but that price won’t last for long. Register now, so you don’t miss out on DevFest Florida!

I’m a confirmed speaker at RWDevCon 2018, which takes place Thursday, April 5th through Saturday, April 7th, 2018 at the Westin Alexandria, just outside Washington, DC!

I’ll be doing a couple of sessions, one of which is a half-day workshop on one of the hottest new technologies that’ll come out with iOS 11: ARKit, the augmented reality framework for iPhone and iPad.

If you’re wondering what’s possible with ARKit, check out the futuristic battle scene on a table from the demo by Wingnut AR at the WWDC 2017 keynote:

If you want to see what indie developers have been able to do with beta versions of ARKit, check out this compilation:

I’m not yet at liberty to discuss exactly what I’ll be presenting, but I can say this: it will be mind-blowingly good, and you won’t want to miss it.

There will also be workshops on:

• Machine Learning with CoreML and Vision, with Patrick Kwete and Audrey Tam
• Practical Instruments, with Luke Parham
• Swift Algorithms, with Kelvin Lau and Vincent Ngo

You can find out more about the RWDevCon workshops in this article.

If you want to get in on some of this development action, follow this blog, and go register for RWDevCon 2018!

Early bird conference registration is $899, but if you really want to dive deep into AR and catch my workshop, early bird conference + workshops registration is $1,399.

RWDevCon is a conference where all the sessions are developer tutorials. It’s organized by the fine people at:

• RayWenderlich.com, the premier tutorial site for iOS/macOS developers, and now, Android and Unity developers. I’m a newly-added author to the site — my first article was published in July: Augmented Reality in Android with Google’s Face API.
• 360iDev, the premier independent iOS/macOS developer conference, which is taking place at the time of this writing.

RWDevCon is a smaller conference with a few hundred attendees, but those attendees are part of the dedicated, tightly-knit community that frequents RayWenderlich.com. The focus on tutorials means that if you’re a developer looking to boost your iOS development skills, you’ll get a lot of bang for your conference buck:

The size of the conference, coupled with the nature of the community, means that you won’t just be another face in the crowd, and you’ll make friends and connections at this conference — those of you who were at the early RailsConf conferences in Chicago and Portland, or the Toronto conference RubyFringe and FutureRuby, or the GIANT conferences will know what I’m talking about.

I’m also told that they throw a good party:

In addition to tutorials, RWDevCon features a number of “inspiration talks”. Here’s one from RWDevCon 2017 — I’m an Idiot, by Rich Turton, in which he talks about how to leverage your inner idiot to make you a better coder, writer and communicator:

I’m looking forward to this event!

No matter where you stand on the firing of James Damore — whom I prefer to refer to as “the manifestbro” — you should take away this valuable lesson:

If you write a document that becomes such a public relations nightmare that it requires the CEO to cut short a family vacation to deal with the mess, update your resume.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.