Category: Uncategorized

The most common phrases in software development job ads, explained

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date July 12, 2019

Found via Chris Heilmann. Click the table to see the source.

The ones about “agile team”, “self-starter”, and “passionate” are especially true.

I’m on the Startup Bus!

I’m on the Startup Bus! Tampa to New Orleans - Wednesday, July 24 - Sunday, July 28.

I’m one step closer to scratching an item off my bucket list: I’ve been accepted as a “hustler” on the Startup Bus! In a couple of weeks, I’m going to be on a bus bound for a few days with a newly-minted team, racing to build a real, working technology product that we’ll pitch to real investors and advisors in a competition in New Orleans against teams from other parts of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

This is the 10th annual Startup Bus North America competition. It’s a competition that takes place on a three-day bus ride where contestants — better known as “buspreneurs” — form teams on day one in order to try to come up with the most innovative technology startup. Teams are composed of:

Developers: The programmers — the people who build the product.
Designers: The people who craft the look and feel of the product.
Influencers: The people who help coordinate the team and persuade people to use the product.

I’ve signed on as an influencer who can also pinch-hit as a developer and designer. That’s how I pitched myself to the Startup Bus organizers, who approve all participants:

Hey, @TheStartupBus! I want to join as an influencer/hustler. 13K followers, but I can pinch-hit as a coder (made ARKit tutorial vids, revising iOS tutorial book, write Android articles, an app in the store), can design, & I play a mean accordion, which they LOVE in New Orleans. pic.twitter.com/QQjDfumlHM

— 🎹 Joey deVilla (@AccordionGuy) June 27, 2019

The winners of the competition are chosen by a panel of judges, who come from the fields of technology and tech investment. It’s been called “the mother of all hackathons” on VentureBeat, and “as close to blood sport as Silicon Valley entrepreneurship gets” in WIRED.

Click the map to see it at full size.

I’m going to be on the Florida bus, which conveniently departs from Tampa, and is the one with the least actual distance to cover (it’ll follow a route that will keep it on the road for three days). Other buses will depart from New York, Toronto, Washington D.C., Mexico City, San Mateo, and Akron.

I’ll write more about it as we get closer to the event. For now, I’m racing to get stuff done, because in a couple of weeks, I’ll be on the bus!

An amazing first meetup: “Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer” at 7venth Sun Brewery, Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date July 10, 2019

Click the photo to see it at full size.

The first “Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer” meetup took place last night, and with about three dozen attendees at peak (and on a Tuesday night) it was a smashing success! My thanks to everyone who came; it’s you who made this event special.

The early crowd. Click the photo to see it at full size.

Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer is a regular gathering of Tampa Bay’s techies, creatives, entrepreneurs, and geeks of all stripes. It’s an event where we can get to know other local techies, creatives, entrepreneurs, and geeks and talk shop, share ideas, and maybe even collaborate on projects as we enjoy each other’s company, fun surroundings, and craft beer. It was great seeing some old friends and acquaintances, and to make new ones as well!

More people arrive. Click the photo to see it at full size.

Even more people arrive! Click the photo to see it at full size.

And finally, we take over the place. Click the photo to see it at full size.

Anitra and I started this meetup to help build Tampa Bay’s scenius — a term coined by Brian Eno that describes as “the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”

Here’s an expanded definition, straight from Eno himself:

“Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”

…I thought that originally those few individuals who’d survived in history – in the sort-of “Great Man” theory of history – they were called “geniuses”. But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent.

So I came up with this word “scenius” – and scenius is the intelligence of a whole… operation or group of people. And I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that – let’s forget the idea of “genius” for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.”

“Genius/EGOsystem vs. Scienus/ECOsystem” graphic by Austin Kleon.

To build a scenius, you need one of the “4 C’s” that a strong tech and creative community needs — convene. There need to be places and events to bring people together. Otherwise, that very necessary ecosystem never forms, and everyone simply chugs away in isolation, and the scene that we want never coalesces. That’s the goal of Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer: to give the community opportunities to convene, and with each gathering, making it more likely that the conversations, friendships, and the exchange of contact information, ideas, and maybe even opportunities, will help grow our scene.

To find out more about scenius, check out this article: Tampa Bay’s tech “scenius” depends on us.

There will be another Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer meetup in August! We’re working on the details right how — if you want to stay in the loop and know when it’s happening, join the Meetup group.

Some credit where credit is due: Thanks to 7venth Sun Brewery in Seminole Heights for being an amazing venue…

…Xtreme Tacos for being a fantastic food vendor…

…Tential (and especially Alex Kelly) for helping to promote the event…

…but most of all, thanks to everyone who was there! Without you, there’s no meetup:

Photo by Alex Kelly. Click the photo to see the source.

Current Events Tampa Bay Uncategorized

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, July 8, 2019)

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date July 6, 2019

Every week, I compile a list of events for developers, technologists, tech entrepreneurs, and nerds in and around the Tampa Bay area. We’ve got a lot of events going on this week, and here they are!

This weekly list is posted as a voluntary service to the Tampa tech community. With the notable exceptions of Tampa iOS Meetup and Coders, Creatives and Craft Beer — both of which I run — most of this information comes from Meetup.com, EventBrite, and other local event announcement sites. I can’t guarantee the accuracy of the dates and times listed here; if you want to be absolutely sure that the event you’re interested in is actually taking place, please contact the organizers!

Monday, July 8

Tuesday, July 9

Wednesday, July 10

Thursday, July 11

Friday, July 12

Saturday, July 13

Sunday, July 14

Current Events Tampa Bay Uncategorized

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, July 1, 2019)

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date June 29, 2019

A holiday reminder

Keep in mind that this is a holiday week, with the 4th of July happening on Thursday. Event announcement services like Meetup have a tendency to automatically schedule recurring events without regard for holidays. If the event you want to attend happens on or near the 4th, you might want to double-check with the organizers and confirm that the event is actually happening.

Monday, July 1

Tuesday, July 2

Wednesday, July 3

Thursday, July 4

Friday, July 5

Saturday, July 6

Sunday, July 7

Current Events Tampa Bay Uncategorized

Demo Day at Suncoast Developers Guild – Friday, July 19

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date June 26, 2019

On Friday, July 19, Suncoast Developers Guild will host Demo Day for their 14th cohort!

Demo Day is the day when the student developers at Tampa Bay’s home-grown coding school (and more — see below), Suncoast Developers Guild, take their capstone projects — full applications that demonstrate what they learned during their intensive 13-week program, shown below…

Click the graphic to see it at full size.

…and demonstrate them to an audience of local tech companies, engineers, and supporters of the tech community. It’s open to the public, and it’s your chance to see first-hand what their graduating developers have learned and made, get to know them, and hopefully, hire them.

If you’d like to attend, it’s happening Friday, July 19, 2019 from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. at Suncoast Developers Guild, located at 2220 Central Avenue in St. Pete. Admission is free, and there is 2-hour free parking in front of their campus.

Suncoast Developers Guild is more than just a coding school. It’s also:

A space that serves as a hub for developers and techies on the St. Pete side of Tampa Bay,
home for a number of local techie meetups and gatherings,
the organizer and sponsor of a lot of the Tampa Bay tech community’s activities and get-togethers,
the people behind the Suncoast Developers Guild Slack, the de facto Tampa Bay online grapevine,
and most importantly, the social heart and soul of the tech scene on the St. Pete side of the Bay.

Suncoast Developers Guild has given so much to the Tampa Bay tech scene, and as local techies, it’s only fair to give a little back. If you’ve got the time, please attend Demo Day on July 19th, support the latest cohort of students, and give SDG some love! I plan to attend, and I’ll see you there.

Uncategorized

Quick notes on macOS “Catalina”

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date June 25, 2019

A screenshot of the “Hello, World!” app in the book. Click to see at full size.

I’m racing to finish the first section of an upcoming book on programming for the next version of iOS, so I’m deep in beta-land with:

Developer beta 2 of macOS 10.15, a.k.a. “Catalina”
Developer beta 2 of iOS 13
Developer beta 2 of Xcode 11

…and while I’ve run into the occasional quirk or bug (and one crash), I’ve generally been able to go about my work. Aside from the software listed above, I haven’t been using much too many other apps on the machine running the Catalina beta — it’s mostly been:

Safari and Firefox for browsing
MacDown for writing the book in Markdown
git and gitHub Desktop for checking in revisions
Visual Studio Code for occasional text editing
Slack for keeping in touch with the rest of the team

All these applications seem to run fine under Catalina.

If you’re curious to find out more about the upcoming macOS Catalina, you should read Daniel Eran Dilger’s writeup in AppleInsider, where he provides an in-depth overview of the just-released public beta.

If you’re tempted to dive in and get the public beta for a machine that you rely on to get things done, he provides this warning. I’m quoting it here, because it can’t be said enough:

And now: a warning!

Note that most users should not download a Public Beta! This is especially the case for anyone who would have their life or work inconvenienced by having to track down complex problems, potentially including hardware that won’t boot or a full restore from a backup. That in itself can take hours to perform, particularly in our modern age where you likely have 100 GB or more of photos alone.

It’s not just that the Catalina Public Beta could have some wild bugs hiding in there as it develops—in our modern age of cloud-connected everything, even a minor bug could trigger a chain of events that might end up corrupting your Keychain passwords, duplicating contact records, borking your HomeKit configuration, or erasing pictures you expect to be synced to iCloud.

Let me emphasize this one more time: you don’t just need a solid backup before you install a Public Beta; you need the flexibility of hours of free time to sort out any problems that might result from using early beta software!

…

Tread cautiously, and don’t blame the beta for being beta—you’ve been warned!

Writing the programming book requires me to use these not-quite-ready-for-prime-time operating systems, and even then, I’m doing it on an older spare Mac, and not the only I rely on for my day-to-day stuff. If you really have to get your hands on an early version of Catalina, make sure you’ve backed up everything you’d miss if the OS suddenly made it disappear, and if possible, try it out on a backup machine.

If you’ve gotten this far and are still undeterred by the risks, you’ll want to check out this article on The Verge: How to download the iOS 13, iPadOS, macOS Catalina, and tvOS 13 public betas.