Category: What I’m Up To

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Meetups Programming Tampa Bay What I’m Up To

Suncoast Software Skills Meetup: Making sense of Git and GitHub — Monday, March 24 at Embarc Collective!

With everything else that we developers have to know and learn, many of us use Git and GitHub “on autopilot,” using them to perform a handful of daily tasks that out of habit with little understanding. If you want to get a better understanding of Git and GitHub — and have fun at the same time — Monday’s meetup is for you!

The tl;dr

Why attend this meetup?

New developers have trouble with Git and GitHub, but so do experienced ones! Would you like to take a step back and really understand these fundamental developer tools? If so, thus upcoming session at Suncoast Software Skills Meetup is for you!

Join us for a beginner-friendly seminar designed to demystify Git and GitHub! Whether you’re a coding novice or simply looking to get a better understanding of version control, we’ll guide you through the fundamentals with a practical hands-on exercise.

And yes, this is a SHAME-FREE ZONE. Even after all these years using various source control systems leading up to Git and GitHub — rcs, cvs, Visual SourceSafe, Subversion (svn), TFS — we still stumble. This workshop is all about getting good at Git and Github!

We’ll also look at ways you can fix common Git mistakes that we all make, courtesy of Katie Saylor-Miller’s and Julia Evans’ delightful book, Oh Shit, Git!

You’ll also learn about great resources for getting better at Git and GitHub, such as Oh My Git!, a videogame that makes learning about Git fun.

This will be a fun meetup at one of Tampa Bay’s best meetup venues, Embarc Collective. And thanks to the Embarc Collective / Bank of America scholarship, we’re able to provide food (it’ll be cuban sandwiches, empanadas, and potato croquettes).

Join us this Monday, and let’s sharpen our software skills!

Once again, here’s the registration page (and yes, it’s free)!

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Artificial Intelligence Meetups Tampa Bay What I’m Up To

Tampa Bay AI Meetup on Monday, March 17 at Embarc Collective: Build an AI Job Application Helper App!

The tl;dr

Details

You’ve probably heard lots of stories from friends and acquaintances about how much work you have to do to conduct a job search these days.

There are a fair number of data points showing that this is true; the Silicon Valley-based career guidance service Pathrise, says that job seekers who sent 20+ job applications every week got more interviews and landed a job sooner.

That’s a lot of work, especially since the general advice is to customize your resume for every job application.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to get some help customizing your resume for every job application you have to fill out?

With Anitra and I leading you through the steps, you’re going to build just that on Monday, March 17th at the Tampa Bay AI Meetup at Embarc Collective. Along with us, you’ll code up an AI-powered application that takes two inputs…

✅ Your resume
✅ The job description of a job you’re applying for

…and it produces a version of your resume that’s been fine-tuned in these ways:

  • Present you in the best possible light
  • Make changes so that your experiences, talents, and achievements show that you’re an excellent fit for the job
  • Tune your experience and skills to better match the job requirements
  • Update your resume to use key words and phrases from the job description
  • Correct spelling and grammar mistakes
  • Fix phrasing to be more clear and concise
  • Improve sentence structure and use action verbs

Bring your laptop! We’ll provide you with a “starter” project and access to an AI account, and we’ll walk you through the process of writing a Python app in Jupyter Notebook that does what we described above. In the process, you’ll learn:

  • About Jupyter Notebook, one of the preferred tools for AI and data science
  • How to make calls to an AI API
  • How to build an application based on an AI API

You will leave the meetup with a working Python app that does what we’ve described above: help you fine-tune your resume for specific job applications!

Join us on Monday, March 17th and let’s build this app!

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Meetups Tampa Bay What I’m Up To

Tampa Bay AI and Suncoast Software Skills Meetups — powered by Embarc Collective and Bank of America!

Great news — the meetups that Anitra and I co-organize…

are the recipients of Embarc Collective’s and Bank of America’s Tampa Bay Tech Meetup Scholarship!

For 2025, this scholarship will make it much easier for us to organize our meetups. It will provide…

  • Dedicated Space: One of the challenges of running a meetup is getting a space to hold them. Embarc Collective has amazing event spaces right in downtown Tampa, close to the interstate, and well-suited for tech meetups. Being able to host our meetups at Embarc is a really big help!
  • Financial Support: The costs of renting premium spaces like those in Embarc Collective and feeding attendees are also a challenge for non-corporate meetup organizers like us. The financial support from the Scholarship is invaluable.
  • Community Connection: Embarc Collective is one of the hubs of Tampa Bay’s tech ecosystem, and having their community connections will help us take our meetups to the next level.

Our first meetup to take place at Embarc Collective will be the Tampa Bay AI Meetup’s Build an AI job application helper app, which will happen on Monday, March 17 from 6 – 8 p.m.. We’re working on a date for the Suncoast Software Skills Meetup event, so watch this space!

We’d like to thank Embarc Collective and Bank of America for creating the Scholarship and for selecting our Meetups to be recipients. We’re going to put on some great meetups this year!

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What I’m Up To

Company headshots / What I’ve been up to

Here’s a quick little post that’s here to let you know a couple of things. For starters, Packfiles’ site now includes company headshots, which include Yours Truly:

To recap, Packfiles makes a SaaS called Warp, which migrates source code repositories from other, lesser source control systems (Azure DevOps right now, but BitBucket and GitLab soon) to GitHub.

Migration is a tedious manual process that’s like this:

But with Warp, it’s more like this:

My title, Technical Experience Lead, is something I made up on the spot, but it pretty much covers what I do. I make sure that the people who use the SaaS have the best experience possible, from the moment they visit our site and try our service, to the actual migration process.

I’ve been recording how-to videos in my nice, quiet, and conevnient home studio, but yesterday, internet service went out in our neighborhood. Luckily, Embarc Collective — where I do my non-recording work — has a content studio and they were kind enough to let me book it for all afternoon yesterday on very short notice.

Here’s the booking screen outside the studio…

…and here’s what it was like inside:

It’s a busy time for me, and I’ll write more about it here — watch this space!

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Meetups Tampa Bay What I’m Up To

Last night’s “Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer” meetup

Last night’s Coders, Creatives and Craft Beer meetup was a lot of fun — and a lot of new faces, with people who’d never been to one of our meetups joining us for the first time!

Held at Magnanimous Brewing Seminole Heights, this meetup is simply a get-together for people who write code, aspire to write code, are creative, or aspire to be creative. We like to say that it’s “All conversations, no presentations!”

( ℹ️ And in case you were wondering, there are non-beer, non-alcohol options at every place we hold Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer. Anitra and I drink, but you don’t have to in order to join us. We also always pick places with food options.)

There’ll be another one next month — we’d love it of you could join us!

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Charts, Diagrams, and Infographics What I’m Up To

Whiteboarding

Joey’s hand-drawn diagram of how Packfiles’ Warp performs Azure DevOps-to-GitHub repository migrations

One of the (many) nice things about going to Embarc Collective to do my work at Packfiles for three (sometimes four) days a week is that they’ve got great whiteboards:

Joey’s laptop and insulated mug sitting on a table, with Embarc Collective’s tall whiteboards in the background.

As Packfiles’ documentarian and primary technical and customer support go-to person and as an occasional cartoonist, the whiteboards are both a great way to flesh out diagrams that I’ll later illustrate in Canva as well as to keep those doodling skills sharp.

Who knows, maybe I’ll just use hand-drawn whiteboard diagrams instead. What do you think?

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Artificial Intelligence What I’m Up To

Running DeepSeek R1 on a Raspberry Pi

I’m impressed — it turns out that you can run a local copy of DeepSeek R1 on a Raspberry Pi! The photo above shows the large language model of the moment running on my Raspberry Pi 500, which is simply a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM mounted inside a convenient keyboard enclosure. DeepSeek R1 runs slowly on this machine, but it does run!

Fortunately, the installation process is pretty straightforward…

  • Ensure the Raspberry Pi’s system is up to date by running the following commands in the terminal: 
    sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y
  • Download and run the Ollama installer: 
    curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh
  • Download and start the DeepSeek model of your choice. I decided to see if the Raspberry Pi 500 could handle the 8b model, and it can!: 
    ollama run deepseek-r1:8b

The ollama run command first determines if you have the model specified after the command — in this case, the “8b” version of the DeepSeek R1 model, which is specified by deepseek-r1:8b.

If you don’t have it, it downloads the model and supporting files first. If you already have the model, it runs it.