Since March 13, 2017, I’ve posted a weekly list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas. I’ve continued to do this to this day, with me typically assembling the list on Thursday and posting it on Friday.
Today is Thursday, so I’m assembling the list — or more accurately, a Jupyter notebook running some Python code I wrote is scraping various sites and creating a checklist like the one you see in the screenshot above.
Back when I first started the list, I used to put it together manually, but as Tampa Bay’s tech scene and events grew, so did the list. It wasn’t long before assembling the list was eating up the better part of an afternoon, and that’s when I decided to add some automation to the process.
The checklist contains likely candidates for inclusion in the list, and each item in the list is checked by default. The checklist is there to allow me to apply my final judgement as to what goes and doesn’t go into the list.
There’s a hug “deny” list of key words and phrases that cause an event to not make it into the checklist because it doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “tech, entrepreneur, or nerd.” For example, events with the words “real estate” don’t make it into the list — they often contain the word “developer,” which my code is looking for, but that’s not the right kind of developer event for the list.
Would any of you be curious as to what’s in my tech events list-creating code and how it works? Would you like me to do a presentation at a local meetup or on YouTube explaining how it works? Let me know.
There aren’t that many free trials that manage to convert me into a paying customer, but GitHub Copilot is now one of the exceptions. I don’t think I’ve seen a programming add-on tool that’s been this useful or beloved by developers since…well, maybe ReSharper back during my time as a Microsoftie (2008 – 2011).
It’s pretty good — but far from perfect — at generating Python code I’m thinking of writing as I type it in, which has resulted in a speed boost for me. Between Copilot (which I’ve had for free for a bit) and Claude Sonnet (which I’ve been paying for), I’ve been enjoying the new assisted world that I’ve been coding in.
Your mileage will vary with the programming language you’re using and the sort of application you’re working on. If what you’re doing matches lots of examples in Copilot’s training set, you’ll get lots of good suggestions. However, if you’re coding in a more obscure programming language, or writing a kind of application for which there would’ve been few examples to add to Copilot’s training set, you’ll get fewer suggestions, and a good number of them will be wrong.
But for me, Copilot’s a very helpful programming tool that I’ve harnessed in order to do more. Pardon me while I go pull out Atypical Consulting LLC’s credit card…
I was pointing someone to the Amazon page for the book I co-wrote a little while back — iOS Apprentice, Eighth Edition — and I saw what you’re seeing in the screenshot above.
I like to think of my technical writing as sexy, but I didn’t think it was this sexy!
In case you’re curious, here’s what the actual cover looks like:
Tap to see the book’s page on the publisher’s site (Kodeco.com).
DevOpsDays Tampa Bay 2024 took place last Thursday, September 19th, and I’m pleased to report that it was a success, with 230 attendees, great talks, an enthusiastic audience, and a lot of participation, all in my favorite conference venue!
DevOpsDays is a worldwide series of community-run technical conferences covering topics of software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the intersection between them.
DevOpsDays Tampa Bay is “The Other Bay Area’s” edition of DevOpsDays, organized, produced, and executed by volunteers from Tampa Bay and beyond, for the benefit of the tech scene here on “The Other West Coast.”
Here are my photos from the event…
Andrew Clay Shafer opened the conference with his keynote, The Ghost of DevOps Past…
…which was followed by PJ Hagerty’s presentation, DevOps — Philosophy vs. Practice. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any photos of his talk, as I was getting ready to give my talk, Python Meets DevOps!
Photo by Maria Seenarraine.
I was followed by Aman Sharma’s presentation on what he termed “GenOps” — in other words, DevOps for Generative AI applications:
After Aman was Omer Farooq, who gave his talk, Modernized Approach to Container DevSecOp through Software Development Lifecycle.
And then: lunch!
One of the best things about last year’s and this year’s DevOpsDays Tampa Bay was that they took place at Armature Works. It’s not just a great conference venue, but also a great place to eat!
Rather than feed us standard-issue tech conference food, we were each given a $25 coupon redeemable at any of the food vendors.
I decided to try out a new-to-me place, Bap Bap and selected their Korean fried chicken and kimchi fries. I definitely would order it again:
Immediately after lunch was Micahel Levan’s presentation, Production-Ready Platform Engineering: From Conception To Build To FAIL, followed by Gwyneth Allwright’s Escaping the Legacy Infrastructure Labyrinth:
Next up was Al Rodriguez, with DevOps Like a Dev:
…follwed by Luis Hernandez with In The Deep End: My Experience as a Linux Kernel Mentee:
The final talks of the day were:
Mike Butler, who introduced the Open Space portion of the conference with his quick talk, Open Spaces – The Greatest Thing about DevOpsDays,
Ed LeGault, with Optimizing Software Delivery with DORA Metrics and EBM, and
Josh Lee, with Modern Application Debugging: An Intro to OpenTelemetry.
Afterwards, we had 90 minutes devoted to Open Space discussions — I pretty much stuck around the AI-related discussion.
At the end of the Open Spaces portion, the conference came to a close with a quick curtain call by the organizers (listed from left to right, as they appear in these photos):
James Gress
Troy Koss
Obie Muzon
Seni Aguiar
Chris Ayers
Assisting them were a number of volunteers, all of whose names I don’t have — but my thanks to them for keeping things running smoothly.
DevOpsDays Tampa Bay was a fun conference to speak at, attend, catch up with old friends, and make new ones. I’m looking forward to next year’s event!
Last night, Anitra and I had the pleasure of attending Tampa Bay Techies’ Social Networking Happy Hour, which took place at the coworking space Sorry Not Public in downtown Tampa.
Tap to view at full size.
Tampa Bay Techies is a group whose goal is to bring the Tampa Bay tech community together through social and educational events, and promote personal and career growth through training, mentoring, and volunteer work.
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They picked an interesting venue for last night’s networking event: Sorry Not Public, a relatively new coworking space with a lo-fi startup vibe that had me convinced for a moment that I was in San Francisco or Toronto.
Tap to view at full size.
(They also had a lovely bar, and kudos to the bartender for making a great Bulleit-based whiskey sour.)
Tap to view at full size.
We had a great time chatting with old friends and meeting new ones. It’s great that Tampa Bay Techies events consistently attract new people and keep the scene lively!
Tap to view at full size.
We also had a chance to talk to the people who run Sorry Not Public. They’re expanding to incorporate different kinds of spaces to accommodate all kinds of working styles, and the amenities they provide are aimed squarely at creatives and techies, with meeting areas, a photo/video studio, and even a gym and sauna.
(YouTube titles and thumbnails can be changed even after the video is posted, and many YouTubers change them as they figure out which versions attract “search” and “browse” viewers.)
Selected moments from the video
Near the start of the video, I suggest to viewers that they try to come up with their own mantra to help them through their layoff journey:
I also remind viewers that there’s a difference between being fired and being laid off:
Here are some layoff stats to reassure you that if you’ve been laid off, you’re not alone:
Making things worse is the fact that shareholders love layoffs — they’re cost savings, which can boost stock prices:
Remember this motto:
I also go through some of the items in the Life Events Inventory, a ranked list of the most stressful events in life. Guess where getting laid off is in the list — I won’t show you kere, though; you’ll have to watch the video!
Here’s the most pithy advice I have for expressing the emotions you may have in the aftermath of being laid off, courtesy of Scott Hanselman:
I talk about the benefits of exercise…
…remind the viewer that it’s always 5 p.m. somewhere…
…and yes, I make a reference not just to “That Site,” but That Site’s identifying drum riff:
You don’t need a unicorn gratitude journal to make it through a layoff, but you should practice gratitude to help you through the process:
I suggest that it might be therapeutic to get rid of at least some of your (former) company swag, but hang on to the stuff that’s useful. I’m hanging on to the Patagonia sweater they sent to me (ironically, a week or so before they laid me off) because it’s nice and warm, and I’m willing to put up with the “VC Bro’ vibes it gives off:
And finally, here’s one of the images I use to explain that if you need therapy or counseling, get it:
Because I’m in the middle of a job search — like about 1 in 11 techies who’ve been laid off since that start of 2023, I’ve been asked for links to my portfolio. Here’s the current version of my content portfolio as of August 2024, which showcases my developer relations / tech advocate / technical writing experience.
I’m currently contracted to create the first of several new courses for Kodeco that will be available in October. Kodeco is expanding beyond their usual mobile development tutorials and into tutorials covering the development of AI applications.
My course will be a thorough introduction to Python for experienced programmers who want to get into AI development.
Teaching Python for Computer Coach
I’m nearly done teaching an online 40-hour / five-week / two-nights-per-week introductory Python course for Tampa Bay’s go-to tech training center, Computer Coach (it will conclude on August 14). This course is aimed at people who are new to programming, but by the end of the course, they’ll have built Python applications in Jupyter Notebook, command-line applications, and even web apps in Flask!
The Global Nerdy YouTube channel
I’ve recently been working on building up the Global Nerdy YouTube channel, where I plan to post long-form videos on technology, software development, and life as a developer.
I published this video in July 2024, the first in a series on surviving the recent tech industry layoffs:
In response to the recent CrowdStrike outage, I posted this video explaining how it happened:
I had a short contract stint as the Developer Advocate for Toronto-based startup Unified.to during April and May 2024. My first assignment at Unified.to was to write their 2024 State of SaaS APIs, a 44-page white paper on various aspects of how APIs are designed and implemented. It covered a wide range of topics, including:
API designs and specification formats
API documentation — generated manually, or with automated tools?
URLs in APIs: static base URLS, custom domain-/subdomain-based URLs, and versioned URLs
In addition to the 2024 State of SaaS APIs paper, I wrote articles for their blog at the rate of about one per week, including What is a Unified API?, for which I also made the diagrams (pictured below):
In my most recent full-time position, I was a member of Auth0 by Okta’s Content team in their Developer Engagement group. I was there for over three years, and my primary responsibility was to create content for mobile developers — articles, tutorials, videos, and other material.
Prior to my arrival at Auth0, there hadn’t been much new content for mobile developers for the prior three years, during which time Apple and Google had made significant changes to iOS and Android.
During my tenure as Senior Developer Advocate, I started writing Auth0’s first new mobile development articles in years, focusing on native iOS and Android development. For React Native and Flutter, I worked with guest authors to produce articles for developers building mobiel apps with those platforms. I also worked with the Developer Experience and SDK teams to update some long-neglected “quickstart” toolkits to help mobile developers become acquainted with Auth0’s “login as a service” more quickly and easily.
In my three years at Auth0, I brought the mobile development section of the Auth0 development blog from 0 pageviews/month to 20,000 pageviews/month.
I ended up producing one long-form article a month that bore my name on the byline (I ended up rewriting or ghost-writing a number of guest articles as well). My Auth0 articles are listed below, with some annotations for notable articles.
Not all of my articles were about the Auth0 platform. I wrote some articles simply to gain the attention from mobile developers and on mobile development topics I felt didn’t receive enough attention.
My series of articles on working with dates and times in the Swift programming language remains popular among iOS developers — in fact, in Google searches for the search terms swift dates times still rank my articles in the top five:
I also wrote articles that went outside my usual topic of mobile development, including these two articles, which are still in the top five results for searches on EXIF and Python and EXIF and JavaScript:
I learned mobile development from reading the first edition of The iOS Apprentice, a book produced by RayWenderlich.com (which eventually became Kodeco), the premier mobile development tutorial site, and I’ve been a fan ever since.
So when they put out a call for authors for Android articles, I took it as an opportunity to learn Android development so that I could be a contributor to the site. They gave me a choice of assignments that I could take on for my “audition,” and I chose one of the trickier ones: “Write an article showing how to make an augmented reality Android app.”
Thanks to my success with that augmented reality article, I was selected to be the technical editor for their book ARKIt by Tutorials. I was also selected to make not one, but two presentations at their RWDevCon 2018 conference: a two-hour presentation and a four-hour deep dive:
These presentations were the top two most highly-rated presentations at the conference.
When they sought out authors for the 8th edition of The iOS Apprentice, I threw my hat in the ring because I wanted to revise the book that taught me mobile development. Shortly after I was selected as one of the co-authors, Apple introduced the new SwiftUI framework, which necessitated completely rewriting major portions of the book.
I have also written the following articles for Kodeco, the most recent one in March 2024:
In November 2023, I gave an hour-long presentation to the Tampa Devs group that explained how computers work “under the hood.” I starting by explaining what transistors are and how they work, worked up to microprocessors, and finally covered programming in assembly language:
In February 2024, I gave a presentation on getting into AI development at the Civo Navigate North America 2024 conference. My time slot was on Day 1, immediately after the opening keynote:
Based on the success of my AI talk at Civo Navigate North America, the Austin Forum on Technology and Society invited me to give a more in-depth online version of the talk for their “AI April” event in April 2024:
A few days after the “backdoor” to the xz Utils utility was discovered, I proposed giving a last-minute lightning talk about the incident to the organizers of the BSides Tampa 2024 cybersecurity conference in April 2024. It ended up turning into a full presentation:
As a result of the response to my presentation at Civo Navigate North America 2024, Civo also invited me to give a lightning talk at Civo Navigate Local Tampa 2024 in April 2024:
I’ve been publishing Global Nerdy, my personal blog on technology, tech news, and software development since August 2006. To this day, it gets about 30,000 pageviews per month.
And finally, while this is from a while back, I’m including it in this portfolio simply because I’m sure no other candidate will be able to show you something like this: my short-lived children’s show about technology. Just like Sesame Street, there’s a puppet co-host:
