Category: What I’m Up To

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Artificial Intelligence Conferences Presentations Programming What I’m Up To

O’Reilly’s AI Codecon — free and online, Thursday, May 8!

On Thursday, May 8th from 11 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Eastern, O’Reilly Media will host a free online conference called AI Codecon. “Join us to explore the future of AI-enabled development,” the tagline reads, and their description of the event starts with their belief that AI’s advance does NOT mean the end of programming as a career, but a transition.

Here’s what I plan to do with this event:

  • Register for the event
  • Log in when it starts and fire up a screen recorder
  • Watch the event in the background while working
  • Generate a transcript from the recording and feed it into a couple of LLM
  • Have the LLMs answer any questions I may have and generate summaries and “going forward” game plans based on the content and my future plans

Interested? Register here.

The agenda for AI Codecon

Here’s the schedule for AI Codecon, which is still being finalized as I write this:

  1. Introduction, with Tim O’Reilly (10 minutes)
  2. Gergely “Pragmatic Engineer” Orosz and Addy Osmani Fireside Chat (20 minutes)
    Addy Osmani for an insightful discussion on the evolving role of AI in software engineering and how it’s paving the way for a new era of agentic, “AI-first” development.

  3. Vibe Coding: More Experiments, More Care – Kent Beck (15 minutes)
    Augmented coding deprecates formerly leveraged skills such as language expertise, and amplifies vision, strategy, task breakdown, and feedback loops. Kent Beck, creator of Extreme Programming, tells you what he’s doing and the principles guiding his choices.
  4. Junior Developers and Generative AI – Camille Fournier, Avi Flombaum, and Maxi Ferreira (15 minutes)
    Is bypassing junior engineers a recipe for short-term gain but long-term instability? Or is it a necessary evolution in a high-efficiency world? Hear three experts discuss the trade-offs in team composition, mentorship, and organizational health in an AI-augmented industry.

  5. My LLM Codegen Workflow at the Moment – Harper Reed (15 minutes)
    Technologist Harper Reed takes you through his LLM-based code generation workflow and shows how to integrate various tools like Claude and Aider, gaining insights into optimizing LLMs for real-world development scenarios, leading to faster and more reliable code production.
  6. Jay Parikh and Gergely Orosz Fireside Chat (15 minutes)
    Jay Parikh, executive vice president at Microsoft, and Gergely Orosz, author of The Pragmatic Engineer, discuss AI’s role as the “third runtime,” the lessons from past technological shifts, and why software development isn’t disappearing—it’s evolving.
  7. The Role of Developer Skills in Today’s AI-Assisted World – Birgitta Böckeler (15 minutes)
    Birgitta Böckeler, global lead for AI-assisted software delivery at Thoughtworks, highlights instances where human intervention remains essential, based on firsthand experiences. These examples can inform how far we are from “hands-free” AI-generated software and the skills that remain essential, even with AI in the copilot seat.
  8. Modern Day Mashups: How AI Agents Are Reviving the Programmable Web – Angie Jones (5 minutes)
    Angie Jones, global vice president of developer relations at Block, explores how AI agents are bringing fun and creativity back to software development and giving new life to the “programmable web.”
  9. Tipping AI Code Generation on its Side – Craig McLuckie (5 minutes)
    The current wave of AI code generation tools are closed, vertically integrated solutions. The next wave will be open, horizontally aligned systems. Craig McLuckie explores this transformation, why it needs to happen, and how it will be led by the community.
  10. Prompt Engineering as a Core Dev Skill: Techniques for Getting High-Quality Code from LLMs – Patty O’Callaghan (5 minutes)
    Patty O’Callaghan highlights practical techniques to help teams generate high-quality code with AI tools, including an “architecture-first” prompting method that ensures AI-generated code aligns with existing systems, contextual scaffolding techniques to help LLMs work with complex codebases, and the use of task-specific prompts for coding, debugging, and refactoring.
  11. Chip Huyen and swyx Fireside Chat (20 minutes)
    Chip Huyen will delve [Aha! An AI wrote this! — Joey] into the practical challenges and emerging best practices for building real-world AI applications, with a focus on how foundation models are enabling a new era of autonomous agents.

  12. Bridging the AI Learning Gap: Teaching Developers to Think with AI – Andrew Stellman (15 minutes)
    Andrew Stellman, software developer and author of Head First C#, shares lessons from Sens-AI, a learning path built specifically for early-career developers, and offers insights into the gap between junior and senior engineers.
  13. Lessons Learned Vibe Coding and Vibe Debugging a Chrome Extension with Windsurf – Iyanuoluwa Ajao (5 minutes)
    Software and AI engineer Iyanuoluwa Ajao explores the quirks of extension development and how to vibe code one from scratch. You’ll learn how chrome extensions work under the hood, how to vibe code an extension by thinking in flows and files, and how to vibe debug using dependency mapping and other techniques.
  14. Designing Intelligent AI for Autonomous Action – Nikola Balic (5 minutes)
    Nikola Balic, head of growth at VC-funded startup Daytona, will show through case studies like AI-powered code generation and autonomous coding, you’ll learn key patterns for balancing speed, safety, and strategic decision-making—and gain a road map for catapulting legacy systems into agent-driven platforms.
  15. Secure the AI: Protect the Electric Sheep – Brett Smith (5 minutes)
    Distinguished software architect, engineer, and developer Brett Smith discusses AI security risks to the software supply chain, covering attack vectors, how they relate to the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, and how they tie into scenarios in CI/CD pipelines. You’ll learn techniques for closing the attack vectors and protecting your pipelines, software, and customers.
  16. How Does GenAI Affect Developer Productivity? – Chelsea Troy (15 minutes)
    The advent of consumer-facing generative models in 2021 catalyzed a massive experiment in production on our technical landscape. A few years in, we’re starting to see published research on the results of that experiment. Join Chelsea Troy, leader of Mozilla’s MLOps team, for a tour through the current findings and a few summative thoughts about the future.
  17. Eval Engineering: The End of Machine Learning Engineering as We Know It – Lili Jiang (15 minutes)
    Lili Jiang, former Waymo evaluation leader, reveals how LLMs are transforming ML engineering. Discover why evaluation is becoming the new frontier of ML expertise, how eval metrics are evolving into sophisticated algorithms, and why measuring deltas instead of absolute performance creates powerful development flywheels.
  18. Closing Remarks – Tim O’Reilly (10 minutes)

Interested? Register here.

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Meetups Tampa Bay What I’m Up To

My photos from last Wednesday’s “meetup of Tampa Bay technology meetups”

Last Wednesday, Tampa Devs led a meetup of Tampa Bay technology meetups, and it was a hit! My thanks to Nelson Yee for helping put this event together (and very quickly, too) and for James Gress for his presentation on the state of AI.

I took some photos of the event and am sharing them here. You can find even more photos in Nelson’s post on LinkedIn.

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Meetups Programming Tampa Bay What I’m Up To

Tampa Bay Python is under new management!

Thank you, Joe Blankenship, for all you do!

In case you missed organizer Joe Blankenship’s announcement, he’s become quite busy with his new venture, A Valid Company, and won’t have the bandwidth to run Tampa Bay Python.

As not only the organizer behind Tampa Bay Python, but also the Chief Data Officer of Certus Core and one of the people behind the Data4 conference, he’s a tech powerhouse, and we should expect to see great things from A Valid Company! I’d like to thank Joe for all the work he’s done for the local Python and tech communities.

And now, the new organizer…

…that would be me.

In case you’re not aware, I’ve been programming in Python since 1999. I had to learn it while on vacation the week before a Python programming job, and said vacation was at Burning Man ’99.

My favorite way to describe Burning Man is like a circus-meets-rave in the desert, and it’s up to you to provide the entertainment. The motto at the time was “There are no spectators; only participants.”

Version 1.0.0

It turns out that most of the partying happens at night, and mornings at Burning Man are relatively mellow. The mornings were when I learned Python, armed with my trusty Toshiba Satellite 4015CDT (Pentium II running at 266 MHz; I’d boosted the RAM to 96 MB) and a paperback copy of Mark Lutz’s book, Learning Python (first edition, of course). I fell in love with the language — after all, any language that you can learn amidst the chaos of Burning Man has to be a good one!

Since then, I’ve been using Python for all sorts of things, including generating the weekly tech events list that appears on this blog every Friday. I’m honored to be the new organizer for Tampa Bay Python!

I’m already working on ideas for upcoming Tampa Bay Python meetups, but if you have suggestions for topics that Tampa Bay Python should cover, I’d love to hear them — just drop me a line at joey@joeydevilla.com or via any of my social media accounts.

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Artificial Intelligence Career What I’m Up To

Claude does impression of me, comes up with new acronym: STARBS

Ben Affleck’s interview scene from “Good Will Hunting”.

I’m working on some new videos for the Global Nerdy YouTube channel, and one of them is on answering questions in the dreaded “behavioral interview.” That’s the interview where you’re asked questions like “Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a conflict on your team. How did you handle it?”

To help come up with ideas for the video about behavioral interviews, I posed some questions to LLMs. As I like to say, no matter how creative or clever you are, it is by definition impossible to make a list of ideas that you’d never come up with yourself.

So I posed this question to Claude, which for some reason, seems to know stuff about me:

How would you describe a behavioral interview, if you had to describe it in the style of Joey deVilla?

And wow, was the response snark-tastic:

Here’s the text of the response:

Joey deVilla’s Guide to Behavioral Interviews

Imagine me adjusting my accordion straps and coffee mug before dropping this knowledge bomb…

So you wanna know about behavioral interviews? Those corporate rituals where they ask you to “Tell me about a time when…” instead of just asking if you can do the damn job?

Behavioral interviews are the tech industry’s version of “Show, don’t tell” – except instead of showing your actual skills, you’re telling stories about when you supposedly used them! It’s like your professional life as fan fiction, where the hiring manager is desperately hoping you’re not writing in the genre of fantasy.

These interviews operate on the radical premise that past behavior predicts future performance. Revolutionary, I know! It’s like assuming that because I once played “Lady of Spain” on my accordion at a Tampa dev meetup, I’ll do it again given the chance and sufficient sangria.

The formula they want is STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result. But what they’re REALLY looking for is STARBS: Situation, Task, Action, Result, Bull$#!t – that special sauce where you frame yourself as the hero who saved the project while maintaining perfect diplomatic relations with that passive-aggressive PM who kept moving the goalposts.

The trick isn’t just recounting what happened – it’s storytelling with a corporate-friendly narrative arc. You need conflict (but not TOO much conflict), challenges (that showcase your skills), and resolution (where you emerge victorious but humble).

Remember: in behavioral interviews, there are no failures – only “growth opportunities” and “valuable lessons” that conveniently transformed you into exactly the employee they’re looking for!

Adjusts glasses, takes dramatic sip of coffee

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go practice my own STAR stories for when someone inevitably asks me about “a time I demonstrated adaptability in a challenging situation” – which is code for “that time I coded for 36 hours straight because someone in management promised an impossible deadline.”

My questions, after reading Claude’s output:

  1. Am I really that much of a smart-ass?
  2. “STARBS” — Situation, Task, Actions, Result, Bullshit — is pretty clever. Whose writing did Claude lift that from?

So I did some web searches using terms like starbs star situation task action result bullshit, and couldn’t find any instance of STARBS. It seems to be one of those effectively new creations that an autocomplete-on-steroids can generate.

I’m not gonna lie: I kind of like STARBS, and wish that I’d come up with it myself.

(If you’re interested, see if you can do some searches to find other instances of the term STARBS.)

Categories
Conferences Programming What I’m Up To

I’m speaking at Kansas City Developer Conference!

I’ve just been informed that I’ll be one of the speakers at the 2025 edition of KCDC — Kansas City Developer Conference — which takes place August 13 through 15!

What is KCDC?

This will be the 16th KCDC, and it’ll take place at the Kansas City Convention Center in downtown Kansas City, Missouri.

KCDC draws 2000+ attendees each year and features tracks for the following topics:

  • Architecture
  • AI and Data Science
  • Cloud
  • Data
  • DevOps
  • Human Skills
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • Methodologies and Process Management
  • .NET
  • Other Technologies
  • Security
  • Testing and QA
  • UI/UX and Design

My talk

My talk, titled The Best, Most Fun Python Platform You’ve Never Heard Of, is a programmer’s introduction to the powerful, fun, and all-too-often-ignored Ren’Py. While Ren’Py is called a “visual novel engine,” I prefer to think of it as the fastest, most fun way to create Python applications.

Here’s the description for my talk:

Python’s occupied the number one spot on the TIOBE Programming Community Index for the past couple of years, and it’s the preferred programming language in for AI and data science. Perhaps you’ve been thinking about learning it, but the thought of having to do another set of “Hello World” style exercises is filling you with dread. Is there a more fun way to get up to speed with Python?

Yes, there is, and it’s called Ren’Py. It’s billed as a visual novel engine and often used for writing dating simulation games, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a platform that lets you code in Python (and more) and deploy to desktop, web, and even mobile platforms, and with a fraction of the effort required by React, Vue, or Angular. It’s a fun framework that’s been used to produce games you can find on Steam, but it’s got applications well beyond amusement.

In this session, we’ll look not just at the basics of Ren’Py development, but the building of a dating game based on KFC’s official game, “I Love You Colonel Sanders,” a simple turn-based combat game starring Florida Man, and building mobile apps in a way that’s less frustrating than usual.

Chris Ayers is speaking too!

Better still, I won’t be the only Tampa Bay geek speaking — Chris Ayers will be there too, and he’ll be delivering his talk, The Power of Dev Containers and GitHub Codespaces:

Dive into the future of software development with our session on Dev Containers and GitHub Codespaces. Dev Containers bring reproducibility and consistency across any platform with Docker, simplifying project onboarding and setup. GitHub Codespaces takes this a step further, offering scalable, cloud-hosted development environments, accessible from anywhere.

In this session, you’ll gain insights into:

  • Dev Containers Fundamentals: Understand their role in creating consistent development environments.
  • GitHub Codespaces Integration: Explore how Codespaces enhances Dev Containers, providing flexible, cloud-based development.
  • Practical Implementation: Learn to configure Dev Containers for your projects, including tool installation, VS Code extensions, port forwarding, and software setup.
  • Maximizing Codespaces: Discover how to customize Codespaces for remote development efficiency.

François Martin will be there!

If you were at the March Tampa Bay Java User Group meetup, you saw François Martin deliver a presentation with a not-at-all-controversial title: Why Software Testing is a Waste of Time.

Anitra and I had the pleasure of taking him around Tampa while he was in town, and I even lucked out by being able to catch up with him for dinner while we were in Greece earlier this month!

He’ll deliver two talks at KCDC:

  • 82 Bugs I Collected in a Year You Won’t Believe Made It to Production
  • How writing just one import the wrong way slows down your website

…and yes, I’m bringing the accordion.

Categories
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)!

Categories
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!