Last night (Wednesday, June 21), Tampa Devs held a meetup at Embarc Collective with a great topic: Selling Yourself: The Art of Interviewing. They brought in some domain experts, who are also friends of this blog: Pitisci & Associates’ Craig Darrell, Brian Dodd, and Stephen Rideout, who were there to show us how to land a job.
Craig gave the presentation, which was eagerly absorbed by the audience, a lot of whom were first-time attendees of a Tampa Devs meetup. This was a crowd that was ready for their first or next job, and they had questions aplenty. Luckily for them, Craig, Brian, and Stever were there to answer them, and it looks like they had even more questions to answer after Craig’s talk.
It’s been a while, so let’s go back to the beginning and build an iOS app!
Join us on Monday, June 26 at 6:00 p.m. at Computer Coach to sit down, fire up Xcode, and write an iOS app. Register here!
It’s been a while since Tampa Bay has had a meetup for Apple platforms — iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and the upcoming visionOS (as in the OS for Apple’s Vision Pro, a.k.a. “the goggles”). The best way to learn how to develop for all of these platforms is to develop for iOS.
At this meetup, where we’ll build a simple iOS app and get re-acquainted with iOS development with Swift and SwiftUI.
Are you new to iOS development, the Swift programming language, Xcode, SwiftUI, or any combination of these? This meetup session is just for you! You’ll come to the meetup with your Mac with Xcode installed, and you’ll leave with a working app!
This meetup will be a “code along with the presenter” exercise. You’ll fire up Xcode, click File → New, and following the presenter’s work on the big screen, you’ll write code in Swift, build a user interface in SwiftUI, and compile and run the app. If you’ve never built an iOS app before — or it’s been a while — you’ll want to attend this meetup!
You’ll need:
A Mac computer — preferably a laptop, but we’ve had people bring in Mac desktops before.
Xcode 14.3.1. It’s free on the App Store, but it does take a while to download and install. It’s best if you install it in advance.
And because it’s hard to code on an empty stomach, we’ll provide the pizza, courtesy of our sponsor: Okta! We’d also like to thank Computer Coach for the generous use of their space.
Once again: Join us on Monday, June 26 at 6:00 p.m. at Computer Coach to sit down, fire up Xcode, and write an iOS app. Register here!
Here it is — the recording of my interview on the 4:00 p.m. news on FOX 13 Tampa with anchor Chris Cato, where I answered more questions about artificial intelligence:
In this quick interview, we discussed:
The “existential threat to humanity” that AI potentially poses: My take is that a lot of big-name AI people who fear that sort of thing are eccentrics who hold what AI ethicist Timnit Gebru calls the TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism) mindset. They’re ignoring a lot of closer-to-home, closer-to-now issues raised by AI because they’re too busy investing in having their heads frozen for future revival and other weird ideas of the sort that people with too much money and living in their own bubble tend to have.
My favorite sound bite: “The Terminator is not a documentary.”
A.I. regulation: Any new technology that has great power for good and bad should actually be regulated, just as we do with nuclear power, pharma, cars and airplanes, and just about anything like that. A.I. is the next really big thing to change our lives — yes, it should be regulated.” There’s more to my take, but there’s only so much you can squeeze into a two-and-a-half minute segment.
Cool things AI is doing right now: I named these…
Shel Israel (who now lives in Tampa Bay) is using AI to help him with his writing as he works on his new book,
I’m using it with my writing for both humans (articles for Global Nerdy as well as the blog that pays the bills, the Auth0 Developer Blog) as well as for machines (writing code with the assistance of Studio Bot for Android Studio and Github Copilot for iOS and Python development)
Preventing unauthorized access to systems with machine learning-powered adaptive MFA, which a feature offered by Okta, where I work.
My “every 13 years” thesis: We did a quick run-through of something I wrote about a month ago — that since “The Mother of All Demos” in 1969, there’s been a paradigm-changing tech leap every 13 years, and the generative AI boom is the latest one:
Tap to view at full size.
And finally, a plug for Global Nerdy! This blog has been mentioned before in my former life in Canada, but this is the first time it’s been mentioned on American television.
I’ll close with a couple of photos that I took while there:
In the green room, waiting to go on. Tap to view at full size.
The view from the interview table, looking toward the anchor desk. Tap to view at full size.
The cameras, teleprompters, and monitors. Tap to view at full size.
Once again, I’d like to thank producer Melissa Behling, anchor Chris Cato, and the entire Fox 13 Tampa Bay studio team! It’s always a pleasure to work with them and be on their show.
A screenshot from ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers.
Here’s something much better and more useful than anything you’ll find in the endless stream of “Chat Prompts You Must Know”-style articles — it’s ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers. This online tutorial shows you how to use API calls to OpenAI to summarize, infer, transform, and expand text in order to add new features to or form the basis of your applications.
Isa Fulford and Andrew Ng.
It’s a short course from DeepLearning.AI, and it’s free for a limited time. It’s taught by Isa Fulford of OpenAI’s tech staff and all-round AI expert Andrew Ng (CEO and founder of Landing AI, Chairman and co-founder of Coursera, General Partner at AI Fund, and an Adjunct Professor at the computer science department at Stanford University).
The course is impressive for a couple of reasons:
Its format is so useful for developers. Most of it takes place in a page divided into three columns:
A table of contents column on the left
A Jupyter Notebook column in the center, which you can select text and copy from, as well as edit and run. It contains the code for the current exercise
A video/transcript column on the right.
It’s set up very well, with these major sections:
Introduction and guidelines
Iterative prompt development
Summarizing text with GPT
Inferring — getting an understanding of the text, sentiment analysis, and extracting information
Transforming — converting text from one format to another, or even one language to another
Expanding — given a small amount of information, expanding on it to create a body of text
Chatbot — applying the techniques about to create a custom chatbot
Conclusion
And finally, it’s an Andrew Ng course. He’s just good at this.
The course is pretty self-contained, but you’ll find it helpful if you have Jupyter Notebook installed on your system , and as you might expect, you should be familiar with Python.
I’m going to take the course for a test run over the next few days, and I’ll report my observations here. Watch this space!
So what’s this beginner-friendly Android dev tool that we don’t know about?
The Ren’Py icon.
It’s Ren’Py, a “visual novel engine” that makes it easy to create visual novels — interactive stories featuring a combination of text, images, sound effects, and music — that run on computers and mobile devices.
There are a couple of ways to think of visual novels:
As a “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style book, but in electronic form, and backed with visuals, sound effects, music, and interactivity, or
As a story-driven, turn-based multimedia game, which can fit any number of genres, including adventures, simulations, or role-playing games.
What will Joey cover at the meetup?
In this meetup, Joey’s presentation will cover:
A quick intro to visual novels, including some delightfully ridiculous ones like Attack Helicopter Dating Simulator and I Love You, Colonel Sanders.
A tour of Ren’Py and its basic features.
A look at the code of a beginner-friendly project: a “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style game/novel.
A look at the code of a more advanced project: Attack on Walmart, a turn-based combat role-playing game.
Q&A, which in this case means Questions and Accordion!
Why is it called Ren’Py?
Ren’Py is a portmanteau of ren‘ai (恋愛), Japanese for “romantic love”…
…and Python, the programming language in which it’s implemented, and one of the languages you can use to create Ren’Py visual novels / games.
How much programming do I need to know to make visual novels or games in Ren’Py?
You’ve got options!
If you’re new to programming, Ren’py provides a scripting language that’s easy enough to let you get started writing visual novels after a couple of minutes’ worth of learning, but powerful enough to add a surprising amount of interactivity.
If you know Python or are an experienced programmer, you can harness the entire Python language and its libraries and geek out to your heart’s content.
And, yes, you can program using a mix of both Ren’Py’s programming language and Python.
What platforms can I use to develop Ren’Py visual novels and games?
You can run the Ren’Py development tool on Windows, macOS, and Linux…
…and with a little work, you can even do Ren’Py development on a Raspberry Pi!
What platforms do Ren’Py visual novels and games and run on?
The point of my presentation is that you can use Ren’Py to build visual novels and games for Android. Ren’Py can convert your scripts into an Android Studio project, which you can then deploy to your Android device or submit to the Play Store.
In case you missed it, here’s that interview I did for the 4:00 p.m. news on FOX 13 Tampa on Monday, April 10th with anchor Chris Cato:
It’s a follow-up to this piece that FOX 13 did back in March:
In that piece, I appeared along with:
Local realtor Chris Logan, who’s been using ChatGPT to speed up the (presumably tedious) process of writing up descriptions of houses for sale
University of South Florida associate director of the School of Information Systems and Management Triparna de Vreede, who talked about its possible malicious uses and what might be possible when AI meets quantum computing.
IP lawyer Thomas Stanton, who talked about how AI could affect jobs.
All of this is a good preamble for the first Tampa Artificial Intelligence Meetup session that I’ll be running — it’s happening on Wednesday, May 31st!
It’s been my experience that some of the most important things I’ve learned and all the connections I’ve made at conferences didn’t happen at the presentations. Instead, they happened between presentations — in the hallways, lounges, lunches, and social gatherings, where I had the chance to chat with the speakers, organizers, and the other attendees. This observation is so common that it’s given rise to “unconferences” like BarCamp, whose purpose is to invert the order of things so that the conference is more “hallway” than “lecture theatre”.
It’s especially important to talk to people you don’t know or who are outside your usual circle. Books like The Tipping Point classify acquaintances with such people as “weak ties”. Don’t let the word “weak” make you think they’re unimportant. As people outside your usual circle, they have access to a lot of information, people, and opportunities that you don’t. That’s why most people get jobs through someone they know, and of those cases, most of the references came from a weak tie. The sorts of opportunities that come about because of this sort of relationship led sociologist Mark Granovetter to coin the phrase “the strength of weak ties”.
The best way to make weak ties at a conference is to work the room. If the phrase sounds like sleazy marketing-speak and fills your head with images of popped collars and wearing too much body spray, relax. Working the room means being an active participant in a social event and contributing to it so that it’s better for both you and everyone else. Think of it as good social citizenship.
If you’re unsure of how to work the room, I’ve got some tips that you might find handy…
Have a one-line self-introduction
A one-line self-introduction is simply a single-sentence way of introducing yourself to people you meet at a conference. It’s more than likely that you won’t know more than a handful of attendees and introducing yourself over and over again, during the conference, as well as its post-session party events. It’s a trick that Susan RoAne, room-working expert and author of How to Work a Room: The Ultimate Guide to Making Lasting Connections In-Person and Online teaches, and it works. It’s pretty simple:
Keep it short — no longer than 10 seconds, and shorter if possible. It’s not your life story, but a pleasantry that also gives people just a little bit about who you are.
Make it fit. It should give people a hint of the cool stuff that you do (or, if you’re slogging it out in the hopes of doing cool stuff someday, the cool stuff that you intend to do.)
Show your benefits. Rather than simply give them your job title, tell them about a benefit that your work provides in a way that invites people to find out more. Susan RoAne likes to tell a story about someone she met whose one-liner was “I help rich people sleep at night”. That’s more interesting than “I’m a financial analyst”.
You’ll probably see a group of people already engaged in a conversation. If this is your nightmare…
Click the screenshot to read the Onion article.
…here’s how you handle it:
Pick a lively group of people you’d like to join in conversation. As people who are already in a conversation, they’ve already done some of the work for you. They’re lively, which makes it more likely that they’re open to people joining in. They’ve also picked a topic, which saves you the effort of having to come up with one. It also lets you decide whether or not it interests you. If they’re lively and their topic of conversation interests you, proceed to step 2. If not, go find another group!
Stand on the periphery and look interested. Just do it. This is a conference, and one of the attendees’ goals is to meet people. Smile. Pipe in if you have something to contribute; people here are pretty cool about that.
When acknowledged, step into the group. You’re in like Flynn! Step in confidently and introduce yourself. If you’ve got that one-line summary of who you are that I talked about earlier, now’s the time to use it.
Don’t force a change of subject. You’ve just joined the convo, and you’re not campaigning. Contribute, and let the subject changes come naturally.
Feel free to join me in at any conversational circle I’m in! I always keep an eye on the periphery for people who want to join in, and I’ll invite them.
More tips
Here’s more advice on how to work the room:
Listen! Yes, you’re there to talk, but so is everyone else. Make sure you listen to other people in the circle as they speak, and ask questions, too! One of the reasons you go to PyCon is to get exposed to new ideas. As I said earlier, learning goes beyond the talks. Try to learn three new things at every event.
Be more of a host and less of a guest. No, you don’t have to worry about scheduling or if the coffee urns are full. By “being a host”, I mean doing some of things that hosts do, such as introducing people, saying “hello” to wallflowers and generally making people feel more comfortable. Being graceful to everyone is not only good karma, but it’s a good way to promote yourself. It worked out really well for me; for example, I came to the first DemoCamp (a regular Toronto tech event back in the 2000s) as a guest, but by the third one, I was one of the people officially hosting the event.
Beware of “rock piles”. Rock piles are groups of people huddled together in a closed formation. It sends the signal “go away”. If you find yourself in one, try to position yourself to open up the formation.
Beware of “hotboxing”. I’ve heard this term used in counter-culture settings, but in this case “hotboxing” means to square your shoulders front-and-center to the person you’re talking to. It’s a one-on-one version of the rock pile, and it excludes others from joining in. Once again, the cure for hotboxing is to change where you’re standing to allow more people to join in.
Put your stuff down. Carrying your bag or other stuff is a non-verbal cue that you’re about to leave. If you’re going to stay and chat, put them down. When you’re about to leave, take your stuff and start saying your goodbyes.
Show and tell. Nothing attracts our eyes like shiny, whether it’s an interesting pieces of tech, a new book, a new t-shirt you’re fond of, or even some local knowledge, such a new restaurant, cafe, or bar that just opened. It’s why I carry my accordion around; I think of it as a device that converts curiosity into opportunity (and music as well). Got an interesting thing or idea? Got a neat project that you’ve been working on? Whatever it is, park yourself someplace comfortable in the hallway, show it off and start a conversation!
Save the email, tweets and texts for later, unless they’re important.They’ll draw your attention away from the room and also send the message “go away”.
Mentor. If you’ve got skills in a specific area, share your knowledge. Larry Chiang from GigaOm says that “It transitions nicely from the what-do-you-do-for-work question. It also adds some substance to party conversations and clearly brands you as a person.”
Play “conversation bingo”. If there are certain topics that you’d like to learn about or people you’d like to have a conversation with, put them in a list (mental, electronic or paper) of “bingo” words. As you converse at the conference, cross off any of those topics that you cover off the list. This trick forces you to become a more active listener and will help you towards your learning goals. Yelling “BINGO!” when you’ve crossed the last item on the list can be done at your discretion.
