Categories
Business Programming Tampa Bay

Tampa #1 on Forbes’ list of emerging tech cities (and other Tampa tech news)

Tampa is the city on Forbes’ list of emerging tech cites in the U.S.

“Tampa is quickly turning into Florida’s tech capital,” says the August 24th article in Forbes titled Emerging Tech Cities In The U.S.. “It has been exploding in the tech industry for several years now. There are over 50 software and IT companies in Tampa.”

In order, the cities in Forbes’ list of emerging tech cities are:

  1. Tampa (“Tampa is responsible for over 25% of Florida’s tech jobs, and there has been a massive surge in tech jobs in recent years.”)
  2. Miami (“In 2020, two of tech’s biggest names (and wallets) relocated to Miami to make it their permanent home. Founders Fund partner Keith Rabois and Blumberg Capital founder David Blumberg moved to Miami.”)
  3. New York City (“It’s not entirely a shocker considering how New York City is one of the centers for everything. Even that underplays the truly momentous amount of technological innovation that’s come out of that city in recent years.”)
  4. Austin (“It’s another city that’s been blowing up for the past few years as a result of an influx of tech talent.”)
  5. San Francisco (“You simply cannot comment on the current tech scene without considering its most famous, iconic setting.”)

12 Things You May Be Doing Wrong in Your Job Search (Tuesday @ 10:00 a.m., online)

When a job search starts to get frustrating, it may be that you’re making a few missteps. Find out if that’s the case at this Computer Coach workshop, 12 Things You May Be Doing Wrong in Your Job Search. Their workshops are always free, and Computer Coach are always helpful! (They’ve even helped me out.)

Tampa veterans use technology, connections to help Afghans evacuate

Quiet Professionals (whose name is derived from the sobriquet for the Green Berets) is a defense contractor based in Tampa’s Rocky Point, and they’re doing their part in Afghanistan with their OSINT (open source intelligence) dashboard to help people in Afghanistan find help and escape. You can find more in these stories:

You can also find out more on the Project Afghan Relief Fund site, and even directly help with a donation. I did, and you can too.

Tampa Bay coffee shops put tech to work to compete with national chains

Here’s a Tampa Bay Business Journals story on how three of our own local coffee chains — Blind Tiger, Buddy Brew, and Kahwa, all of whose brews I enjoy regularly — are competing against the megacoffeecorps with technology.

Give them some business! You won’t just be getting great coffee; you’ll also be investing in a local business, and helping the local area more interesting and less sterile.

Do you have mobile dev skills? These local companies are hiring.

A little while back, I posted an article titled So many Tampa Bay mobile dev job openings, so few applicants. The situation hasn’t changed much — there are still lots of local places who are looking for mobile developers:

Want to learn Android development or sharpen you Android dev skills? Join the GDG Suncoast Meetup and keep an eye open for their Android Study Jams, which happens every Wednesday.

I’m also looking at rebooting my Programmers of Portables meetup soon — watch this space!

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, August 30, 2021)

Here’s your weekly list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events — plus a little area tech news — for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, August 30 through Sunday, September 5, 2021.

This is a weekly service from Tampa Bay’s tech blog, Global Nerdy! For the past four years, I’ve been compiling a list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas. There’s a lot going on in our scene here in “The Other Bay Area, on the Other West Coast”!

As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:

  • Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
  • Tech project management / agile processes
  • Video, board, and role-playing games
  • Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
  • Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
  • Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
  • Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
  • Anything I deem geeky

By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.

With headlines like these…

…I’m limiting this list to online events only. In the age of broadband, Zoom, GitHub, and so many other ways to work collaboratively at a distance, it’s not that hard to meet online and do our part to help bring the pandemic under control.

This week’s events

Monday, August 30

Tuesday, August 31

Wednesday, September 1

Thursday, September 2

Friday, September 3

Saturday, September 4

Sunday, September 5

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!

Categories
Hardware Humor

A helpful hint if you’re selling your old gear

An actual item seen in Facebook Marketplace for Tampa. Even shrunk down, you can see that “like new” is a stretch. Tap to view at full size.

If you say that the (purportedly) little-used thing you’re selling is “like new”, you might want to give it a little cleaning before taking its picture.

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, August 23, 2021)

Here’s your weekly list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events — plus a little area tech news — for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, August 23 through Sunday, August 29, 2021.

Due to the recent steep climb in the number of COVID cases, I’m limiting the events listed to online ones for the time being.

This is a weekly service from Tampa Bay’s tech blog, Global Nerdy! For the past four years, I’ve been compiling a list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas. There’s a lot going on in our scene here in “The Other Bay Area, on the Other West Coast”!

As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:

  • Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
  • Tech project management / agile processes
  • Video, board, and role-playing games
  • Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
  • Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
  • Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
  • Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
  • Anything I deem geeky

I’m moving this list to Fridays so that you’ve got more time to plan for the upcoming week. Let me know if this change works for you (or if it doesn’t)!

By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.

This week’s events

Monday, August 23

Tuesday, August 24

Wednesday, August 25

Thursday, August 26

Friday, August 27

Saturday, August 28

Sunday, August 29

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!

Categories
Hardware Humor Mobile

I keep one in my wallet

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

Notable Tampa Bay ONLINE tech events this week (Week of Monday, August 16, 2021)

Tampa Bay Women in Tech’s Monday Night Pulse Check (Monday, August 16, 7:00 p.m.)

This is a regular gathering (currently online) held by Tampa Bay Women in Tech, which they use for open discussion — “an idea you want to unpack, a situation you need to temperature check, or a strategy you would like feedback, we have our own in-house experts here.”

✅ Find out more / register for this event here.

Tampa Bay Tech Career Advice Forum’s 4 Key Strategies to Landing Your Next Job (Tuesday, August 17, 10:00 a.m.)

When it comes to seminars on the topic of job hunting or career building in Tampa Bay, you can always count on the folks at Computer Coach/Tampa Bay Tech Career Advice Forum to provide useful info. Even though it’s the era of “The Great Resignation”, you still can’t land a job without using at least a couple of strategies.

✅ Find out more / register for this event here.

Learn Cybersecurity Tampa — Breaking Into Cybersecurity: Security Analyst (Tuesday, August 17, 8:00 p.m.)

This is billed as a “virtual fireside chat” by its hosts, Flatiron School and SecureSet Academy, featuring A career coach chatting with a cybersecurity bootcamp grad about how they broke into this in-demand industry. That’s not all that different from my story, and let me tell you: Working in the cybersecurity industry is pretty nice.

✅ Find out more / register for this event here.

Code Katas [Virtual] with Seattle JS Hackers (Tuesday, August 17, 8:30 p.m.)

A kata (from Japanese, meaning “form”) is a pattern of martial arts moves that are used as practice of the fundamentals to improve your fighting technique. A code kata is a coding exercise where you practice the fundamentals to improve your coding technique.

This is a joint Tampa Bay / Seattle online event, which will give you the opportunity to work with coders you probably haven’t met before.

✅ Find out more / register for this event here.

WITI Tampa Bay — Tech Trends presented by PwC (Wednesday, August 18, 5:30 p.m.)

At this online event, these speakers from PwC will talk about tech trends in their areas of work:

  • Mina Ghaani, Director of Product & Technology – PwC’s Technology Impact Office
  • Andrea Loeffert: Data & Analytics Manager
  • Nicole Roberts: Director – Testing Center of Excellence

✅ Find out more / register for this event here.

GDG SunCoast — Android Study Jams (Wednesday, August 18, 7:00 p.m.)

This is a regular online event (every Wednesday) where locals work on an Android app using the Kotlin programming language.

Topics that will be explored are:

  • Creating multiple layouts and adding user interactivity to our Android apps.
  • Defining navigation paths
  • Starting external activities
  • Handling complex lifecycle situations
  • Adding logging
  • Working with ViewModel and LiveData
  • Creating a database using the Room library
  • Displaying a list of clickable items with RecyclerView
  • Loading and displaying data from the internet
  • Making our app more accessible for all users.

✅ Find out more / register for this event here.

Tampa Cybersecurity Meetup — Cybersecurity for Beginners: Intro to Python (Thursday, August 19, 8:00 p.m.)

✅ Find out more / register for this event here.

Tampa Bay Tech Career Advice Forum — Panel Discussion: Working Well with Recruiters (Fridaty, August 20, 10:00 a.m.)

The Computer Coach/Tampa Bay Tech Career Advice Forum folks wrap up the working week with this online session where they’ve put together this panel of veteran recruiters to discuss how to effectively work with staffing firms and discuss tips and tricks for job seekers.

✅ Find out more / register for this event here.

Tampa Games Developer Guild — Game Project Therapy (Virtual) (Saturday, August 21, 4:00 p.m.)

This is an informal networking event open to new and veteran game developers from any background. Bring your projects, discuss best practices, share recommended plugins, code walkthroughs, debug your code, and brainstorm awesome game ideas.

✅ Find out more / register for this event here.

Want to know what else is going on this week in Tampa Bay’s tech, entrepreneur, and nerd scene?

Check out this week’s list of events.

Categories
Reading Material

Everything terrible about Medium, captured in a single post.

I stumbled across the headline I really hate the Medium experience, which resonated with me because — well, I really hate the Medium experience. When I tried to follow the link to read the article, I was presented with this:

Tap the image to view the terribleness at full size.

And that perfectly (and self-referentially too!) sums up the Medium experience.

If you’re writing developer articles, don’t write on Medium.

It won’t grow your audience or your reputation, the knowledge you’re trying to share will remain hidden as developers look elsewhere for answers, and you won’t be in control of your own content. Medium promises monetization, but speaking as someone who used to be able to pay the rent on Adsense revenues, articles don’t monetize that well anymore, and Medium pays worse.

Get a domain, set up whatever publishing system works for you, and post your articles there.

Don’t believe me? Listen to these people instead.