Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, August 9, 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 9 through Sunday, August 15, 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”!

This list 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 9

Tuesday, August 10

Wednesday, August 11

Thursday, August 12

Friday, August 13

Saturday, August 14

Sunday, August 15

Tampa Bay Tech News

Fast, the one-click-checkout-as-a-service company, chooses Tampa as its east coast hub

From St. Pete Catalyst:

San Francisco-based fintech startup Fast, an online checkout company, is expanding to Tampa. 

Fast announced the plans on Tuesday during an event in partnership with Tampa Mayor Jane Castor, NASCAR driver Parker Kligerman and other local athletes at Sparkman Wharf.

Fast CEO Domm Holland will lead the efforts to expand in Tampa and name it the company’s East Coast hub. Holland co-founded the company with former Uber operations executive Allison Barr Allen. 

“I’ve been asked by many Silicon Valley friends why Tampa? One of the biggest reasons is Mayor Jane Castor,” Holland said, crediting her understanding of his business needs and how Fast fits into the city’s goals of bolstering the tech sector. 

“I wanted to be in an area brimming with innovative energy and stocked with skilled talent,” Holland said.

Want to know more about Fast? Check out this article in protocol, Fast has a plan to reinvent online shopping. And then kill the password as well as this interview from episode 1103 of This Week In Startups where Jason Calacanis interviews Domm Holland:

Tampa-based tech company, Blue.cloud, nimbly transitions to successfully grow revenue 200% amidst pandemic

From That’s So Tampa:

Here in Tampa Bay, a not-so-quiet tech boom was already underway. From Oldsmar and Clearwater to Tampa and St. Pete, more and more tech companies were choosing to move to – or get their start in – the area. So when the world transitioned from hard copy to the cloud, the region was well-prepared to step into the role everyone needed: help figuring all that stuff out.

Perhaps the best example is Blue.cloud, a cloud-only digital transformation company that got its start in Tampa Bay. Having already been in operation for more than 15 years, Blue.cloud (formerly Bluenet, founded in 2004) was one of the industry leaders in a perfect position to leap to the rescue last March.

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
Mobile Programming

The “Awesome Android Complete Reference” repo on GitHub

This article is part of the Android August series, in which I’m writing an Android development a day during the month of August 2021.

Today, I’m giving you a quick entry for Android August: The Awesome Android Complete Reference repo on GitHub. This is a curated list of great Android development reference material, including tutorials, projects showcasing various architectures, third-party libraries, UI references, notes on performance and optimization, best practices, and more.

Categories
Mobile Programming

FREE video learning for the beginning Android developer

This article is part of the Android August series, in which I’m writing an Android development a day during the month of August 2021.

While you can buy Android video courses on Udemy and other places, don’t forget that there’s a good selection of great video tutorials for free. These are my current favorites.

Kotlin for Beginners

If you’re new to Android development, chances are that you’ll actually be learning not one, but two different things simultaneously: the Android framework and the Kotlin programming language.

If you want a solid grasp of Kotlin, I can’t thnk of a better YouTube video than Donn Felker’s Kotlin for Beginners. The video is almost 10 hours long, but it’s quite thorough. Even experienced developers who are new to Kotlin will find it helpful:

Build a Simple Android App

My current favorite Android tutorial video on YouTube is Philipp Lackner’s Build a Simple Android App, which walks you through the process of building a “to-do list” app in just over an hour:

Google’s Android Basics in Kotlin course

Straight from the Google mothership, Android Basics in Kotlin is a YouTube video-based course that tries to walk the middle road between teaching Android development and teaching Kotlin. It does this by having you build a set of apps.

If you’re into certifications, this course is designed to prepare you for the Associate Android Developer certification exam. Units 1 through 5 of the course are available, and there’s a Unit 6 coming soon!

Categories
Hardware Mobile What I’m Up To

Soon…

I’ll admit it. I’ve been watching my new phone — a RedMagic 6R Android gaming phone, which I wrote about in this article — travel from the factory in Hong Kong all the way to my house in Tampa.

As I write this, it landed in FedEx’s Memphis facility two hours ago.

Soon!

Categories
Mobile Podcasts

Recommended Android developer podcasts for 2021

This article is part of the Android August series, in which I’m writing an Android development-related article every day during the month of August 2021.

If you’re a regular podcast listener and an Android developer (or an aspiring Android developer), you’ll want to check out these podcasts. Not only are they informative, but they’re also active, or in other words, they’re still in the process of making more episodes. Add them to your playlist and deepen your Android knowledge!

Android Developers Backstage (171 episodes)

This is probably the longest-running Android developer podcasts. Hosted by Nick and Romain, two developers from the Android engineering team, Android Developers Backstage covers topics of interest to Android programmers, with in-depth discussions and interviews with engineers on the Android team at Google.

Jetpack Compose, the reactive data-driven UI toolkit for Android, has finally hit the 1.0 stage, and it’s included in the “Arctic Fox” release of Android Studio. It’s the hot new thing, and Android Developers Backstage is right on top of it, with several recent episodes covering different aspects of Jetpack Compose.

Fragmented: The Software Podcast (220 episodes)

For sheer volume of developer-focused episodes and topics, you can’t beat Fragmented, the Android-centric developer podcast hosted by Donn Felker and Kaushik Gopal. While they do talk a lot about Android, they focus on all sorts of topics that are relevant to software developers of all stripes, such as the importance of having a growth mindset, the importance of code conventions, the three things every developer needs to be able to do, growing an online presence in the software industry, and more.

Talking Kotlin (101 episodes)

I’m sure that there are still lots of Android developers out there who prefer to code in Java, but as far as I’m concered, Kotlin is the Android programming language. And wouldn’t you know it — there is a Kotlin programming podcast, and it comes straight from the source: JetBrains, the dev tool vendor behind Android Studio and Kotlin. Better still, it’s hosted by Kotlin’s best advocate, Hadi Hariri, JetBrains’ VP of Developer Advocacy.

Now in Android (43 episodes)

This is the official Android developer podcast, put together by the Android team. It provides summaries of what the Android team has been up to that you, the developer should know about. It covers library and platform releases, articles, videos, podcasts, samples, code labs — whatever seems relevant and interesting for Android developers.

Lately, there’ve been a number of episodes covering the beta version of the upcoming Android 12.

All About Android (535 episodes)

“All About Android” is aptly named: For over 500 episodes, they’ve been covering all sorts of Android developments — “the biggest news, freshest hardware, best apps and geekiest how-tos”.

POW! Samsung Developer Program (21 episodes)

Samsung, the people behind what’s considered to be the Android flagship phone, have a developer podcast: POW! The Samsung Developers Podcast. It’s hosted Samsung senior developer evangelist Tony Morelan, Sr..

The RayWenderlich.com Podcast

This is the official podcast of my friends at RayWenderlich.com, the premier mobile development tutorial site. RayWenderlich.com started off as an iOS dev tutorial site (it’s how I learned), but they’ve expanded to cover Android, Unity, and Flutter development, and so has the podcast.

Categories
Career

Hillsborough County Paid Training and Work Experience Program

If you are:

  • A resident of Hillsborough County
  • Between the ages of 18 and 24
  • Want training to work in high-demand fields
  • Want to get paid work experience

…then you’ll want to catch this online event next Monday, August 9th at 2:00 p.m.: An orientation for the paid training and work experience you can get from ACE, the Apprenticeship to Career Empowerment program!

ACE provides training and paid experience by partnering people age 18 through 24 with local employer for paid apprenticeships in areas including:

  • Business administration
  • Coding
  • Cybersecurity
  • Digital marketing

This orientation will cover the details of the ACE program, show you how to apply, and give you a chance to ask questions. If you’re looking for work in fields that provide lots of opportunity, good pay, and great prospects for your future, you don’t want to miss this — make sure that you (or a young person whose future you care about) sign up for this event!

Categories
Hardware Mobile

My next phone: Nubia RedMagic 6R

This article is part of the Android August series, in which I’m writing an Android development-related article every day during the month of August 2021.

This weekend, I placed an order for a RedMagic 6R from Nubia, the high-end branch of ZTE who’ve been making some interesting phones specifically for gaming. For US$500, you get the same processors as those in Samsung’s flagship phone, the Galaxy S21…

ChipsetQualcomm SM8350 Snapdragon 888 5G (5 nm)
CPU8 Kryo 680 cores:
📱 1 running at 2.84 GHz
📱 3 running at 2.42 GHz
📱 4 running at 1.80 GHz
GPUAdreno 660

…paired with an AMOLED screen that has a crazy 144 Hz refresh rates. With specs like these, it’s no wonder that it made GSMArena’s Best gaming phones 2021 buyer’s guide.

Want to know more about the RedMagic 6R? Here’s GSMArena’s video review:

My father-in-law needed an upgrade from his flip phone from the pleistocene epoch, so I decided to give him my current phone, a Moto One Hyper, and get a new one. The original plan was to go with my go-to Android phone vendor, Motorola (who typically give great bang for the buck), and get the G100.

But after seeing that the RedMagic 6R goes for the same price and with flagship specs (here’s a side-by-side spec chart for the 6R and the G100), I decided to make the leap.

Tap to view at full size.

Because I’m not in a complete hurry to get the phone and because I have some serious writing and editing to do this week and don’t want to be distracted by sweet new gear, I decided to be true to my Asian-ness and save about $80 by ordering the phone and a protective case directly from Nubia/ZTE rather than going through Amazon Prime and getting it the next day.

(Besides, I didn’t feel like buying Jeff Bezos more midlife crisis spaceship parts today.)

Tap to view at full size.

The phone left the warehouse in Yuen Long (a town in Hong Kong’s western New Territories), and is currently making its way to me in Tampa via FedEx.

What will I do with a gaming phone? Build apps for it with my newly-purchased gaming laptop by getting more familiar with this development tool:

I’ll post an unboxing video and other notes when it arrives. Watch this space!