…appears in Vasily “vas3k” Zubarev’s Machine Learning for Everyone, which begins with:
Machine Learning is like sex in high school. Everyone is talking about it, a few know what to do, and only your teacher is doing it.
Here’s the “official unofficial” list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for Monday, April 15 through Sunday, April 21, 2024.
This week’s events
- Monday, April 15
- Tuesday, April 16
- Wednesday, April 17
- Thursday, April 18
- Friday, April 19
- Saturday, April 20
- Sunday, April 21
Monday, April 15
Monday at 5:30 at Kforce, Tampa: Tampa Java User Group has not one, but two presentations:
- Developer Career Masterplan by Bruno Souza, Summa Technologies, and
- GenAI with Java and AWS by Vinicius Senger, AWS
Find out more and register here.
Monday at 6:30 at Buddy Brew Coffee, Tampa: Tampa Machine Learning is a new meetup group, and they’re holding their first “Coffee and ML” meetup! Find out more and register here.
Tuesday, April 16
All day Tuesday at Armature Works, Tampa: The Civo Navigate Local conference features talks and workshops on cloud native, emerging tech, AI/ML, and thought leadership, all brought to you by my favorite cloud hosting company, Civo! Use my discount code, JDCIVOLOCAL, which knocks down the admission price from $40 to $10! Find out more and register here.
Wednesday, April 17
Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Entrepreneur Collaborative Center, Tampa: Data Analytics Tampa Bay will feature Sri Subramanian, Head of Data Engineering, SurveyMonkey, who will talk about Snowflake Data Cloud, it’s end-to-end architecture, and how it can serve as a single, scalable data platform for a variety of use cases, such as data lake to data warehouse to ML. Find out more and register here.
Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. at Bar Louie, Tampa: Tampa Bay User Experience’s happy hour sponsored by UserTesting is your chance to meet other local UXers and get your questions answered about all things UserTesting. Find out more and register here.
Thursday, April 18
Thursday at 5 p.m. at Walk-On’s Sports Bistreaux, Tampa: Tech on Tap is hosting their monthly tech networking get-together in Midtown Tampa. Find out more and register here.
Thursday at 5:30 p.m. at Vaco Tampa: High Tech Connect is holding their networking event at Vaco’s new “Skycenter” space! Find out more and register here.
Thursday at 6:00 p.m. at St. Petersburg College EpiCenter Campus: Tampa Bay Techies, Tampa Devs, and Tampa Java User Group are jointly hosting the event “Seamless Infrastructure: Master Automated Deployments on AWS.” It will be an immersive Terraform CI/CD and Testing on AWS workshop led by Kevon Mayers, Solutions Architect, AWS. Find out more and register here.
Thursday at 6:00 p.m. at Bahama Breeze at Rocky Point (Tampa): Tampa Bay InfraGard is holding their bi-monthly networking social! Find out more and register here.
Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at Cigar City Brewery, Tampa: Lean Beer for All Things Agile! It’s a lean coffee-style discussion, but in the evening, and with beer, where you can discuss anything agile or lean! Find out more and register here.
Friday, April 19
Saturday, April 20
Sunday, April 21
About this list
How do I put this list together? It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.
In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.
What goes into this list? I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:
- 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 and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
- Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
- Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
- Anything I deem geeky
You can register for next Tuesday’s Civo Navigate Local Tampa 2024 conference, happening at Armature Works, for the low, low price of TEN DOLLARS with this discount code…
JDCIVOLOCAL
…as opposed to the regular price of $40 (still a deal, but you can spend the $30 you saved on Bake’n Babes cookies or whatever else you prefer from Armature Works’ food stalls).
What’s Civo Navigate Local Tampa?
Civo Navigate Local Tampa is a one-day version of Civo’s 2-day Navigate conferences, with a stronger focus on local organization and techies. It will feature four topic categories…
- Cloud Native
- AI/ML
- Emerging Tech
- Thought Leadership
…over two tracks:
- A main stage track with panels and presentations, and
- A workshop track with lightning talks and workshops
Want to know what Civo’s two-day conference is like? Here’s a video summary of the most recent one, held in Austin in February:
Want to know more? All the details are on the Civo Navigate Local Tampa site.
We needed one, and we now have one again: Tampa Bay has a product meetup and it’s happening this Tuesday, April 9 at Kforce at 6:30 p.m.!
ℹ️ Want to attend this meetup? Register here.
It doesn’t matter if you make or sell physical products, software products, or service products. If you’re in “The Other Bay Area” and you manage (or want to manage) a product — a thing or service that you sell to customers to fulfill a need or want — you’ll want to attend this meetup.
As it says on the page for the upcoming meetup:
This group is for professionals who are passionate about Agile, Product Development, and Product Creation. We connect to share experiences, knowledge, and best practices in Lean Product Development. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting out, this group is the perfect place to network, learn, and grow in the field of product development. Let’s collaborate, innovate, and elevate our skills together!
The hosts will be:
- Nisha Patel, Product Manager at RevStar, S&R Candle Company, and 3T Career Institute, as well as a co-organizer of Tampa Bay’s chapter of Women in Agile, and all-round regular at local agile events, and
- Om Patel, Enterprise Business Agility Consultant at ClearlyAgile, organizer of the local Lean Beer events, and co-host of the Arguing Agile podcast!
If you plan to attend, be sure to register for it; registration helps meetup organizers figure out how much food to order. And yes, refreshments will be served.
Location note: For those of you who haven’t been to Kforce in a while, the Kforce office is no longer in Ybor; it’s now in Midtown Tampa, a stone’s throw from the Whole Foods.
Tap to view at full size.
To me, it always felt that I learned better and retained more if I took notes by hand rather than typing them in, and there’s research that backs up my hunch!
Scientific American points to a study published in the January 25, 2024 issue of Frontiers in Psychology with one of those “the answer is in the title” titles: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom.
Tap to view at full size.
The gist of the Scientific American article:
- Taking notes by hand versus typing results in more electrical activity across many interconnecting brain regions that handle things like:
- movement
- vision
- sensory processing
- memory
- It’s slower than typing, which means you have to pick and choose what you record, forcing you to:
- prioritize the information you’re presented with
- figure out what the main points are
- relate what you’re writing notes about to what you’ve learned before
- …and that means you’re more likely to stay engaged and grasp new concepts better
- Writing by hand means that your motor and memory systems have to work together, which improves your memory of what you’re writing notes about
Tap to view at full size.
As Unified API’s newest member and Supreme Developer Advocate, I have a lot of work ahead of me — and a lot of note-taking. So I customized a notebook from a Scrum software vendor (I can’t even remember when I got it) with Unified’s octopus logo (see the photo above) and have been taking furious notes. As a result, I’m retaining what I’m learning, which is very, very important at this very early stage in the game.
If you’re learning something new, trying breaking away from the computer as a note-taking device, get a paper notebook, and try writing notes by hand! You may be pleasantly surprised.
Reading list
- Scientific American: Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning (21 February 2024)
- Frontiers in Psychology: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom (25 January 2024)
- Forbes: Four Reasons To Take Notes By Hand (22 April 2021)
- Scientific American: A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop (3 June 2014)
- Association for Psychological Science: The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking (22 May 2014)
And to be thorough, here’s an article that suggests that it’s not as cut-and-dried as the articles and papers listed above say:
- McGill University’s Office for Science and Society: Pen and Paper Versus Laptop: Is There a Clear Winner in the Note-Taking Olympics? (20 September 2019)
Here’s the “official unofficial” list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for Monday, April 8 through Sunday, April 14, 2024.
This week’s events
- Monday, April 8
- Tuesday, April 9
- Wednesday, April 10
- Thursday, April 11
- Friday, April 12
- Saturday, April 13
- Sunday, April 14
Monday, April 8
Tuesday, April 9
Tuesday morning at 10:00 a.m., online: Computer Coach presents How to Get the Most out of Networking, where an expert facilitator will guide you through the essential steps for successful networking:
- Identify the right people to network with
- How to make meaningful connections
- How to build lasting relationships that can benefit your career
- The latest networking trends and strategies
- How to leverage social media and other digital tools to expand your network and reach new opportunities
Find out more and register here.
Tuesday evening at 5:30 p.m. @ Entrepreneur Collaborative Center, Tampa: Computer Coach presents Tech Navigator: Exploring IT Careers, featuring this panel of experts, boasting rich experiences across various tech domains, who’ll share their tech career insights and journeys:
- Joel Morales – Director, ATGS Cloud
- Peter Bagley – Sr Cybersecurity Engineer, CACI International
- Angelica Chadwick – Managing Director of Technology, StevenDouglas
- Jeremy Smearman – Sr Project Manager, Atlantic Digital
- Eddie Martinez – Director of Digital Strategy, Maintain Digital
Find out more and register here.
Tuesday evening at 6:30 p.m. @ Kforce, Midtown Tampa: Tampa Bay has a product meetup again! This group is for professionals who are passionate about Agile, Product Development, and Product Creation. If you build products of any kind — physical products, software products, service products — you’ll want to catch this meetup.
Find out more and register here.
Wednesday, April 10
Wednesday evening at 6:00 p.m. @ Entrepreneur Collaborative Center, Tampa: Tampa Bay QA & Testing Meetup presents How Quality Assurance Principles Elevate Your Life. This will be a session with Jaime Mantila, a Quality Engineering Manager at PwC, as he shares insights from his 15-year journey in Quality Assurance (QA). Having worked with top firms like AgileThought, Raymond James, and Citi, Jaime has encapsulated his experiences in his 2023 book, Software Testing Explained.
Find out more and register here.
Wednesday evening at 7:00 p.m., online: Google Women Techmakers Florida presents Google Career Certificates Overview- What Are They and Are They Worth It? This will be a workshop focused on empowering professional women in the tech industry, where they’ll review Google’s career certifications .
Find out more and register here.
Thursday, April 11
Friday, April 12
Saturday, April 13
Sunday, April 14
About this list
How do I put this list together? It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.
In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.
What goes into this list? I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:
- 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 and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
- Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
- Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
- Anything I deem geeky
I knew that office art would come in handy.
Long story short: I’m joining Unified API — or “Unified” for short, online at unified.to —as their Supreme Leader of All Things Developer Relations. That’s not my official title, but it’s the most accurate description of my role.
Unified’s product, like the best startup products, is something its founders needed but couldn’t find, so they made it: a unified API.
It’s a way to call all a whole lot of SaaS APIs from all sorts of categories — HR, ATS, CRM, marketing, authentication — from a single API.
If you’re going to join a startup, you had better believe in the founders, and I believe in Unified’s founders, CEO Roy Pereira and CTO Alexey Adamsky. I know them from when I live in Toronto — Roy from Toronto’s strong startup scene and its then-monthly DemoCamp gatherings…
…and Alexey, who developed one of the apps that I regularly showcased when I was Microsoft Canada’s breadth developer advocate for Windows Phone 7:
I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting and being vetted by Unified’s Head of Marketing, Kailah Bharath and Head of Sales Michelle Tomicic:
And yes, with the addition of Yours Truly, that’s the entire company. I’m back in startup mode!
vs. working in big tech. Tap to view the source.
It’s going to be an interesting change of pace, moving from a big tech company to a small and scrappy startup, but part of the allure is the adventure. As Gergely “Pragmatic Engineer” Orosz puts it, the good part about startups is that they’re are amazing places to learn in, and you can make a large impact and directly influence the company.
Of course, adventure doesn’t come without a “risk tax.” Being in a startup can be unsettling: there’s less financial stability, you can’t “coast,” and you’re always looking over your shoulder for the ever-present spectre of potential failure. But I prefer to live by this Venn diagram:
Unified is based in Toronto, but I will remain based here in “The Other Bay Area,” Tampa Bay, operating from my home office, pictured below…
I’m going to spend a lot of time going over Unified’s documentation, SDKs, blog, white papers, dashboard, and every other part of the developer experience and do what I can to make a great developer tool even better!
I’m looking forward to the adventure with Unified!