(YouTube titles and thumbnails can be changed even after the video is posted, and many YouTubers change them as they figure out which versions attract “search” and “browse” viewers.)
Selected moments from the video
Near the start of the video, I suggest to viewers that they try to come up with their own mantra to help them through their layoff journey:
I also remind viewers that there’s a difference between being fired and being laid off:
Here are some layoff stats to reassure you that if you’ve been laid off, you’re not alone:
Making things worse is the fact that shareholders love layoffs — they’re cost savings, which can boost stock prices:
Remember this motto:
I also go through some of the items in the Life Events Inventory, a ranked list of the most stressful events in life. Guess where getting laid off is in the list — I won’t show you kere, though; you’ll have to watch the video!
Here’s the most pithy advice I have for expressing the emotions you may have in the aftermath of being laid off, courtesy of Scott Hanselman:
I talk about the benefits of exercise…
…remind the viewer that it’s always 5 p.m. somewhere…
…and yes, I make a reference not just to “That Site,” but That Site’s identifying drum riff:
You don’t need a unicorn gratitude journal to make it through a layoff, but you should practice gratitude to help you through the process:
I suggest that it might be therapeutic to get rid of at least some of your (former) company swag, but hang on to the stuff that’s useful. I’m hanging on to the Patagonia sweater they sent to me (ironically, a week or so before they laid me off) because it’s nice and warm, and I’m willing to put up with the “VC Bro’ vibes it gives off:
And finally, here’s one of the images I use to explain that if you need therapy or counseling, get it:
Om Patel
Om is an enterprise business agility consultant with many years of experience coaching teams and leadership at clients in several industries. He has played different roles in his career from developer, product manager, project manager, and scrum master. Om has led agile transformations at companies like Walt Disney World, Atex Global, EY and PwC. He is actively involved in the agile community.
Brian Orlando
An expert in business agility, product, and an advocate for product-led growth. Brian builds and connects teams to vision and strategies, and continually transition my organizations toward a product-led culture.
Brian is also host of the Arguing Agile podcast, where he shares learnings, experiences, and stories from across his career. He strives to create quality products that solve real problems for the users and the business.
Mike Miller
Mike Miller is the kind of product nerd you’re glad you have around. With nearly 20 years in IT and 12 of those years dedicated to agile product management, he has seen just a out everything under the sun. Working on digital products in RMM, eComm, manufacturing, and finance* has blessed him with an inside track on the most common dysfunctions in agile product management – and how to solve them!
*Previous recipients of Mike’s wisdom include IBM, Connectwise, Ashley Furniture, PwC, Gerdau, Trellance, Discover, and quite a few more.
Happy Friday, Tampa Bay! Hopefully, you’ve emerged from Tropical Storm Debby unscathed. I had a little yard clean-up to do, but that’s about it.
Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, August 12 through Sunday, August 18, 2024. This list includes both in-person and online events.
The latest video, Tough Job Market!, is a reminder that it could take a long time to hear back from a prospective employer after sending an application. It also features my four-word plan for thriving in the current job market:
Wednesday at 6 p.m., online:Tech4Good Tampa Bay is relaunching with a kickoff meeting! This is a fantastic opportunity for our existing members to connect with the new team, learn about their expanded mission, and share your insights and ideas for the future, as well as for new members to learn more about Tech4Good and how to get involved. Find out more and register here.
Thursday at 5:00 p.m. at DTCC (Tampa): The Tampa Java User Group will feature Taking Off with the Java Flight Recorder, a presentation by Billy Korando, a Java Developer Advocate with the Java Platform Group at Oracle. He’ll show how this powerful and low-overhead observability tool built into the JVM that can help you track down those performance issues and difficult-to-understand bugs. Find out more and register here.
Thursday at 7:00 p.m. at Bar Louie at the International Plaza (Tampa):Lean Beer is happening on the Tampa side of the bay! Discuss any topics on Agile and Lean that are of interest to whomever is gathered. You suggest the topics, then they prioritize that list democratically, through a good ol’-fashioned vote. They manage our discussions via time boxes, and a Roman vote (drinks up/drinks down). Vegas rules apply! Find out more and register here.
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
Because I’m in the middle of a job search — like about 1 in 11 techies who’ve been laid off since that start of 2023, I’ve been asked for links to my portfolio. Here’s the current version of my content portfolio as of August 2024, which showcases my developer relations / tech advocate / technical writing experience.
I’m currently contracted to create the first of several new courses for Kodeco that will be available in October. Kodeco is expanding beyond their usual mobile development tutorials and into tutorials covering the development of AI applications.
My course will be a thorough introduction to Python for experienced programmers who want to get into AI development.
Teaching Python for Computer Coach
I’m nearly done teaching an online 40-hour / five-week / two-nights-per-week introductory Python course for Tampa Bay’s go-to tech training center, Computer Coach (it will conclude on August 14). This course is aimed at people who are new to programming, but by the end of the course, they’ll have built Python applications in Jupyter Notebook, command-line applications, and even web apps in Flask!
The Global Nerdy YouTube channel
I’ve recently been working on building up the Global Nerdy YouTube channel, where I plan to post long-form videos on technology, software development, and life as a developer.
I published this video in July 2024, the first in a series on surviving the recent tech industry layoffs:
In response to the recent CrowdStrike outage, I posted this video explaining how it happened:
I had a short contract stint as the Developer Advocate for Toronto-based startup Unified.to during April and May 2024. My first assignment at Unified.to was to write their 2024 State of SaaS APIs, a 44-page white paper on various aspects of how APIs are designed and implemented. It covered a wide range of topics, including:
API designs and specification formats
API documentation — generated manually, or with automated tools?
URLs in APIs: static base URLS, custom domain-/subdomain-based URLs, and versioned URLs
In addition to the 2024 State of SaaS APIs paper, I wrote articles for their blog at the rate of about one per week, including What is a Unified API?, for which I also made the diagrams (pictured below):
In my most recent full-time position, I was a member of Auth0 by Okta’s Content team in their Developer Engagement group. I was there for over three years, and my primary responsibility was to create content for mobile developers — articles, tutorials, videos, and other material.
Prior to my arrival at Auth0, there hadn’t been much new content for mobile developers for the prior three years, during which time Apple and Google had made significant changes to iOS and Android.
During my tenure as Senior Developer Advocate, I started writing Auth0’s first new mobile development articles in years, focusing on native iOS and Android development. For React Native and Flutter, I worked with guest authors to produce articles for developers building mobiel apps with those platforms. I also worked with the Developer Experience and SDK teams to update some long-neglected “quickstart” toolkits to help mobile developers become acquainted with Auth0’s “login as a service” more quickly and easily.
In my three years at Auth0, I brought the mobile development section of the Auth0 development blog from 0 pageviews/month to 20,000 pageviews/month.
I ended up producing one long-form article a month that bore my name on the byline (I ended up rewriting or ghost-writing a number of guest articles as well). My Auth0 articles are listed below, with some annotations for notable articles.
Not all of my articles were about the Auth0 platform. I wrote some articles simply to gain the attention from mobile developers and on mobile development topics I felt didn’t receive enough attention.
My series of articles on working with dates and times in the Swift programming language remains popular among iOS developers — in fact, in Google searches for the search terms swift dates times still rank my articles in the top five:
I also wrote articles that went outside my usual topic of mobile development, including these two articles, which are still in the top five results for searches on EXIF and Python and EXIF and JavaScript:
I learned mobile development from reading the first edition of The iOS Apprentice, a book produced by RayWenderlich.com (which eventually became Kodeco), the premier mobile development tutorial site, and I’ve been a fan ever since.
So when they put out a call for authors for Android articles, I took it as an opportunity to learn Android development so that I could be a contributor to the site. They gave me a choice of assignments that I could take on for my “audition,” and I chose one of the trickier ones: “Write an article showing how to make an augmented reality Android app.”
Thanks to my success with that augmented reality article, I was selected to be the technical editor for their book ARKIt by Tutorials. I was also selected to make not one, but two presentations at their RWDevCon 2018 conference: a two-hour presentation and a four-hour deep dive:
These presentations were the top two most highly-rated presentations at the conference.
When they sought out authors for the 8th edition of The iOS Apprentice, I threw my hat in the ring because I wanted to revise the book that taught me mobile development. Shortly after I was selected as one of the co-authors, Apple introduced the new SwiftUI framework, which necessitated completely rewriting major portions of the book.
I have also written the following articles for Kodeco, the most recent one in March 2024:
In November 2023, I gave an hour-long presentation to the Tampa Devs group that explained how computers work “under the hood.” I starting by explaining what transistors are and how they work, worked up to microprocessors, and finally covered programming in assembly language:
In February 2024, I gave a presentation on getting into AI development at the Civo Navigate North America 2024 conference. My time slot was on Day 1, immediately after the opening keynote:
Based on the success of my AI talk at Civo Navigate North America, the Austin Forum on Technology and Society invited me to give a more in-depth online version of the talk for their “AI April” event in April 2024:
A few days after the “backdoor” to the xz Utils utility was discovered, I proposed giving a last-minute lightning talk about the incident to the organizers of the BSides Tampa 2024 cybersecurity conference in April 2024. It ended up turning into a full presentation:
As a result of the response to my presentation at Civo Navigate North America 2024, Civo also invited me to give a lightning talk at Civo Navigate Local Tampa 2024 in April 2024:
I’ve been publishing Global Nerdy, my personal blog on technology, tech news, and software development since August 2006. To this day, it gets about 30,000 pageviews per month.
And finally, while this is from a while back, I’m including it in this portfolio simply because I’m sure no other candidate will be able to show you something like this: my short-lived children’s show about technology. Just like Sesame Street, there’s a puppet co-host:
How did the CrowdStrike Bug of July 19, 2024 take down 8.5 million Windows systems and cause the biggest global outage of all time? I’ll explain in this video, where you’ll also learn about operating systems, the kernel, device drivers, and more!
