Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

Roberto Torres at Café con Tampa (Oxford Exchange) this Friday!

Roberto Torres is an unstoppable force for good in Tampa Bay. Since founding the Blind Tiger Café, he’s since expanded to multiple locations all over the area, including a branch called Endeavr located right in our new startup accelerator, Embarc Collective.

Café con Tampa is also an unstoppable force for good — it’s a weekly gathering on Friday mornings between 8 and 9 a.m. at the Commerce Club (upstairs at Oxford Exchange) where you’ll see interesting speakers give presentations over breakfast on topics that matter to them. Think of it as an intellectual salon with the city’s best breakfast sandwiches.

This Friday, March 6th, Roberto Torres is the guest speaker at Café con Tampa, and he’ll be presenting on a topic that’s near and dear to my heart: choosing Tampa as the destination to live, work, and play.

(I myself made this decision 6 years ago, having driven into town with a Honda CR-V full of my stuff on March 7th, 2014 — this presentation will be a sort of early anniversary for me!)

I’ll be there, and I’d like to see some of Tampa’s tech community come to this one. It happens this Friday at 8:00 a.m., ends promptly at 9:00. Tickets are $12 at the door (they take cash or credit), and covers the cost of the room and the breakfast buffet.

Categories
Career Current Events Tampa Bay

Tampa Bay Innovation Center’s Entrepreneur & Investment Challenge is looking for applicants

Tampa Bay Innovation Center’s Spring 2020 Entrepreneurship & Investment Challenge takes place from April 28th through July 15th, and they’re looking for Tampa Bay-based tech startups to join!

The Entrepreneurship & Investment Challenge is a program focused on preparing technology ventures in how to scale a company. It’s not about preparing your pitch, marketing, or raising money. Instead, it takes an “inside-out” approach. It’s about preparing your company not to just look ready but to be ready to take an investment, hit the ground running, and execute your plan.

From their site:

The program helps CEOs develop into leaders that can rapidly execute plans, adjust plans when appropriate, and give them the experience to know how to navigate the obstacles that derail promising startups. While a good pitch will attract investors, the deal is closed based on your response to questions and successful due diligence. Having the confidence that you can handle the next phase of your startup will help close the deal with investors.

Eligible companies are:

  • Scalable B2B tech ventures

  • Are pre-seed, seed, or post-seed to Series A

  • At the post-MVP / proof of concept stage

  • In possession of less that $2 million in capital

  • Made up of two or more team members

  • Able to commit to a 12-week program

The program is free-as-in-beer — you won’t spend anything to attend — and no equity is required. It’s offered in a series of 1= to 2-day workshops over 10 to 12 weeks, and accommodates up to 10 companies per cohort.

Interested? Find out more at the Entrepreneurship & Investment Challenge page at the Tampa Bay Innovation Center site.

Categories
Current Events Players Tampa Bay

Don’t miss the 7th annual WITI Geek Glam this Thursday!

The WITI (Women in Technology International) Geek Glam is Tampa Bay’s most glamorous tech event, and it takes place this Thursday, March 5th at Tampa River Center at Julian B Lane Riverfront Park. One of the events at the Geek Glam will be the fashion show, featuring a number of Tampa Bay tech women, including my favorite, Anitra Pavka:

The event will also feature:

  • A silent auction, whose proceeds will go to the WITI Tampa Network Scholarship fund at SPC and USF to support future generations of Tampa Bay technologists
  • A pop-up market
  • Door prizes
  • Networking with 350 of your peers in the Tampa Bay tech community
  • A DJ to keep the tunes going and a photographer for some non-selfie shots
  • Some nerd with an accordion providing scintillating conversation and additional musical merriment

…and it all happens in this gorgeous venue with a wonderful riverfront view:

Here’s the event schedule:

  • 5:30 – Event Starts
  • 6:00 – Welcome from WITI
  • 7:00 – Welcome from Sponsors
  • 7:15 – Fashion Show
  • 8:30 – Silent Auction Closes
  • 9:00 – End of Geek Glam 2020!

And here’s how you can attend:

  1. You can go to the event registration page and buy a ticket, which is $30 for WITI members and $45 for non-members.
  2. You can attend for free by volunteering. Suzanne Ricci is looking for a handful of volunteers; the details are on LinkedIn.

This will be a fun, stylish event, and it’s both a great cause as well as a great opportunity to catch up with local techies and other business movers and shakers. Don’t miss out on this one!

Categories
Humor Programming

“This is just to say” (The 2020 edition)

This is just to say

I have fixed
the bugs
in the app

and which
you coded
and probably thought
were features

Forgive me
they were egregious
so basic
and so avoidable

Categories
Humor Reading Material

Monday morning in the programmer world

Recommended reading and notes:

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, March 2, 2020)

Hello, and welcome to another installment of the weekly What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene list! I’ve been putting together this list since 2017, and my goal was to give the Tampa Bay technology community a useful, convenient resource for finding tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events. Just as regular get-togethers of techies helped grow the scenes in my former homes of Toronto and Silicon Valley, I believe that bringing together the bright lights of Tampa Bay will help bring about the “Silicon Suncoast”.

Here are the coming week’s events…

Monday, March 2

If you’ve got Monday free and can make the drive to Orlando, you might want to check out Women in Data Science — a UCF gathering whose goals are to inspire and educate data scientists worldwide, regardless of gender, and support women in the field. It’s an annual one-day technical conference covering the latest data science-related research and applications. There’s no risk of a “manel” here — all the speakers are female. All genders are invited to participate in the conference.

Tuesday, March 3

If you hear the phrase “board game” and think of tripe like Monopoly or Sorry, you’ve been away from them too long. We now live in the golden age of board games, a era where they’ve gone well beyond the old “be the first person to make it to the finish line” paradigm and reached levels of sophistication normally reserved for computer games. If you’re looking for something different to do on Tuesday night, you might want to check out the board game nights in Brandon and St. Pete.

Wednesday, March 4

The topic at Wednesday’s Tampa Android Developers Group meetup is Android Google Maps. It’ll be a walkthrough of the Advanced Android in Kotlin 04.1: Android Google Maps codelab produced by Google. It’s in Kotlin — which you should learn if you want to do native Android programming (if you have a grasp of Java or any other object-oriented programming language, you’ll understand Kotlin). Bring a laptop with Android Studio 3.5 or higher!

Thursday, March 5

WITI’s (Women in Technology International) Geek Glam will be a great night out for a great cause! It’ll have a fashion show featuring models you’ll recognize from our local tech scene, a pop-up market, door prizes, and a silent auction whose proceeds will go towards scholarships for women in tech. It happens on Thursday at 5:30 p.m. at the Tampa River Center.

Friday, March 6

If you haven’t yet been to Café con Tampa, you’re missing out on the best weekly community event in the area. Every week, they bring a compelling speaker to talk about an interesting (and often important) topic at the Commerce Club in Oxford Exchange. For $12, you get a breakfast buffet featuring Tampa Bay’s best breakfast sandwiches, a great presentation, and the change to meet with some of the area’s movers and shakers.

This Friday’s Café con Tampa should be a great one — the guest speaker is Roberto Torres, founder of the Blind Tiger Café, who just opened a branch at Embarc Collective. He’ll talk about a pet topic of mine: Tampa Bay as a place in which to live, work, and play. I’ll be there, and I’d love to see you there as well, representing the Tampa tech community!

Saturday, March 7

Sunday, March 8

Do you have an upcoming event that you’d like to see on this list?

If you know of an upcoming event that you think should appear on this list, please let me know!

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.

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Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, February 24, 2020)

Here’s what’s happening in Tampa Bay this week!

This weekly list is posted as a voluntary service to the Tampa tech community. With the notable exceptions of Tampa iOS Meetup and Coders, Creatives and Craft Beer — both of which I run — most of this information comes from Meetup.com, EventBrite, and other local event announcement sites. I can’t guarantee the accuracy of the dates and times listed here; if you want to be absolutely sure that the event you’re interested in is actually taking place, please contact the organizers!

Marc Maron is (sort of) right about Tampa, and that’s okay

Marc Maron, one of the stars of the Netflix series GLOW, a comedian and big-time podcaster (he’s estimated to get a quarter-million downloads per episode) was in Tampa last Saturday for his performance at the Straz. He faced some “Florida” weirdness — a couple in the front row got into a fight in the middle of his show and he had to talk them down — and had this to say about the area:

“Downtown Tampa, again, I don’t want to judge, but it looks like it halfway happened,” he said. “It looked like there was attempt at some point in time to kind of make it hip, to do something with downtown, and it might’ve happened for a month or two, or maybe a year, but it’s definitely on the other side of that.”

He was much harsher with Orlando, which he left as quickly as he could because “It’s only an hour-and-a-half to Tampa, but there was no [expletive deleted] way—no reason—to hang around Orlando.”

As for our own neck of the woods, I would correct one thing. Downtown Tampa isn’t halfway happened, but halfway happening. There’s a difference, and it’s a crucial one.

Maron saw a small slice of downtown Tampa for a small slice of time. He probably saw Tampa U from a distance, and he probably never saw places like Ybor, the various “Heights” neighborhoods, and all of St. Pete and Clearwater. What he saw was a static picture that doesn’t show what’s been happening over the past few years: the growth of the Riverwalk, the changes in Channelside, the revitalization of St. Pete, and more. His short visit wouldn’t have made him aware of Tampa’s rising food scene, its well-established beer scene, the new places that are popping up all the time, the numbers of people moving here, and the energy that these changes bring to the area. This isn’t “happened”, this is “happening”.

Keep that in mind as you read about other metros and their booming tech scenes. Things are happening here as well — not just on the big scale with Synapse Summit, Embarc Collective, and the Suncoast Developers Guild, but even on the smaller scale. Just look at my first “What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech scene” post from a mere three years ago versus the list below to see how we’ve grown and changed.

In the end, the difference between “happened” and “happening” is up to us. So far, we’re doing well — let’s keep it up!

Monday, February 24

Tuesday, February 25

Wednesday, February 26

Thursday, February 27

Friday, February 28

Saturday, February 29

Sunday, March 1

Do you have an upcoming event that you’d like to see on this list?

If you know of an upcoming event that you think should appear on this list, please let me know!

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!