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What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, July 8, 2019)

Every week, I compile a list of events for developers, technologists, tech entrepreneurs, and nerds in and around the Tampa Bay area. We’ve got a lot of events going on this week, and here they are!

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!

Monday, July 8

Tuesday, July 9

Wednesday, July 10

Thursday, July 11

Friday, July 12

Saturday, July 13

Sunday, July 14

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What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, July 1, 2019)

Every week, I compile a list of events for developers, technologists, tech entrepreneurs, and nerds in and around the Tampa Bay area. We’ve got a lot of events going on this week, and here they are!

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!

A holiday reminder

Keep in mind that this is a holiday week, with the 4th of July happening on Thursday. Event announcement services like Meetup have a tendency to automatically schedule recurring events without regard for holidays. If the event you want to attend happens on or near the 4th, you might want to double-check with the organizers and confirm that the event is actually happening.

Monday, July 1

Tuesday, July 2

Wednesday, July 3

Thursday, July 4

Friday, July 5

Saturday, July 6

Sunday, July 7

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Demo Day at Suncoast Developers Guild – Friday, July 19

On Friday, July 19, Suncoast Developers Guild will host Demo Day for their 14th cohort!

Demo Day is the day when the student developers at Tampa Bay’s home-grown coding school (and more — see below), Suncoast Developers Guild, take their capstone projects — full applications that demonstrate what they learned during their intensive 13-week program, shown below…

Click the graphic to see it at full size.

…and demonstrate them to an audience of local tech companies, engineers, and supporters of the tech community. It’s open to the public, and it’s your chance to see first-hand what their graduating developers have learned and made, get to know them, and hopefully, hire them.

If you’d like to attend, it’s happening Friday, July 19, 2019 from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. at Suncoast Developers Guild, located at 2220 Central Avenue in St. Pete. Admission is free, and there is 2-hour free parking in front of their campus.

Suncoast Developers Guild is more than just a coding school. It’s also:

  • A space that serves as a hub for developers and techies on the St. Pete side of Tampa Bay,
  • home for a number of local techie meetups and gatherings,
  • the organizer and sponsor of a lot of the Tampa Bay tech community’s activities and get-togethers,
  • the people behind the Suncoast Developers Guild Slack, the de facto Tampa Bay online grapevine,
  • and most importantly, the social heart and soul of the tech scene on the St. Pete side of the Bay.

Suncoast Developers Guild has given so much to the Tampa Bay tech scene, and as local techies, it’s only fair to give a little back. If you’ve got the time, please attend Demo Day on July 19th, support the latest cohort of students, and give SDG some love! I plan to attend, and I’ll see you there.

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Quick notes on macOS “Catalina”

A screenshot of the “Hello, World!” app in the book. Click to see at full size.

I’m racing to finish the first section of an upcoming book on programming for the next version of iOS, so I’m deep in beta-land with:

  • Developer beta 2 of macOS 10.15, a.k.a. “Catalina”
  • Developer beta 2 of iOS 13
  • Developer beta 2 of Xcode 11

…and while I’ve run into the occasional quirk or bug (and one crash), I’ve generally been able to go about my work. Aside from the software listed above, I haven’t been using much too many other apps on the machine running the Catalina beta — it’s mostly been:

  • Safari and Firefox for browsing
  • MacDown for writing the book in Markdown
  • git and gitHub Desktop for checking in revisions
  • Visual Studio Code for occasional text editing
  • Slack for keeping in touch with the rest of the team

All these applications seem to run fine under Catalina.

If you’re curious to find out more about the upcoming macOS Catalina, you should read Daniel Eran Dilger’s writeup in AppleInsider, where he provides an in-depth overview of the just-released public beta.

If you’re tempted to dive in and get the public beta for a machine that you rely on to get things done, he provides this warning. I’m quoting it here, because it can’t be said enough:

And now: a warning!

Note that most users should not download a Public Beta! This is especially the case for anyone who would have their life or work inconvenienced by having to track down complex problems, potentially including hardware that won’t boot or a full restore from a backup. That in itself can take hours to perform, particularly in our modern age where you likely have 100 GB or more of photos alone.

It’s not just that the Catalina Public Beta could have some wild bugs hiding in there as it develops—in our modern age of cloud-connected everything, even a minor bug could trigger a chain of events that might end up corrupting your Keychain passwords, duplicating contact records, borking your HomeKit configuration, or erasing pictures you expect to be synced to iCloud.

Let me emphasize this one more time: you don’t just need a solid backup before you install a Public Beta; you need the flexibility of hours of free time to sort out any problems that might result from using early beta software!

…

Tread cautiously, and don’t blame the beta for being beta—you’ve been warned!

Writing the programming book requires me to use these not-quite-ready-for-prime-time operating systems, and even then, I’m doing it on an older spare Mac, and not the only I rely on for my day-to-day stuff. If you really have to get your hands on an early version of Catalina, make sure you’ve backed up everything you’d miss if the OS suddenly made it disappear, and if possible, try it out on a backup machine.

If you’ve gotten this far and are still undeterred by the risks, you’ll want to check out this article on The Verge: How to download the iOS 13, iPadOS, macOS Catalina, and tvOS 13 public betas.

 

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Raspberry Pi 4: Powerful as a 2009 laptop or a 2014 smartphone — all for $35!

The Raspberry Pi 4 has been announced, and on paper, it’s impressive — especially when you that the starting price has stayed the same at $35. While specs won’t tell you the whole story, the Raspberry Pi 4’s numbers seem to put it on par with a laptop or smartphone that you (or your parents) may still have and may even still be using.

Here are the Raspberry Pi 4’s specs, side-by-side with those of the HP Envy 13 laptop (from 2009) and the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone (from 2013/2014). The Pi’s numbers are either at least as good as, if not better than those of the laptop and smartphone:

2009-era Laptop
(HP Envy 13)		 2014-era Smartphone
(Samsung Galaxy S4)		 2019 Raspberry Pi
Processors 1.6 GHz dual-core CPU
(Intel Core 2 Duo SU9600)
and DirectX 10-capable 16-core GPU
(ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330)		 1.6 GHz quad-core CPU
(ARM Cortex-A15)
and DirectX 9_3-capable 3-core GPU
(PowerVR SGX544)		 1.5GHz quad-core CPU (ARM Cortex-A72)
Active Memory 2GB DDR2 RAM 2GB LPDDR3 RAM 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB LPDDR4 RAM
Storage 250GB 4500 RPM hard drive 16, 32 or 64GB solid state storage MicroSD cards, which start at 16GB and go as high as 512GB
Display 1600 * 900 1080 * 1920 4K (3840 * 2160)
Networking
  • Bluetooth
  • Ethernet
  • Wifi
  • Bluetooth
  • Cellular
  • Wifi
  • Bluetooth 5.0
  • Gigabit ethernet
  • 5GHz wifi
Powerful enough to run a proper and complete port of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City? Yes Yes
 This is just me speculating, but: Probably.

It may be an “Internet of Things” device in form and price, but in terms of what it can do, it’s a desktop computer.

The 1GB model sells for $35, the 2GB for $45, and the 4GB for $55, and for a little more money, you can get it in kit packages that include a case, keyboard, mouse, and more.

More reading

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What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, June 24, 2019)

Every week, I compile a list of events for developers, technologists, tech entrepreneurs, and nerds in and around the Tampa Bay area. We’ve got a lot of events going on this week, and here they are!

This weekly list is posted as a voluntary service to the Tampa tech community. With the notable exception of Tampa iOS Meetup, 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!

Monday, June 24

Tuesday, June 25

Tampa’s Women Who Code chapter is holding a two-part event this week featuring Tampa Bay tech evangelist Russ Fustino. Part one covers Xamarin Forms, a cross-platform UI toolkit that’s also one of the simplest ways to create native applications for Android, iOS, and the Universal Windows Platform. He’ll demonstrate building an app and deploying it to Android, iOS, and Windows devices. Part two covers the blockchain system made by Algorand, which boasts throughput on par with large financial networks and immediate transaction finality. He’ll explain Algorand’s protocol, demonstrate node management with command-line tools, and show how to build layer 2 applications using Algorand’s SDK.

Wednesday, June 26

“Secrets of the Undercroft” may sound like the title for a Harry Potter novel, but it’s an open house for a new player in the Tampa Bay tech scene. The Undercroft is a guild whose goal is to grow the area’s individual, organizational, and economic security by advancing innovation, creativity, and security knowledge. Their space, located in one of Ybor City’s charming old buildings, will features training rooms, a media studio, conference rooms, shared workspaces, rack space, and even an ISOC (information security operations center). They’re opening soon, and this is your chance to get an early look at their space and find out more about them.

Thursday, June 27

Tech’s hottest topic meets tech’s hottest platform on Thursday at the Tampa Bay AWS User Group meetup! Tristan Li, Solutions Architect at Amazon, will talk about AWS’ latest artificial intelligence and machine learning features. As an added incentive, they’ll raffle off a $250 credit for AWS.

Friday, June 28

If you can’t make it to Tuesday’s “Secrets of the Undercroft” event (see above) but want to find more about Tampa Bay’s new security, innovation, and creativity guild, come attend this meet-and-greet with The Undercroft’s founders, members, and partners over light snacks and drinks.

Saturday, June 29

Sunday, June 30

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What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, June 17, 2019)

Every week, I compile a list of events for developers, technologists, tech entrepreneurs, and nerds in and around the Tampa Bay area. We’ve got a lot of events going on this week, and here they are!

This weekly list is posted as a voluntary service to the Tampa tech community. With the notable exception of Tampa iOS Meetup, 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!

Monday, June 17

Monday’s interesting event comes from OK! TRANSMIT, the meetup where art-inclined technologists and technologically-inclined artists meet up to talk about and workshop their projects. It happens at 6:00 p.m. in St. Pete’s Duncan McLellan Gallery. Find out more here.

Tuesday, June 18

It used to be the Agile QA Meetup, but they’ve expanded beyond quality assurance to cover all sorts of agile topics.  They’re now Empower Agile Teams, and they’re meeting on Tuesday to talk about growing and sustaining agile transformations. They’re meeting on Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. at Kforce. Find out more here.

Wednesday, June 19

One of the best-attended meetups in the Tampa Bay area is the Tampa Bay User Experience Meetup, and it’s happening this Wednesday at Kforce. This meetup is about data science and how it and UX can work together to better accomplish business objectives. Find out more here.

Thursday, June 20

Lean Beer is like Lean Coffee, but with BEER! Join Tampa Bay’s agile community as we discuss issues over ales, lagers, stouts, and more. It happens on Thursday at The Pub in the International Plaza. Find out more here.

Friday, June 21

Here’s a group new to this list — Threat Angler, whose goal is to advance the cybersecurity industry by grooming new talent and optimizing security operations. This meetup is the first gathering of the Snow SecOps LinkedIN group, and it happens online on Friday. Find out more here.

Saturday, June 22

Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games aren’t just a geek pastime — they’re an important part of the culture. I’m not exaggerating when I say this; Reid Hoffman, co-founder and executive chair of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock Partners says that his success comes from his RPG experiences. If you’re new to RPGs and want to get into them, Game Club Tampa Meetup has the event you need this Saturday! Find out more here.

Sunday, June 23

Sunday’s interest event is Book vs Movie Club, a book club where they attempt to answer the question “Was the book better than the movie?”. The book/movie in question this time is The Girl on the Train, and they’ll do in at one of my favorite British-themed pubs, Yeoman’s Cask and Lion. Find out more here.