Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay Uncategorized

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur scene (Week of Monday, December 11, 2017)

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

Do you have an tech or entrepreneurial event in or around the Tampa Bay area that you’d like to see listed here? Drop me a line about it at joey@globalnerdy.com!

Monday, December 11

Tuesday, December 12

Wednesday, December 13

Thursday, December 14

Friday, December 15

Saturday, December 16

Sunday, December 17

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay Uncategorized

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur scene (Week of Monday, December 4, 2017)

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

Do you have an tech or entrepreneurial event in or around the Tampa Bay area that you’d like to see listed here? Drop me a line about it at joey@globalnerdy.com!

Monday, December 4

Tuesday, December 5

Wednesday, December 6

Thursday, December 7

Friday, December 8

Saturday, December 9

Sunday, December 10

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay Uncategorized

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur scene (Week of Monday, November 27, 2017)

Tampa Bay Tech Events — Week of Monday Nov. 27 through Sunday, Dec. 3, 2017 — Photo of Amelie Arena with lightning in the sky

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

Do you have an tech or entrepreneurial event in or around the Tampa Bay area that you’d like to see listed here? Drop me a line about it at joey@globalnerdy.com!

Monday, November 27

Tuesday, November 28

Wednesday, November 29

Thursday, November 30

Friday, December 1

Saturday, December 2

Sunday, December 3

 

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay Uncategorized

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur scene (Week of Monday, November 20, 2017)

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

Do you have an tech or entrepreneurial event in or around the Tampa Bay area that you’d like to see listed here? Drop me a line about it at joey@globalnerdy.com!

Monday

 

 

Tuesday

 

 

Wednesday

 

Thursday

Thursday is Thanksgiving, so take these listings, which appear on Meetup.com with a grain of salt. I recommend that you check with either the meetup organizer or the venue to see if they’re actually taking place that day.

Friday

As far as I can tell, there aren’t any public tech, nerd, or entrepreneurial gatherings on Black Friday that i’m aware of. Have a great day off, and if you’re hitting the stores, stay safe!

Saturday

Sunday

Categories
Programming

Looking for a great conference on iOS development? Check out RWDevCon!

If you’re interested in iOS development and are looking for a conference to attend next year, I highly recommend RWDevCon, the all-tutorial, mostly-iOS conference run by the fine people at the tutorial site RayWenderlich.com!

It takes place during April 5 through 7, 2018 in Alexandria, Virginia, and will feature…

…four in-depth workshops…

  1. Swift algorithms: build your own collection type, and while doing so, dive into the semantics, performance, and expectations of each Swift collection protocol. Then you’ll explore ways to write your code that takes advantage of this new knowledge.
  2. Machine learning: A hands-on workshop where you’ll harness CoreML and Vision framework and find out what machine learning is, train a model, and then integrate it into an app.
  3. Practical instruments: Finally learn how to use Xcode’s instruments to see how you apps works, find out where the bottlenecks are, and boost your app’s performance.
  4. And finally, the workshop I’m giving: ARKit — where you’ll learn about the features of Apple’s ARKit augmented reality framework, harness data from the camera and your users’ motions, present information and draw images over real-world scenes, and make the world your View Controller!

…and all these presentations…

  • Living Style Guides
  • Swift 4 Serialization
  • Architecting Modules
  • Cloning Netflix: Surely it Can’t be That Hard
  • Auto Layout Best Practices
  • Clean Architecture on iOS
  • The Game of Life
  • Android for iOS Developers
  • The Art of the Chart
  • Spring Cleaning Your App
  • Improving App Quality with Test Driven Development
  • Advanced WKWebView
  • Clean Architecture on Android
  • Getting Started with ARKit (that’s the one I’m giving!)
  • Custom Views
  • App Development Workflow
  • Integrating Metal Shaders with SceneKit
  • Xcode Tips & Tricks
  • Advanced Unidirectional Architecture
  • Embracing the Different
  • Lessons from the App Store

…and a party every night…

…all in a great venue:

Want to find out more? Visit RWDevCon.com!

Categories
Uncategorized

My DevFest Florida interview with Brian and Fred from Thunder Nerds

Just after giving my presentation at DevFest Florida 2017, I sat down with the Brian Hinton and Fred Weiss from the Gulf Coast-based tech podcast Thunder Nerds to talk about my presentation, making the transition to showing up at an office after eight years of remote work from the home office, how I got into tech, and of course, how I work the accordion into my job.

It’s a fun 26-minute conversation with two great hosts:

My thanks to Brian and Fred for a great time, and to DevFest Florida for inviting them!

And remember, if you’re looking for new listening material, go check out Thunder Nerds! Here’s a sampling of their podcasts that I’ve enjoyed:

Categories
Programming

Why “?:” is called Kotlin’s “Elvis operator”

At Victoria Gonda’s presentation on Kotlin at DevFest Florida 2017, she talked about many of Kotlin’s language features. (Be sure to check out the slides from her presentation, Kotlin Uncovered!)

When she got to the “Elvis operator” — ?: — there were murmurs in the crowd, and I could hear people whispering “why’s it called that?”. Hopefully, the photo above answers the question: it looks like an emoticon for Elvis.

The more formal name for the Elvis operator is the null coalescing operator, and it’s a binary operator that does the following:

  • It returns the first operand if it’s non-null,
  • otherwise, it returns the second operand.

It’s far more elegant to write

val result = value1 ?: value2

than

if (value1 != null) {
  result = value1
} else {
  result = value2
}

And in case you iOS developers were wondering, Swift has a null coalescing operator: it’s ??.