…and draws cartoon eyes, nose, and mustache over them. It also uses smile detection…
…and the tilt of the subject’s head…
…to decide what additional cartoon features to add to the picture:
If the app is more than 80% confident that a face is smiling, it draws the pupils of its eyes as smiling stars.
If a head is tilted 20 degrees or more to the left or right, it draws a tiny red hat atop it.
The app I’ll present — and yes, I’ll give you the code — is an example of augmented reality, or AR for short. “Augmented reality” is just a highfalutin’ term that describes a computer spicing up real-world images with computer-generated ones. We’ll combine it with computer facial detection, which is nothing new for humans, but still pretty new for computers, never mind handheld ones.
Writing an app like FaceSpotter used to require serious programming chops, but with the libraries that you’ll see in this presentation, you can whip up an app like it in an afternoon. You’ll learn how to:
Incorporate the Face API into your own apps
Programmatically identify and track human faces from a camera feed and get their location and size
Identify points of interest, such as eyes, ears, nose, and mouth on tracked faces
Draw augmented reality text and graphics over images from a camera feed
Build a Snapchat Lens-like app that draws cartoony features over faces it detects in a camera feed
Join me, Mike, and Scott at the next GDG Sun Coast Meetup, where I’ll present FaceSpotter and the code behind it in my presentation, Android and Augmented Reality!
What to bring: You don’t really need to bring everything, but if you want to follow along (I’ll have a starter project that you can play with), bring a laptop with Android Studio, and your Android device!
If you’re reading this blog, chances are that you often check the reviews before you buy something, whether online or in a brick-and-mortar establishment. I always see what the reviews are before buying something at Amazon, usually check the reviews for restaurants and hotels that are new to me, take the temperature of a film on Rotten Tomatoes, and even at the local craft beer pub where Tampa’s monthly Ybor Tech OpenHack get-together (New World Brewery; 4.6 stars on Facebook, 4.2 stars on Yelp), I’ve pulled out my phone to check reviews when faced with a menu of unknown ales and stouts.
I’m not telling you anything new by saying that in a world with nearly ubiquitous networked computing, reviews are crucial to bringing in new business. What might be new to you are the numbers behind reviews, but you can discover them in Website Builder.org’s User Reviews are the King, which collects data from 30 sources and brings them together into a single infographic.
Here’s a preview of the infographic. Click it to see the whole thing:
Creative Commons photo by uncle_shoggoth. Tap to see the source.
Those of you familiar with the Game of Thrones TV series will recognize the guy in the photo above: he’s Tyrion Lannister, one of the most-loved characters, if not the most-loved character on the show. A good part of his charm is his ability to get results by forging unlikely alliances and winning over people despite some very long odds.
If you look online, you’ll find many tributes to Tyrion’s genius. Here’s one of my favorites: Charisma on Command’s video, Why Tyrion Will Win the Game of Thrones. It’s just under 15 minutes long, but it’s fun to watch, and you’ll find some tips that you can use in your working life:
If you’ve got another 11 minutes to spare — hey, watch both during lunch! — here’s another Charisma on Command video showing Tyrion’s ability to take control of a situation:
There’s a reason for all this Tyrion Lannister preamble: I’m here to tell you that I’m the Tyrion Lannister of tech. And I’ll do it by citing examples.
Winning over an free software / open source crowd at a student conference and trolling Richard Stallman
I was following a presentation by the amazing, brilliant, and entertaining Giles Bowkett, who put together a rapid-fire 400-slide extravaganza, which included stories about carrying a gun because he was in actual danger of being mauled by a cougar (here’s one of his presentations that’s pretty close to the one he gave there). Giles is a stunningly good presenter, and it’s deadly to follow him.
I was the most “corporate” speaker there, as a representative of not just Microsoft, but Ballmer-era Microsoft (it was 2009) .
The audience was made up entirely of university engineering and computer science students with a strong preference for free software and open source, who also invited Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman to speak.
You’d think that I shouldn’t have been the breakout speaker of the event, but that’s how it turned out.
First, there was my presentation. I won over the crowd by opening with the unexpected — an accordion number — and then proceeded not to talk about Microsoft technologies, but about finding ways to harness your love for technology to create a great career and great life, telling amusing stories along the way, and appealing to the collegiate sense of humor. (You can watch the entire presentation — it’s the video above.)
If the presentation established me as a trusted and liked speaker, my actions the next day cemented my status as a CUSEC “One of Us” and got me invited to subsequent conferences. It’s what happened when I, as a Microsoftie, attended Richard Stallman’s talk the following day, participated in his auction for overpriced (especially for students) Free Software Foundation trinkets, won the auction for the stuffed GNU (mascot of the Free Software Foundation), and uproariously paid for it with a Microsoft credit card, much to the audience’s delight.
The story spread, so I won over not just the conference audience, but a whole new audience of developers who wouldn’t have paid attention to anything that Microsoft did as word of what happened spread, established Microsoft Canada as regular CUSEC guests, and until later incidents with a pair of rented chaps and a gong, made one of Microsoft Canada’s strangest expense reports.
Getting Microsoft to sponsor an Android conference when Google wouldn’t
In October 2010, Toronto’s AndroidTO conference needed a couple of big sponsors to help ensure that they could hold their day-long, hundreds-of-attendees event without losing money. I’d heard that Google wasn’t going to sponsor them, and asked: Why doesn’t Microsoft sponsor them instead?
I used the event as an opportunity to showcase Windows as a great development platform for Android, by demoing an HP touchscreen computer set up as an Android development station running Eclipse (which at the time was the preferred Android IDE) and also showing the Windows Phone development environment, which looked a lot less confusing and more aesthetically pleasing than Eclipse (although that’s easy), and showing the C# language (similar to Java, so it seems familiar) and Windows Phone in the process.
Our unexpected presence there got us a lot of attention, and as with the CUSEC crowd, I got people who ordinarily wouldn’t give Microsoft any thought to take a closer look…and hey, if Google got shamed along the way, it’s only because I was quick-thinking enough to seize upon an opportunity.
Calming angry air travellers
The hours-long line at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, March 2011.
Air travel can be bad at the best of times, but when people from a several planes who’ve just debarked are stuck waiting in the hallway that leads to customs for hours, it’s downright terrible. That’s what happened in March 2011, as recounted in my blog entry, The Crazy Customs Line at YYZ.
The mood was getting ugly, and despite the fact that there was a bona fide rock star there…
…it was up to Yours Truly to lighten the mood…
…and not only did it help, but it made the news:
It’s not the only time that I’ve used the accordion to make delays a little more bearable, and memorable in the good way:
And now, I’m available to make my Tyrion Lannister-like powers to turn lemons into lemonade for your organization!
If you need someone with both technical and communications skills, who loves a challenge, can rally people, and knows how to turn disadvantages into advantages, you need me! Find out more:
Regular readers of this blog and my social media feeds will know that I’m currently looking for my next gig. This resulted in my magnum opus job application, which while filled with information, is a very long read. This is one of a series of posts highlights some of the bits you may have missed.
About ten years ago, people started asking me “Do you work in radio? Because you have a radio voice.”
Rather than go on about my vocal qualities, I thought it would be best to let you decide for yourself. Here are some video presentations that I’ve done in my previous roles, where you can hear my dulcet tones…
IBM’s NICO
This 5-minute, 33-second video introduces IBM’s NICO service to the viewer. It explains how your network infrastructure could be costing your organization significantly more than it should, and how NICO can drive down your infrastructure and service costs, identify and fix system issues in your telecom system, and give you the tools and best practices to make the most of your network.
I was the “army of one” behind this video, which I produced when I was the Technology Evangelist at GSG, who are an IBM partner, and provide the software platform and assessment services that go into NICO. I wrote the script, did the narration, gathered or created its images, and produced it — all in the span of a couple of weeks.
Honeywell’s “Dark Mobile” webinar
This 13-minute, 12-second video is taken from the “Dark Mobile” webinar that I led for a division of Honeywell formerly known as Enterprise Mobile. “Dark Mobile” is a term that I coined the term during my time at GSG, and it refers to those parts of an enterprise’s mobile telecom environment that goes unobserved, unmanaged, and unknown.
In addition to coming up with the topic and title for the webinar, I wrote the script, hosted the webinar, and produced the video based on the recording and Honeywell’s slides.
GSG intro to MMS
This 8-minute, 19-second video was my first video for GSG. This one explains what MMS is — it’s short for managed mobility services or mobility managed services, depending on whom you ask. As with most of these videos, I’m the “army of one” behind it.
HTML5 and RIAs: Friends with benefits
When I was a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft, a fellow Microsoftie had a problem: he was buried in work and needed a video comparing HTML with rich internet applications (RIAs) such as Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. “Can you make one…by tomorrow evening?” he asked. “That’s when I have to show it to this group in Montreal.”
I got to work, and the result is this 5-minute, 46-second piece that summarizes the web world in the summer of 2010. I wrote, designed, narrated, and as the credits say, hastily produced this video, and my coworker was able to present it the following evening.
Shopify Fund
Here’s a 4-minute, 10-second video that I made during my time as a Developer Evangelist at Shopify. This one was aimed at developers, letting them know about the Shopify Fund, a $1 million fund to incentivize developers to build apps for the Shopify ecommerce platform. As with the other videos in this post, this was pretty much me, a microphone, and a laptop with Camtasia Studio and Audacity.
Why you should hire me
If your organization needs someone with a voice that your customers, partners, and investors will listen to, and has technical skills, you may be interested to know that I’m available and looking for work.
If you’re a regular reader of my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century (and hey, it’s possible, what with over 27 million pageviews since its inception in 2001), there’s a slim chance that you might remember my Secret Side Trip in the summer of 2012.
The Pebble smartwatches of that time (2012).
As I write this, almost five years have passed since the Secret Side Trip. In that time, I have never revealed where I went or what the purpose of that trip was. It can now be told: I was in the San Francisco Bay Area (which I call “The Other Bay Area” since I live in Tampa) to interview for evangelism positions at a couple of companies that I’m quite sure you’ve heard of. One of them was the smartwatch company Pebble.
The importance of networking and writing good cold emails
I was in the Philippines in June 2012, and it was generally known in my professional social circle that I was looking for new opportunities. I didn’t have international roaming (I was still living in Toronto at the time, and didn’t want to pay the exorbitant data roaming rates that my mobile provider, Rogers, wanted), but still had online access thanks to hotel wifi.
One evening — which would’ve been morning on this side of the globe — I received a couple of messages on friends via social media telling me that they’d seen an announcement that Pebble was looking for a developer evangelist, and that they thought the role was made just for me. I never saw the announcement, and without my network, I never would’ve known about the opening.
I quickly jumped on the opportunity and wrote them an email, text text of which I’ve copied and pasted below:
Date: Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 3:11 PM
From: joey@joeydevilla.com Subject: I want to be Pebble’s developer evangelist!
Dear Pebble people:
I’m Joey deVilla, and I’d like to throw my hat into the ring for the position of developer evangelist promoting Pebble. Yours is an exciting project in my favourite field — mobile development — and I’d love to be involved!
I have a dozen years’ experience working either as a developer evangelist or playing that role as a programmer. I’ve been blogging actively since 2001 on my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century (http://joeydevilla.com/) and my technical blog, Global Nerdy (http://globalnerdy.com/), has been around since 2006 and got 1.5 million pageviews last year. I’ve organized developer events ranging from small gatherings at coffee shops to cross-country conferences for thousands of developers and IT pros and I’ve delivered presentations at these events.
Among the companies for which I’ve held the developer evangelist role are:
– OpenCola, Cory Doctorow’s startup, where among other things, we helped popularize the concept of “Whuffie” (a unit of social capital, defined here: ). OpenCola’s development offices were in Toronto, while Cory and I worked out of the evangelism office in San Francisco.
– Tucows, where the position was called “Technical Community Development Coordinator”, the longest title I have ever held (it’s one syllable shy of a haiku). I shortened it to “TC/DC””.
– Microsoft, where I was hired from the open source world to reach out to developers who might not ordinarily consider using Microsoft tools and technologies. I promoted ASP.NET MVC, Windows Azure and was on the Windows Phone “Champs” team. I also helped organize events like “Make Web Not War”, a conference on Microsoft/open source interoperability.
– Shopify, where I most recently worked. I oversaw the Shopify Fund, a $1 million pool of money being used to encourage developers to build apps on the Shopify API and was Shopify’s representative on the 2011 BarCamp Tour, a group of startups that sponsored and actively participated in BarCamps across the country.
I’m also known for bringing my accordion — I call it “social hardware” — to developer conferences and gatherings. I play rock and pop accordion, from Nine Inch Nails to Britney Spears, and I use it as a tool for breaking the ice, livening up technical presentations and adding a little fun weirdness to conferences (here’s a video of me performing at the evening keynote of RailsConf 2007: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/05/24/playing-accordion-at-the-railsconf-keynote-or-theyd-never-let-me-do-this-at-javaone/)
I’m currently based in Toronto, but I’d be willing to relocate for the opportunity to promote Pebble. I’ve lived and worked in the Bay Area before (during the Bubble, at OpenCola) under a TN-1 visa. I still have my U.S. Social Security card and also have a NEXUS card, which cuts the time I spend in U.S. Customs down to 10 seconds.
I believe that I would be the perfect evangelist for you, and would love to talk to you about the opportunity to evangelize Pebble to developers. I’ve enclosed my resume with this email (PDF, 110K). If you have any questions, I would be very happy to answer them.
A mere four hours later, I got this reply from Pebble’s founder and CEO, Eric Migicovsky:
Date: Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 7:02 PM From: Eric Migicovsky Subject: Re: I want to be Pebble’s developer evangelist!
Hey Joey,
Thanks for sending all the info. It would be really good to chat soon. I’m in UK right now for Leweb, but do you want to Skype on Wednesday morning EST?
The next day, we were chatting on Skype, with him in a hotel room in London, and me in the business center of my hotel in Manila (The Ascott in Makati, which I highly recommend), both of us dealing with the sound occasionally dropping out and trying to work out dates for meeting up for an in-depth interview in Palo Alto.
“First world problems are the best,” I remember saying.
Two days in the Valley
Pebble flew me from Tampa to San Francisco on their dime…
An actual photo taken on the first leg of my flight from Tampa to San Francisco.
…and put me up for two nights at this hotel…
An actual photo taken in the hotel lobby on the evening I arrived.
…so that I could do two days’ worth of interviews at Pebble HQ.
In the summer of 2012, Pebble HQ and Eric’s house were one and the same. This isn’t all that different from the office setting in the TV series Silicon Valley, with Erlich Bachman’s house functioning as Pied Piper HQ…
The living room in Erlich Bachman’s house / Pied Pier HQ in Silicon Valley.
…except that rather than being like this…
The exterior of Erlich Bachman’s house / Pied Pier HQ in Silicon Valley.
…it was more like a townhouse, closer to the center of town, only a couple of blocks from University Avenue and the CalTrain station…
Google Street View of a street near Eric’s place.
…but if you replace the early 1960s house design in the Silicon Valley promo photo below with 1990s townhouse design, Pebble’s living-room-turned-into-office setup wasn’t all that different from Pied Piper’s:
The workspace in Erlich Bachman’s house / Pied Pier HQ in Silicon Valley.
The interview
I took the photo above on the first day of the two-day interview. I was overdressed, by Silicon Valley techie standards, but I’m a grown-ass man, and if you’re over 30, in a white-collar line of work, and not in a tropical climate, you should wear a jacket to your job more often than not. I also figured that I’d also stand out against most of the other people dropping by Pebble for a job, who would show up in the stereotypical startup schlub uniform of hoodie, T-shirt, and jeans.
I spent a good amount of my time with Eric brainstorming ideas for Pebble. A lot of people feel uncomfortable when this sort of thing happens; they see this as a company’s way of milking them for ideas for free, especially when the interview doesn’t result in their getting hired. I don’t, for the following reasons:
The job for which I was applying requires generating ideas. I needed to prove to them that I could do that.
I’d rather turn all my dials up to 11 in an interview and go all out. I think that putting in a half-hearted effort in order to prevent them from taking my precious ideas and running with them without my getting anything in return would guarantee a half-assed interview performance.
There’s a world of difference between having an idea and turning that idea into reality. As Thomas Edison said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
The bigger danger to me was them not hearing my ideas, not Pebble “stealing” my ideas. To quote Tim O’Reilly, “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”
I’m particularly pleased with one of my answers that came up during the brainstorming session. It was in response to this question from Eric: “How would you suggest dealing with the watch’s one-bit resolution?” The classic Pebble watch screens were effectively black-and-white: no color, and all their pixels had only an “on” state and an “off” state.
I answered by saying that they should think of their screens as “retro”, embrace their one-bit-ness, and borrow as many graphic tricks from the original Macintosh as they could, such as using dithering to simulate grayscale colors, as shown in the picture above.
I also spent a few hours on their programming challenge, which was to come up with a simple app for Pebble’s predecessor, the inPulse smartwatch, which was designed to be a BlackBerry accessory. They set me up at a coffee table, pointed me to where I could download the inPulse SDK, and said “see what you can come up with.”
The exercise required using things I’d never used before (Oracle VirtualBox, the inPulse SDK) and things I hadn’t used in ages (gcc and C), but in an afternoon, I not only had a working inPulse dev environment, but a working “Magic 8-Ball” app running on the SDK’s simulator.
Outcomes and output
If you know me personally, or if you look at my LinkedIn profile, you’ll know that I didn’t get the job. I think the interview went well, and I continued corresponding with Pebble after the interview, sending them writing samples and other artifacts of my developer evangelism at previous companies, but as July turned into August and then September, no responses came. I believe they ended up going with someone else for the role.
In September 2012, when my friend Katherine Hague was still running her quick-and-easy e-commerce service, ShopLocket (which has since been acquired), I introduced her to Eric via email, thinking that it would be beneficial to both ShopLocket and Pebble, and perhaps might even get my conversation with Pebble going again. As far as I know, nothing came of it.
If your organization needs someone with technical skills who can also communicate with a wide range of audiences — even to kids, with the assistance of a puppet c0-host — you may be interested to know that I’m available and looking for work.
If you’re looking for someone with desktop, web, mobile, and IoT development skills who can also communicate to technical and non-technical audiences, or a marketer or evangelist who also has a technology background and can code, you should talk to me.
The original version of my magnum opus job application, which was for a particular job at a particular company, failed in two respects:
It failed to advance me to the next round of their candidate selection process. I got the “We get many quality applicants that we have to turn down, and you’re one of them — good luck in your future endeavors!” email on Friday. This sort of thing happens, and that’s why I posted a generalized version of the application on this blog. I didn’t want all the work I put into it to be for naught simply because it didn’t impress one prospective employer.
It’s pretty big. There’s a lot of stuff in there because I’ve done a lot of stuff in my career, and it makes for a lot of reading.
There’s not much I can do about the first failure, but there is something I can do about the second. I’m going to highlight some of the items I featured in the magnum opus job application that may have been lost in its deluge of information, starting with this one…
Developer Jr., my short-lived children’s technology show
Back in 2010, when I was a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft, Kelly Bateman and Andy Walker approached me with hosting an web show jointly created by Microsoft Canada and the video tech tutorial site Butterscotch.com (a branch of Tucows). It was called Developer Jr., and it would show its young viewership — around the ages of 8 through 14 — how to make the most of everyday technology. Kelly managed to get funding for two episodes from her department, but we were both unable to find some group within Microsoft Canada that could cover the budget for more; nobody within that branch of the organization had a mandate to reach the show’s audience.
When preparing the show, we shot some test footage with a number of human co-hosts until someone suggested that we get puppeteer Brian Hogg to create a co-star just for the show. That’s how my co-host, Junior, was born.
Here’s the first episode, in which Junior and I walk the audience through building a simple game using the Windows/Xbox 360 game development system, Kodu. To this day, I still get emails from people who see the video and want to know more about Kodu:
In the second episode, Junior and I show our audience how to make their own movies, complete with closing credits, using Windows Movie Maker:
We also shot a couple of promo videos, such as this one where Junior and I are interviewed by Developer Jr.’s co-producer and director Matt Harris…
…and this quick teaser promo with Junior and me:
Why you should hire me
If your organization needs someone with technical skills who can also communicate with a wide range of audiences — even to kids, with the assistance of a puppet c0-host — you may be interested to know that I’m available and looking for work.
If you’re looking for someone with desktop, web, mobile, and IoT development skills who can also communicate to technical and non-technical audiences, or a marketer or evangelist who also has a technology background and can code, you should talk to me.
