You can register for next Tuesday’s Civo Navigate Local Tampa 2024 conference, happening at Armature Works, for the low, low price of TEN DOLLARS with this discount code…
Civo Navigate Local Tampa is a one-day version of Civo’s 2-day Navigate conferences, with a stronger focus on local organization and techies. It will feature four topic categories…
Cloud Native
AI/ML
Emerging Tech
Thought Leadership
…over two tracks:
A main stage track with panels and presentations, and
A workshop track with lightning talks and workshops
Want to know what Civo’s two-day conference is like? Here’s a video summary of the most recent one, held in Austin in February:
It doesn’t matter if you make or sell physical products, software products, or service products. If you’re in “The Other Bay Area” and you manage (or want to manage) a product — a thing or service that you sell to customers to fulfill a need or want — you’ll want to attend this meetup.
This group is for professionals who are passionate about Agile, Product Development, and Product Creation. We connect to share experiences, knowledge, and best practices in Lean Product Development. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting out, this group is the perfect place to network, learn, and grow in the field of product development. Let’s collaborate, innovate, and elevate our skills together!
The hosts will be:
Nisha Patel, Product Manager at RevStar, S&R Candle Company, and 3T Career Institute, as well as a co-organizer of Tampa Bay’s chapter of Women in Agile, and all-round regular at local agile events, and
Om Patel, Enterprise Business Agility Consultant at ClearlyAgile, organizer of the local Lean Beer events, and co-host of the Arguing Agile podcast!
If you plan to attend, be sure to register for it; registration helps meetup organizers figure out how much food to order. And yes, refreshments will be served.
Location note: For those of you who haven’t been to Kforce in a while, the Kforce office is no longer in Ybor; it’s now in Midtown Tampa, a stone’s throw from the Whole Foods.
Notes from my new work notebook. Tap to view at full size.
To me, it always felt that I learned better and retained more if I took notes by hand rather than typing them in, and there’s research that backs up my hunch!
More notes from my new notebook. Tap to view at full size.
The gist of the Scientific American article:
Taking notes by hand versus typing results in more electrical activity across many interconnecting brain regions that handle things like:
movement
vision
sensory processing
memory
It’s slower than typing, which means you have to pick and choose what you record, forcing you to:
prioritize the information you’re presented with
figure out what the main points are
relate what you’re writing notes about to what you’ve learned before
…and that means you’re more likely to stay engaged and grasp new concepts better
Writing by hand means that your motor and memory systems have to work together, which improves your memory of what you’re writing notes about
My new notebook and many colored pens. Tap to view at full size.
As Unified API’s newest member and Supreme Developer Advocate, I have a lot of work ahead of me — and a lot of note-taking. So I customized a notebook from a Scrum software vendor (I can’t even remember when I got it) with Unified’s octopus logo (see the photo above) and have been taking furious notes. As a result, I’m retaining what I’m learning, which is very, very important at this very early stage in the game.
If you’re learning something new, trying breaking away from the computer as a note-taking device, get a paper notebook, and try writing notes by hand! You may be pleasantly surprised.
Here’s the “official unofficial” list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for Monday, April 8 through Sunday, April 14, 2024.
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
And hey, I work for a company with an octopus mascot! I knew that office art would come in handy.
Long story short: I’m joining Unified API — or “Unified” for short, online at unified.to —as their Supreme Leader of All Things Developer Relations. That’s not my official title, but it’s the most accurate description of my role.
Unified’s product, like the best startup products, is something its founders needed but couldn’t find, so they made it: a unified API.
It’s a way to call all a whole lot of SaaS APIs from all sorts of categories — HR, ATS, CRM, marketing, authentication — from a single API.
If you’re going to join a startup, you had better believe in the founders, and I believe in Unified’s founders, CEO Roy Pereira and CTO Alexey Adamsky. I know them from when I live in Toronto — Roy from Toronto’s strong startup scene and its then-monthly DemoCamp gatherings…
…and Alexey, who developed one of the apps that I regularly showcased when I was Microsoft Canada’s breadth developer advocate for Windows Phone 7:
I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting and being vetted by Unified’s Head of Marketing, Kailah Bharath and Head of Sales Michelle Tomicic:
And yes, with the addition of Yours Truly, that’s the entire company. I’m back in startup mode!
The Pragmatic Engineer’s chart comparing working at a startup vs. working in big tech. Tap to view the source.
It’s going to be an interesting change of pace, moving from a big tech company to a small and scrappy startup, but part of the allure is the adventure. As Gergely “Pragmatic Engineer” Orosz puts it, the good part about startups is that they’re are amazing places to learn in, and you can make a large impact and directly influence the company.
Of course, adventure doesn’t come without a “risk tax.” Being in a startup can be unsettling: there’s less financial stability, you can’t “coast,” and you’re always looking over your shoulder for the ever-present spectre of potential failure. But I prefer to live by this Venn diagram:
Unified is based in Toronto, but I will remain based here in “The Other Bay Area,” Tampa Bay, operating from my home office, pictured below…
My home office, where the developer relations magic happens!
I’m going to spend a lot of time going over Unified’s documentation, SDKs, blog, white papers, dashboard, and every other part of the developer experience and do what I can to make a great developer tool even better!
I’m looking forward to the adventure with Unified!
Here’s the “official unofficial” list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for Monday, April 1 through Sunday, April 7, 2024. That’s right — this week starts with April Fools’ Day!
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
It’s back! The 11th edition of BSides Tampa, Tampa Bay’s community-led cybersercurity conference, happens Saturday, April 6th at Marshall Student Center at USF.
You’ll want to attend BSides if:
You work in cybersecurity, because your peers — some of whom you might not know — will be there.
You’re looking for a cybersecurity job. You’ll get to network with people in the field, and you’ll find the conference’s Career track helpful.
You’re curious about cybersecurity. What do cybersecurity people do? They test systems for vulnerabilities (go to the talks in the Offense / Red Team track), they protect systems from attackers (go to the talks in the Defense / Blue Team track), and they create processes to enhance security (go to the talks in the Governance track).
You’re into intelligence — human and artificial. There’s an AI / Defense track that covers these topics.
You want to learn. I can’t think of a BSides where I didn’t learn at least three important things.
You want to know what the Tampa security scene is like. Tampa has an underappreciated security scene, and you’ll get to see what it’s like at BSides Tampa!
BSides Tampa is sponsored by the Tampa Bay chapter of (ISC)², which is clever and mathematically-correct shorthand for “International Information System Security Certification Consortium”. (ISC)² is a non-profit specializing in training and certifying information security professionals.
BSides gets it name from “b-side,” the alternate side of a vinyl or cassette single, where the a-side has the primary content and the b-side is the bonus or additional content.
Here’s the origin story: When the 2009 Black Hat conference in Las Vegas received more presentation submissions than they could take on. There were many presenters whose talks weren’t accepted, but were still very good — there just wasn’t enough room for them at Balck Hat.
So they banded together and made their own parallel conference that ran in parallel to Black Hat — it’s from that event that we get BSides.
BSides conferences are community events, and unlike a lot of tech conferences, they’re inexpensive. BSides Tampa 2024 costs $45 to attend — the same price as last year — and that gets you:
Access to all conference tracks
Access to Discord server
Access to the exhibition area, villages, and sponsorship area
