Welcome to another Global Nerdy Saturday “picdump!” It’s the weekly article where I post the technology- and work-related memes, pictures, and cartoons floating around the internet that I found interesting or relevant this week. Share and enjoy!
The reason why I stopped using Duo:
Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, March 10 through Sunday, March 16, 2025!
This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:
✅ When the event will take place
✅ What the event is
✅ Where the event will take place
✅ Who is holding the event
Packfiles’ SaaS, Warp, makes it easy for organizations to adopt GitHub. If your company is thinking about migrating from Azure DevOps, Bitbucket Server, or Gitlab, Packfiles can help.
Find out more at Packfiles’ site: packfiles.io!
Monday at 6:00 p.m. at Mad Hatters Ethnobotanical Tea Bar: It’s the first meeting of the Tampa Artificial Intelligence Applications Meetup Group / Saint Petersburg Artificial Intelligence Meetup Group!
Find out more and register here.
Tuesday morning at 10, online: Computer Coach will host the webinar, “Career Changing Without Resetting Your Journey,” and learn actionable steps to transition successfully. Recognize your current skills and seize new opportunities without starting from scratch. Register now and take the next step in your career!
Find out more and register here.
Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.: Career Source Hillsborough Pinellas’ Spring 2025 Job Fair will take place at EpiCenter at St. Petersburg College in Clearwater!
✨ Why Attend?
✅ Meet employers from various industries
✅ Explore exciting career opportunities
✅ Bring your resume and be ready to network
This event is free and open to all job seekers! Don’t miss this chance to take the next step in your career.
Find out more and register here.
Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. at Vaco (Tampa): Tampa Bay Product Group will feature Jason Vogel, who’ll share how Product Managers can leverage the power of Feature Flags to manage the complexity and risk inherent in deploying critical business systems.
Find out more and register here.
Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. at Brick House Tavern + Tap, Tampa: Are you passionate about innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship? Looking for a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience and expand your professional network? Join this event for an exclusive Information Session & Networking Event to learn how you can volunteer at the Synapse Innovation Summit—Florida’s premier event for innovators, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders.
Yes, this is a way for you to attend Synapse Summit for free!
Find out more and register here.
Wednesday at 5:30, online: NextGen Tech and AI of St Pete are holding an online session: an exclusive Tech Talk event where they’ll dive into the latest innovations in the field of Artificial Intelligence!
Find out more and register here.
Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. at the Entrepreneur Collaborative Center, Tampa: Data Analytics and AI Tampa Bay will feature a data case study: Predicting Outcomes of Single-Family Residential Home Same-Year Resales. This project aimed to predict whether single-family residential homes in Florida, resold within the same year, would result in a profit or a loss. Using data from the Florida Department of Revenue (FDOR) Assessment Rolls from 2009 to 2020, they built binary classification models to distinguish between profitable and unprofitable resales. They developed three machine learning models: Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, and Random Forest, chosen for their ability to measure the importance of input variables. Feature importance functions from the Scikit-Learn module were applied to identify the most significant factors affecting resale outcomes.
Find out more and register here.
Thursday at 6:00 p.m. at Embarc Collective, Tampa: Tampa Bay Java Group presents Why Software Testing Is a Waste of Time + Reputation Formula. Testing software takes up a lot of time in the software development process, often the same time if not more than the time required for the development itself. Just like development, testing also requires continued maintenance efforts. This (rightfully so) makes a lot of people in different roles, be it managers, developers or even testers question whether or not that time effort is really justified. With more and more companies deploying every 10 minutes or even less start to wonder: why invest time in testing when you can rollback issues in a matter of seconds, in some cases even automatically?
Learn more about common pitfalls, time wasters, and what you can do to make your testing strategy more efficient in this talk!
Find out more and register here.
Thursday at 6:00 p.m. at Casa Santo Stefano, Tampa: Join Tampa Bay Women in Agile for an evening of networking at Casa Santo Stefano in Ybor City! Don’t miss this opportunity to network with like-minded professionals, gain valuable insights, and empower yourself to excel in your career. Whether you are a seasoned Agile practitioner, looking to advance in your career, or learning about agile, this community is filled with knowledgeable and open minded professionals. Let’s come together to support and uplift each other on our professional journeys!
Come and connect with your Tampa Bay Agile community. All are welcome who support Women in Agile!
Find out more and register here.
Thursday at 6:00 p.m. at Magnanimous Brewing, Tampa: Tampa Power Platform and Tampa M365 will have their regular get-together where you can enjoy beers, socialize, and network with awesome local techies. Whether you’re new to Microsoft 365 or an experienced M365 IT Pro / Developer, this event is a great opportunity to meet new faces and get to know your local counterparts.
Find out more and register here.
Thursday at 7:00 p.m. at Neon Temple: Learn “snake charming” — Furio and his flowing, lucious hair will give you all you need to not just learn procedural Python, but create art with it.
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:
Welcome to another Global Nerdy Saturday “picdump!” It’s the weekly article where I post the technology- and work-related memes, pictures, and cartoons floating around the internet that I found interesting or relevant this week. Share and enjoy!
According to cybersecurity news site The Record (they’re pretty good; you should bookmark them), newly-appointed U.S. Defense Secretary (and former FOX News host, philanderer, and raging alcoholic with a track record that “falls short of military standards”) ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia last week.
This is the same Russia that brought us cybersecurity threats such as:
Here’s what CISA — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — has to say about Russia. This is from their Russia Cyber Threat Overview and Advisories page, which was on their website at the time of writing, but it might not be for much longer:
Friends in the cybersecurity industry — prepare a lot of headaches in the near future.
Once upon a time, “Skype” was synonymous with “audio chat” and then “video chat.” But that was a while back, and Zoom, Slack, Discord, and (grudgingly) Teams have taken over.
I hadn’t used Skype in so long that I’d thought the service had already been shot down — but that’s actually happening in May, according to Microsoft’s article, The next chapter: Moving from Skype to Microsoft Teams .
So my first reaction was “Skype is still around?”
My second reaction:
Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, March 3 through Sunday, March 9, 2025! That’s right; it’s not just a new week, but a whole new month!
This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:
✅ When the event will take place
✅ What the event is
✅ Where the event will take place
✅ Who is holding the event
On Tuesday morning at 10:00, Computer Coach will host an online session titled How to Write a Technical Resume. In this live workshop, they’ll discuss how to write a technical resume for job searching in today’s highly competitive job market!
Find out more and register here.
Tuesday evening at 6:30 p.m., online: NextGen Tech and AI of St. Pete is holding their webinar, Tech Talk: Latest Innovations in Artificial Intelligence. This will bean exclusive Tech Talk event where we will dive into the latest innovations in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Find out more and register here.
Wednesday’s an especially busy day!
Women in Tech and Entrepreneurship are having an online session at 11:30 a.m.: Scale Your Business Without Losing Integrity, Going Viral, or Burning Out. Arielle Morten will share integrity-based strategies in this master class for women entrepreneurs.
Find out more and register here.
Tampa Bay Azure User Group is hosting Securing inside your perimeter with Microsoft Purview at 5:30 p.m. at Embarc Collective. Trofeo provides a tour of Purview and an understanding of how to leverage this powerful security tool. Come early and stick around after the event for networking, which will a joint event with High Tech Connect (see below)!
Find out more and register here.
It’s High Tech Connect’s first event of 2025! It starts at 5:30 p.m. at Embarc Collective, with networking a brief presentations by these sponsors and more:
This is a join event with Tampa Bay Azure Group (see above)!
Find out more and register here.
Tampa Devs’ presentation will be on Relational Databases and Data Warehouses! They’ll look at the fundamental distinctions between Relational Databases and Data Warehouses, shedding light on crucial concepts like row store and column store. We will delve into the physical storage of data on disk and examine how it influences performance. It will take place at Vaco Tampa Skycenter at 6:00 p.m.
Fond out more and register here.
Agile Lean Beer St. Pete is all about promoting knowledge sharing and networking among professionals with a passion for Agile Product Development. Come drink with us and explore anything Agile. Whether you’re a Scrum enthusiast or just curious about Agile practices, this is the perfect platform to exchange experiences, network, vent, and foster your Agile knowledge. All this while drinking beer together! It’s happening at OCC Road House & Museum at 6 p.m..
Find out more and register here.
Tampa Bay Drupal & Web Technologies Q&A is happening at The Bricks in Ybor on Thursday at 7 p.m.!
Find out more and register here.
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:
I’ve been seeing a concerning trend over the past couple of months, and perhaps you have too, where people are becoming increasingly reliant on AI for coding, and it might not be working out well for most of them.
Consider this entry from a couple of weeks ago in the subreddit for Cursor, the AI code editor:
Here’s the text of their post:
Cursor f*ck up my 4 months of works
Disclamer, I’m a moron who worked on the same project without thinking about the risk that Cursor could break everything. Yesterday, Cursor (even though I only asked it to feed a view on my UI) destroyed months of development.
My question: How do you back up your projects/versions to ensure that the next action on cursor is reversible? Ops!
Also, I know that while I’m the concern, cursor isn’t the only culprit, it’s also Claude (while good overall) still has some flaws
Don’t take the misspellings and strange grammar as a sign of a lack of smarts — there are “tells” such as the pluralization of “work” that suggest that the author’s first language isn’t English. And in a follow-up comment, they wrote:
I’m not a dev or engineers at all (just a geek working in Finance)
So what I see is someone with the mental capacity to master another language, seeing a problem in their area of expertise that could be solved by an application, and then setting out to build that application with the assistance of AI, even though programming isn’t something they’re familiar with.
First, I think we should celebrate that kind of go-getter attitude.
Second, those of you who are programmers have already seen the post’s author’s rookie mistake. It’s in this question:
My question: How do you back up your projects/versions to ensure that the next action on cursor is reversible?
You probably thought: Of course, they don’t know version control exists!
At the moment, even the best LLM will simply focus on answering the user’s questions and not stray too far to make helpful asides or ask clarifying questions, such as “Have you heard of Git?”
This article appeared on Namanyay Goel’s blog a couple of days after the Reddit post, and according to its stats, it’s already garnered a million views:
Here’s the text of the introduction:
Something’s been bugging me about how new devs learn and I need to talk about it.
We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re shipping? That’s where things get concerning.
Sure, the code works, but ask why it works that way instead of another way? Crickets. Ask about edge cases? Blank stares.
The foundational knowledge that used to come from struggling through problems is just… missing.
We’re trading deep understanding for quick fixes, and while it feels great in the moment, we’re going to pay for this later.
The first line in the following section shouldn’t really be shocking but it still feels shocking:
I recently realized that there’s a whole generation of new programmers who don’t even know what StackOverflow is.
(As user number 216 of Stack Overflow, with over 8,000 reputation to my name, this hurts a little.)
With AI, these junior developers gain speed of delivery, but at the cost of understanding what they delivered does. Which means that they can’t maintain or modify what they built — at least, not without even more AI assistance. Over time, what they build becomes a collection of quick fixes arranged together without any consideration of the system as a whole. That’s a whole lot of tech debt.
There’s more thought on this article in this video by Forrest Knight
And finally, here’s a tweet from the very beginning of February, a couple of weeks before the prior two pieces:
In case you’re not familiar with the name, Andrej Karpathy has forgotten more about computer science and AI than most of us will ever learn. He was the director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla, and also worked at OpenAI, where he specialized in deep learning and computer vision. He also has a YouTube channel that’s worth checking out if you really want to boost your AI/ML skills.
Here’s the text of his tweet:
There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it. I “Accept All” always, I don’t read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I’d have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can’t fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I’m building a project or webapp, but it’s not really coding – I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
This is great for Karpathy, but I’ve already talked with developers who’ve fully embraced the first part of the tweet, where Karpathy throws a lot of work to the AI. The problem is that they’re ignoring these key points from the second part:
Karpathy is very, very good at coding and has lots of experience. He’s internalized a lot of best practices and has developed an instinct for programming and can spot “code smells” a mile away.
The people who’ve been talking to me about getting into “vibe coding” are not Karpathy, and some of them have mentioned that they have that increasingly common problem where they say “I know how to use my programming language and framework, but I don’t know how to apply what I know to build an application from the ground up.”
They’re not ready for vibe coding, but they’re doing it anyway. If your main gig involves working with code — and especially working with other people’s code — you’d better prepare for some interesting times over the next few years.