7venth Sun serves beers and ciders, and you can bring food. There’s a food truck stationed outside, and if you prefer, there’s great Korean food at Gangchu across the street (in fact, 7venth Sun makes one of their beers, K-Hop).
iOS Apprentice, Eighth Edition, written by me, Eli Ganim, and Matthijs Hollemans.
Years ago, I used to joke that if I ever wrote a book, I’d know that it was well-received if it ever got pirated. I’d forgotten about that joke until today. I was Googling for an image of the cover of the book I co-wrote — iOS Apprentice, Eighth Edition (and the first edition to cover SwiftUI) — when I found it available for download on a pirate ebook, er, I mean extralegal evaluation site! I’ve made it as an author — the free-as-in-piracy market has declared it so!
It would be a violation of my agreement with the publisher (and also in very poor taste) to link to the site, so I’ve simply posted a screenshot of the page that features the book.
Here’s what their summary says. They seem to like it:
If you’re new to Swift or programming in general, learning how to write apps can seem like an incredibly difficult task. In that case, you may need this book. It is divided into five parts, each of which describes a separate project. By the end of the book, you will have enough information to be able to implement your ideas in code.
Dignity:
➕ Absence of errors and typos; ➕ Quality Exercises.
Weaknesses:
➖ Not Noticed.
The book has been liked by 58 registered users and shared by 74 registered users on the pirate site. I’m left wondering who registers on a pirate site that doesn’t require registration to download.
The payment model at RayWenderlich.com (the publisher’s name at the time; they’re now Kodeco) isn’t royalty-based, and the edition is pretty out of date now, so I’m not mad at all. In fact, I’m pleased — it means my work was good enough that people wanted to pirate it!
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the second week of 2023: Monday, January 9 through the Sunday, January 15, 2023. Welcome to the first full work week of 2023!
Every week, with the assistance of a couple of Jupyter Notebooks that I put together, I compile this list for the Tampa Bay tech community.
As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:
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 (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Anything I deem geeky
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
I’m ready to starting holding sessions of Tampa Bay Apple Coding Meetup, but I’m missing one thing: a place to hold them!
Prior to the pandemic, I’d been doing monthly meetups where I’d walk Tampa Bay’s developers through “code along with me” tutorials where I’d show them how to write native iOS apps in Swift such as:
A simple text editor
Pomodoro timer
“Magic 8-ball”
Weather app with geolocation
“Frogger” / “Crossy Road”-style game
An augmented reality app similar to the IKEA furniture app
A machine learning app that can identify specific images
It’s time to bring these meetups back!
I need a place in the Tampa Bay area where I can lead a group through an exercise where we get together and build an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Mac, or augmented reality app together. If you’d like to host such an event or know someone or some organization that would be willing to do this, please let me know via email.
Civo Navigate is an in-person conference taking place on Tuesday, February 8 and Wednesday, February 9 in Tampa at Armature Works, and here are some reasons why you should attend…plus a way to attend for 50% off!
Reason 1: The organizers — Civo
I’m reviewing cloud hosting options for backends for my mobile apps as well as some web apps I plan to build, and Civo’s pricing chart makes them look like a pretty good option right now. This conference is a good option to find out more about Civo.
Reason 2: The sessions
Being a “cloud native” technology company, the topics covered in their schedule are interesting:
Kubernetes
Machine learning
Edge computing
Security
DevOps
Machine learning, edge computing, and security are definitely up my alley, and I really need to find out more about Kubernetes — usually, I just say “That’s DevOps’ problem,” but it’s a topic that I really should get to know better.
Reason 3: Woz!
Woz — or if you insist on his “government name,” Steve Wozniak — is the keynote speaker, scheduled for Tuesday, February 7th at 8:50 a.m.! It’s always a delight to see him speak.
Reason 4: The venue — Armature Works
Many conference sessions take place in a space like this…
…but Civo Navigate is happening at Armature Works, a brick warehouse that used to house streetcars but is now home to a fantastic food hall and event space. Their sessions spaces look more like this:
And when it comes to conference food, Civo Navigate can promise better than the usual. That’s because they provide meal vouchers that you can use in Armature Works’ Public Market, pictured below:
Half of success, the saying goes, is simply showing up. Events like Civo Navigate are not just where you might learn something new, but also where chance meetings and opportunities happen. Ask me sometime about the number of great things that have happened to me because I attended a conference.
It’s been just over five weeks since the launch of ChatGPT (it happened on November 30, 2022). Since then, from casual conversations over the holidays to New York Times think pieces, people have been asking if ChatGPT could do their jobs.
In case you’re wondering, I’m a Senior Developer Advocate at Okta for the Auth0 product. If that sounds confusing, it’s because Okta acquired Auth0 in May 2021, and while we’re one company, that company has two products named “Okta” and “Auth0”. It’s my job to show mobile developers how they can use the Auth0 product to authenticate and authorize users.
In the video above, I “had a conversation” with ChatGPT where I asked it some basic questions about OAuth2, OIDC, and Auth0, and it answered them correctly. However, when it got to questions about writing iOS and Android apps that used Auth0 for login, it got some details wrong — and in programming, it’s the details that get you. Watch the video to find out what happened!
