I’ve only gotten back into PowerShell recently, so I was unaware that they have a cartoon mascot that I think of as “PowerShell Gambit.” The mascot appears at the start and completion of its installer, and now I call out PowerShell commands as I type them in my terrible approximation of Channing Tatum’s cajun accent in the Deadpool and Wolverine movie.
Join us on Thursday, January 9 at the Entrepreneur Collaborative Center in Tampa where Tampa Java User Group and Tampa Bay AI Meetup will jointly host Neo4j Developer Advocate Jennifer Reif, who’ll present What you need to know: Data, apps, and AI for graph databases!
Jennifer Reif is a Developer Relations Engineer at Neo4j, who will walk through what a graph database is and how it can transform your applications and data.
Graphs are different from other types of databases because they store relationships between data points. This makes them ideal for applications where the connections between data provides additional context, improving decision-making with existing data.
Join us to learn how to leverage graph databases in your applications and AI projects. Jennifer will talk about creating, querying, and displaying data and learn how to integrate a graph database into applications. Finally, she will discuss how graph databases can be used in AI applications and the strengths they bring to the table. Live code will demonstrate these concepts in action.
Packfiles appears in this week’s edition of Tampa Bay Business Journal as one of the “25 Hottest Startups in Tampa Bay”, and I’m pleased to report that I’m working with them!
Here’s what they wrote:
Packfiles
Tampa-based Packfiles is a project management and software platform founded this year. After meeting and working together in Tampa Bay, co-founders Rob Bremer and Charlton Trezevant — the creator of the software developer meetup group and nonprofit Tampa Devs — wanted to create a tool that eliminates the need for service firms during the coding file migration process, which developers utilize for efficiency.
The tool seeks to simply and controllably migrate files to Microsoft-owned platform GitHub, a popular tool for software developers that hosts code for collaboration and storage. In an ecosystem where successful startups are all about fulfilling a need, the co-founders’ experience collaborating at their prior company to help found one of the premier GitHub Professional Services practices in the United States will be key as they continue to build the platform.
Packfiles’ SaaS, called Warp, is a GitHub migration service. Normally, the process of migrating repositories from Azure DevOps to GitHub involves a complex process that requires a fair bit of planning, a number of shell scripts with limited support, and tedious, error-prone manual work.
It looks like this:
Warp is built on Packfiles cofounders Rob Bremer’s and Charlton Trezevant’s experience with performing these migrations. It automates the lion’s share of the process, and once you’ve done the necessary configurations, Azure DevOps-to-GitHub migrations end up looking like this:
In case you were wondering, that’s an actual screen capture of what I did to migrate a repository from Azure DevOps to GitHub, and if it looks like the comments section from a GitHub issue, that’s because it is! In Warp, you use GitHub to migrate to GitHub:
/migrate to start the migration process for that repository. Warp first replied in a follow-up comment to tell me that the migration was in progress, and then notified me in another follow-up comment that the migration was complete and provided a link to the repository’s new GitHub location.Warp’s target market, as you’ve probably figured out, is organizations who use currently Azure DevOps and want to switch to GitHub.
And who uses Azure DevOps? It turns out there’s a little club of businesses call the Fortune 500, and 85% of them are on Azure DevOps.
This leads to a follow-up question: What makes you think organizations want to move from Azure DevOps to GitHub?
My unofficial answer would be: Have you tried using Azure DevOps?
My more-official answer’s a little more serious, and it’s a citation of a Reddit thread in r/devops from a mere 14 hours ago at the time of writing:
Go and read the rest of the thread to see what they think of Azure DevOps vs. GitHub.
Finally, there’s the reaction that Rob, Charlton, and the rest of the Packfiles team got at the 2024 edition of GitHub Universe, the conference for all things GitHub. They were approached by companies of all sizes, including some very large ones you’ve definitely heard of.
Simply put, Warp solves a problem that most people don’t even know exists, but a lot of organizations need solved.
Long story short: I’ll be doing whatever Packfiles needs me to do. A lot of it will involve creating their documentation and developer/devops relations material, as well as technical sales and support.
The work I’ll be doing, especially in the beginning, will be collaborating very closely with Charlton, who’s lead developer and CTO, as well as with developer Justin Linn (whom I’ve been on not one, but two editions of StartupBus), so I’ll be working at least three days a week at Packfiles’ office at Tampa’s premier coworking/incubator space, Embarc Collective. Here’s what I see when I enter the place:
Luckily, it’s a quick drive from my place; in fact, it would take me 35 minutes to bike there, which I’ll do when the weather’s nice.
And here’s my desk at the office:
I’ve been working with Packfiles for the past couple of weeks, and I’m enjoying working there, being “in the room where it happens,” and also seeing the other folks at Tampa Bay’s startups at Embarc Collective.
This should be an interesting year. Keep watching this space for more!
So this arrived:
It’s a Raspberry Pi 500, which takes a Raspberry Pi 5, the latest generation of the “Internet of Things” tiny computer, and puts it into a keyboard chassis. I probably have more than enough computers, but I love Raspberry Pis, and this 1980s-style “all-in-one” form factor was impossible to resist, especially with its $90 price tag.
The full details are on the official product sheet, but I’ve listed the more important stuff below:
Here’s the Pi 500 as seen from the top…
…and here it is, as seen from the back.
This form factor takes me back the 1980s all-in-one computers on which I learned, most notably units like the Apple ][, Commodore VIC-20 and 64, Texas Instruments 99/4, Radio Shack TRS-80 and TRS-80 Color Computer, Atari 400 and 800, and Sinclair ZX80, ZX81, and ZX Spectrum (all of whose names are properly pronounced starting with “Zed-Ex”).
I put it on. my main desk and hooked it up to the secondary monitor with an HDMI splitter so that my MacBook and the Pi 500 can share it. Here’s what it looks like on my desk:
Setup was straightforward: the Pi 500 comes with a 32 GB A2-class MicroSD card, which acts as its “hard drive.” I plugged it into a MicroSD-to-USB adapter, plugged into my MacBook, and used the Raspberry Pi Imager app to load the latest version of the Raspberry Pi OS, which is based on Debian, onto the card.
In case you need a reminder that we live in an age of technological wonders, here’s the MicroSD card, posed beside a U.S. quarter coin for scale:
I was a bit concerned about the “feel” of the keyboard based on its “chiclet” style, but it’s actually not bad. It feels like a mid-level “wintel” laptop keyboard, and I think the feel of the Pi 500 keyboard feels better than the one on my Windows machine, a 2020-edition Acer Nitro 5 (nice machine, but I despise its keyboard and trackpad).
I already have computers that can run circles around the Pi 500 — an M1 MacBook pro and a Windows gaming laptop powered by a 10th-gen i5. What possible use could the Pi 500 possibly serve for me?
Here are my excuses — er, reasons:
Maybe that last reason is the most important — it’s just fun to play with the Pi 500, and that form factor makes me feel nostalgic for the days when I’d play games that I entered from BASIC source code published in Creative Computing or COMPUTE! magazine.
I’ll write more about my experiences with the Raspberry Pi 500 here, so watch this space if you’re curious about this fun, inexpensive platform!
Tampa Bay Innovation Center (TBIC) is holding an IdeaSprint Bootcamp for new B2B startups on Wednesday, January 15th from 5:00pm – 7:30pm!
It’s going to be an abbreviated, but very intensive program is perfect for B2B software startups that are less than 9 months old. It will cover strategy, product development, and market validation and is for first-time startup founders, who could benefit from the planning activities and tools, and aren’t ready to commit to a full-time program.
Who’s the IdeaSprint Bootcamp for?
What should attendees expect?
What categories of startup are eligible?
Please note:
Welcome to the first Global Nerdy Saturday “picdump” of the year! 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!
If you’re not based in Florida (where I am) or the southern U.S., you may be unaware that it’s no longer available in a number of states. Here’s why, in PornHub’s own words:
Here’s what I’ve experienced as a result:
Here’s the outcome, in pictures from around the ’net:
Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, January 6 through Sunday, January 12, 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
Tuesday evening at GuidePoint Security, Tampa: Speaker Aniruth Narayanan will talk at the Tampa Devs meetup about data lake technologies, and the history of relational databases, data warehouses, ML algorithms, and data lakes. He’ll will also dive into technical details of table formats like ACID guarantees of Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg, the underlying file formats like Apache Parquet, and how they come together to create the lakehouse for ML and AI.
Find out more and register here.
Tuesday evening at New World Tampa: The inaugural edition of the Ideas on Tap lecture series will feature three speakers talking about ideas:
Admission is free, New World has great beer and pizza (even with gluten-free crust), and it should be an entertaining, engaging evening!
Find out more and register here.
Wednesday evening at the Entrepreneur Collaborative Center, Tampa: Data Analytics & AI Tampa Bay is holding their January meetup. This meetup’s topic is part two of a two-part series: Mastering LLM Integrations: Anything LLM, Ollama, and the Path to AI Agents.
Part 2 is about AI agents. Building on the foundations established in Part 1, Part 2 will focus on AI Agents through the lens of CrewAI. This segment will offer an overview of CrewAI’s capabilities and applications in AI Agent development. The session will conclude with a live demonstration of AI Agents in action, illustrating how the foundational concepts from Part 1 translate into real-world use cases.
Find out more and register here.
Thursday evening at the Entrepreneur Collaborative Center, Tampa: Tampa Java user Group and Tampa Bay Artificial Intelligence Meetup present What you need to know: Data, apps, and AI for graph databases.
Join Jennifer Reif is a Developer Relations Engineer at Neo4j, who will walk through what a graph database is and how it can transform your applications and data. She’ll talk about creating, querying, and displaying data and learn how to integrate a graph database into applications. Finally, she will discuss how graph databases can be used in AI applications and the strengths they bring to the table. Live code will demonstrate these concepts in action.
Find out more and register here.
Friday morning, online: Join Tampa Bay User Experience for a virtual coffee talk! Got questions about UX? Want to discuss a specific topic? This is the place to do it.
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:
