Think about it. With an unearned position as a hero to many on Earth, taking credit for the hard work of other people or fortuitous circumstances, a lack of concern for those working under him, and the id of a fourteen-year-old boy, it’s clear that the comic book character that best exemplifies Elon Musk isn’t Tony Stark, but Zapp Brannigan.
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, November 28 through Sunday, December 4, 2022.
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:
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.
| Group | Event Name | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Young Professionals Networking JOIN in and Connect! | In person at Fords Garage St Pete | 11:00 AM |
| Tampa / St Pete Business Connections | Downtown St Pete Business Professionals Lunch | 11:00 AM |
| Professional Business Networking with RGAnetwork.net | St. Pete Networking Lunch! Fords Garage! Monday’s | 11:30 AM |
| Christian Professionals Network Tampa Bay | Live Online Connection Meeting- Monday | 11:30 AM |
| Orlando Digital Media Design Meetup | Virtual Class: Designing with the Adobe Mobile Suite | 2:00 PM |
| SCIPS, a 50+ Tampa Bay Singles Club | EUCHRE, Rummy Q and more at 3PM this MONDAY ONLY. On other Mondays it is 4pm | 3:00 PM |
| Warehouse Arts District Association (WADA) | WADA/CITYVERSE NFT TOWN HALL | 5:30 PM |
| Suncoast Critical Thinking Discussion Group | Tampa Get Together | 6:00 PM |
| Brews N Board Games | Board Game Night at Persimmon Hollow Flamingo Crossings | 6:00 PM |
| Tampa Bay Tabletoppers | Monday Feast & Game Night | 6:00 PM |
| Tampa Bay Thinkers | Katherine’s Baaack! Evangelists, Misogynists, and Repugnicans, BEWARE! | 6:00 PM |
| Board Game Meetup: Board Game Boxcar | Monday Weekly Board Game Night! (Lazy Moon Colonial Location) | 6:00 PM |
| Tampa Bay Gaming: RPG’s, Board Games & more! | Casual Pokemon League at Nerdy Needs | 6:00 PM |
| Tampa Hackerspace | Members Only: Ceramic Cup Glazing and Casting | 6:00 PM |
| Sarasota “Doctor Who” Fan Meetup | November Viewing Party | 6:00 PM |
| Critical Hit Games | MTG: Commander Night | 6:00 PM |
| Clean Fiction Writers of Central Florida | Writers Meet & Greet | 6:00 PM |
| Tampa – Sarasota – Venice Trivia & Quiz Meetup | Trivia Night – Off the Wagon Kitchen & Brewery Smartphone Trivia Game Show | 6:30 PM |
| Learn-To-Trade Forex – Online (As seen on Orlando Sentinel) | Learn-To-Trade Q&A (ONLINE) | 7:00 PM |
| Orlando Stoics | ONLINE: “Toxic Relationships and Attachments” | 7:00 PM |
| Learn-To-Trade Crypto – Online (As seen on Orlando Sentinel) | Learn-To-Trade Q&A (0NLINE) | 7:00 PM |
| Meet New People As Adults – Which is Harder Than Expected | Trivia Night to Meet New People | 7:00 PM |
| Light Study PRO – A Photography Workshop for Emerging Pros | Members as far back as 2008 can access their photos | 7:00 PM |
| Orlando Social Poker Club | Texas Holdem cash games Online every night at 7PM EST | 7:00 PM |
| Central Florida AD&D (1st ed.) Grognards Guild | World of Greyhawk: 1E One-Shots | 7:30 PM |
| The Nomadic Entrepreneur Group Sarasota | Learn How to Create a Ridiculously Easy Second Income on LinkedIn | 8:00 PM |
| Group | Event Name | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Central Florida Philosophy Meetup | Wake Up and Think Clearly Saturday morning share and discuss. | 7:00 AM |
| Florida Center for Creative Photography | FREE Camera Sensor Cleaning for FCCP Supporters — Join FCCP Now and Save $$$ | 8:00 AM |
| Toastmasters Division G | Early Bird Ocala | 8:00 AM |
| Board Game Meetup: Board Game Boxcar | Board Game Boxcar Winter Con 2022 | 9:00 AM |
| Chess Republic | Coffee & Chess: Tampa Midtown | 9:30 AM |
| Toastmasters Division E | Hunters Creek Toastmasters | 9:30 AM |
| Writers Group at the Haunted Antique Shop | Writers Group at the Haunted Antique Shop | 9:30 AM |
| The Art Of Photography – Tampa/Gulf Coast Chapter | SAT 12/3 at 10 AM FREE ONLINE PHOTOGRAPHY CRITIQUE PROGRAM | 10:00 AM |
| North Florida Stock Investing Education | Discounted Cash Flow Series | 10:00 AM |
| Sarasota and Bradenton Continuing Education CEU Community | Saturday CEU • Hand Reflex System | 10:00 AM |
| Orlando Lady Developers Meetup | Code with me – learning sessions weekly on Saturdays | 10:00 AM |
| Orlando Melrose Makers | In-Person: Makerspace Open Lab | 10:30 AM |
| Oviedo Middle Aged Gamers (OMAG) | Bravo Group Campaign Continues | 11:00 AM |
| Orlando Unity Developers Group | Create an Obby Style Video Game | 11:00 AM |
| Geekocracy! | Geeks go Hiking at Jay B. Starkey Park | 11:00 AM |
| World Class Business Networking Orlando | Business Success Networking Lunch | 11:30 AM |
| Winning The Week | Winning The Week – 1st Meet | 12:00 PM |
| Suncoast Makers | FREE Fab Lab Orientation | 1:00 PM |
| Central Florida Florida Foam Fighting (Fumetsu) | Fighter Practice! (Newbies welcome) | 2:00 PM |
| Orlando Machine Learning and Data Science | [IN-PERSON] Databricks demo: transfer learning with MLflow | 3:00 PM |
| Socrates Cafe – “The unexamined life is not worth living” | ONLINE: “Nobel Prize Winners: Inspiring Stories” (Part 2) | 3:00 PM |
| Nerdbrew Events | Community Hang-out Night | 7:00 PM |
| Central Florida AD&D (1st ed.) Grognards Guild | THE ONE-SHOT GUILD | 7:00 PM |
| The Non Non Non Fiction Book Club | 2nd Book Club Meeting @ Southern Brewing: The Undying by Anne Boyer | 7:00 PM |
| Gen Geek | Birthday Bar Crawl 🎉 | 7:00 PM |
| Orlando Horror Movie Fans 20s-30s | Month 1 of 12 till Halloween | 9:30 PM |
| Group | Event Name | Time |
|---|---|---|
| There’s A Book For That: Self-Improvement Book Club | Weekly meeting | 10:00 AM |
| Soberish Hang Outs and Book Club | Discussing Quit Drinking Without Willpower by Allen Carr | 10:00 AM |
| The Art Of Photography – Tampa/Gulf Coast Chapter | SUN 12/4 at 10 AM FREE ONLINE PHOTOGRAPHY CRITIQUE PROGRAM | 10:00 AM |
| Board Games and Card Games in Sarasota & Bradenton | Games at Descent Into Gaming | 12:00 PM |
| Beginners Guide to D & D (Tampa Bay area) | D&D Adventurers League | 1:00 PM |
| Drunk’n Meeples West Pasco (Boardgames) | Weekend Game Day | 1:00 PM |
| Tampa Bay Gaming: RPG’s, Board Games & more! | D&D Adventurers League at Critical Hit Games | 2:00 PM |
| Critical Hit Games | D&D Adventurers League | 2:00 PM |
| Toastmasters, Division D | Weekend Toastmasters | 3:00 PM |
| Orlando Adventurer’s Guild | Epic New Player Nights – Various DMs (Tier 1: Level 1-4) | 5:00 PM |
| Brandon and Seffner area AD&D and Rifts (Palladium) Group | Rifts | 5:00 PM |
| Learn-To-Trade Forex – Online (As seen on Orlando Sentinel) | Learn-To-Trade Forex, Crypto & Futures (ONLINE) | 7:00 PM |
| Florida Center for Creative Photography | Alphabet Soup | Finding Letters in the World Around Us | 7:00 PM |
| Learn-To-Trade Crypto – Online (As seen on Orlando Sentinel) | Learn-To-Trade Cryptos, Forex & Futures (ONLINE) | 7:00 PM |
| Nerdbrew Events | Hidden Gems Night, Presented by A Duck! | 7:00 PM |
| Learn-To-Trade Stocks – Online (As seen on Orlando Sentinel) | Learn-To-Trade Crypto, Forex & Futures (Online) | 7:00 PM |
| Nerd Night Out | NerdBrew Karaoke @ MacDinton’s! | 8:00 PM |
| Solana – Tampa | Office Hours | 8:00 PM |
Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!
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Hey techies! Want to know who’s hiring or what positions are open right now? Here are a couple of Google spreadsheets that you might find helpful in your search:
Help your fellow techies out there and share these spreadsheets far and wide!
It’s true — to do data science, you need to understand linear algebra. Luckily, it’s one of the less onerous branches of math; much easier than calculus, anyway.
If you design or develop front ends, whether web, mobile, or even desktop, you really should watch the latest Web Briefs video by Heydon Pickering, What happened to text inputs?
The video starts with a twist on the classic parable, Inside you are two wolves. In this twist, one of the wolves is called “Adrian”…
…and the other’s called “Chris”:
The video covers its topic very well, and very amusingly — stop messing with text input boxes and making them less usable! They should very clearly indicate that:
The video also goes into topic such as why using text input value placeholders are a poor substitute for labels, as well as why the latest slew of aesthetic tricks are still worse than using a good ol’ text box and label.
A lot of tech workers — and according to some estimates, 25% of Twitter’s workforce — are people from other countries working on an H-1B visa. This temporary non-immigrant visa lets employers hire non-U.S.-citizen/non-U.S.-resident-alien professionals to work in “specialty occupations” that require at least a bachelor’s degree or the equivalent.
(My parents, both doctors, worked in the U.S. and thus had H-1B visas. I was already around when this took place, hence my “American” accent.)
The choice that Twitter employees had to make yesterday — quit or work at “Twitter 2.0” under a “hardcore”, random, capricious, ill-thought-out, workaholic leadership — wasn’t much of a choice for the ones on an H-1B visa. H-1Bs are tied to a specific employer, and quitting that employer means that you have 60 days to find a new employer to sponsor a new H-1B tied to the new employer, change your status, or leave the U.S..
For examples, see:
Under normal circumstances, that’s tricky. Under the current circumstances, with layoffs all over the tech sector, high inflation, and the threat of a recession, it’s much, much worse. The only choice for many H-1B holders at Twitter might be to stay and hope that life under new management — a.k.a. “Space Karen” — isn’t as hellish as many people predict. The problem is that so far, it’s been a total clown show.
Also not helping: racist nationalist toolbags like this guy:
If you know any H-1B holders working at Twitter or under Twitter-like circumstances, support them as best you can.