Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, September 27, 2021)

Here’s your weekly list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events — plus a little area tech news — for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, September 27 through Sunday, October 3, 2021.

This is a weekly service from Tampa Bay’s tech blog, Global Nerdy! For the past four years, I’ve been compiling a list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas. There’s a lot going on in our scene here in “The Other Bay Area, on the Other West Coast”!

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.

This week’s events

This list contains only events that are outdoors or online for the time being

The COVID-19 case rates are dropping from their all-time highs, but we’re still a hotspot and they still need to continue trending downward. With that in mind, I’ve chosen to limit the events listed to outdoor or online events. Be safe, be responsible, get your shots, and we can get back to those better numbers that we had in the spring and early summer!

Monday, September 27

If you’re looking for work in tech, you should start your Monday at 9:00 a.m. with Rise and Grind, Computer Coach’s informal virtual “coffee talk” where they explore what works and doesn’t work in a career search. In each session, they cover a new topic related to career success, network with other professionals, support each other, build meaningful relationships and answer questions about job search strategies. Register on their EventBrite page here!

Tuesday, September 28

Synapse is holding a panel on Tuesday at 4:30, which will feature a panel discussing the topic of doing business with diverse partners. Find out more about the event on its EventBrite page.

Wednesday, September 29

On Wednesday, September 29 at 6:45 p.m., the ReactJS Tampa Bay Meetup will lead an exercise where participants will build a video chat app — very fitting during the pandemic — using Vue and the Daily API. Find out more on the event’s Meetup page.

Thursday, September 30

Friday, October 1

I’m part of this one! At 10:00 a.m. this Friday, Computer Coach will host a panel called State of The Tampa Tech Scene, where the organizers behind Tampa’s influential setups will talk about the current state of technology and the tech industry, as well as how you can get involved and grow your network. Find out more on the event’s Meetup page.

Saturday, October 2

Sunday, October 3

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

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!

Categories
Meetups Programming Tampa Bay

The “Think Like a Coder!” meetup: Monday, October 4

I’m bringing back my Tampa-based programming meetup! It used to be Tampa iOS Meetup, and then Programmers of Portables, but I’m broadening its coverage and renamed it Think Like a Coder!

Think Like a Coder! is a meetup with a mission, which is to help with the programmer’s biggest challenge: How do you apply what you’ve learned about programming to actually write programs? How do you take what you’ve learned about loops, branches, functions, objects, and so on and turn them into applications?

During each meetup, we’ll take on a problem and try to solve it with code. As with my other meetups, these will be “code along with me” exercises — we’ll all learn by doing.

The meetup’s first session will take place ONLINE on Monday, October 4th at 7:00 p.m., and the exercise will be to answer a very “Florida” question: Are Publix subs on sale?

This session will cover scraping — the process of reading the contents of web pages — and then performing actions based on those contents. We’ll work together in JavaScript (and possibly Python) to look at how we can write a program that can answer the question “Are Publix subs on sale?”.

Join us ONLINE on Monday, October 4 at 7:00 p.m. for the first session of Think Like a Coder!

Categories
Programming Reading Material

GoalKicker.com’s free programmer’s notes for all sorts of platforms

I mentioned these FREE ebooks back on Programmer’s Day, but I feel that they merit their own post: GoalKicker.com has a great collection of FREE ebooks featuring programming recipes for all sorts of platforms, from Angular to Android, C to C++ to C#, Java to Kotlin, MongoDB to MySQL, Perl to PHP to Python, Ruby on Rails to React, Swift to Xamarin Forms and more!

You can download them for free here, but if you’re feeling really grateful and generous, you can buy them one or more coffees!

Categories
What I’m Up To

“Hackers” is back on YouTube for free (with ads)!

The YouTube Movies & Shows YouTube channel has a set of films that usually require you to part with some money to watch them, but occasionally become free with ads. One of these films is the so-bad-its-good so-’90s-it-hurts Hackers (it has a 32% critics/68% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes), and at the time of writing, it’s free-with-ads.

I’ve got it on an “background productivity noise” while I work on an article about Auth0 authentication on Android…

Tap to view at full size.

In case you wanted to watch it, here it is in all its 1995 glory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T_CqqjOPDc
Categories
How To

I thought everyone knew these Google apps shortcuts

Tap to view at full size.

This week, in both in-person and online conversations, I found out that a lot of people don’t know these quick shortcuts for creating new documents in Google apps. They’ve been around for a while:

  • Want to quickly create a new Google document?
    Enter doc.new or docs.new into your browser’s address bar.
  • Want to quickly create a new Google spreadsheet?
    Enter sheet.new or sheets.new into your browser’s address bar.
  • Want to quickly create a new Google slide deck?
    Enter slide.new or slides.new into your browser’s address bar.

In fact, domain names that end with .new have a specific purpose: they’re shortcuts to take actions in specific web applications.

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, September 20, 2021)

Here’s your weekly list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events — plus a little area tech news — for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, September 20 through Sunday, September 26, 2021.

This is a weekly service from Tampa Bay’s tech blog, Global Nerdy! For the past four years, I’ve been compiling a list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas. There’s a lot going on in our scene here in “The Other Bay Area, on the Other West Coast”!

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.

This week’s events

This list contains only events that are outdoors or online for the time being

The COVID-19 case rates are dropping from their all-time highs, but we’re still a hotspot and they still need to continue trending downward. With that in mind, I’ve chosen to limit the events listed to outdoor or online events. Be safe, be responsible, get your shots, and we can get back to those better numbers that we had in the spring and early summer!

Monday, September 20

Tuesday, September 21

Wednesday, September 22

Thursday, September 23

Friday, September 24

Saturday, September 25

Sunday, September 26

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

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!

Categories
Deals Programming Reading Material

Happy Programmer’s Day 2021!

Once again, it’s September 13th — the 256th day of the year (on non-leap years)! As the number of values that can be expressed in a single byte, 256 means something to programmers, and as the largest power of 2 that will fit into 365, the 256th day of the year is a perfect excuse to declare it as Day of the Programmer.

Here are some things that you might find useful on this special day…

Want a free programming book? How about a whole lot of free programming books? GoalKicker.com has a series of notes for professionals for a wide array of programming languages and platforms. You can download them for free, but if you’re feeling really grateful and generous, you can buy them one or more coffees!

There’s Humble Bundle’s Python Superpowers bundle, which provides a lot of goodies for $25, including some really good Python video courses, ebooks, and a 6-month free license of PyCharm Professional Edition!

All work and no play makes Jack/Jackie a dull programmer, so why not play some programming games, like Shenzhen I/O, pictured above? Here’s a list of nine coding games that could sharpen your skills.

And finally, if you’re a new programmer or just need a Git refresher, you’ll want to check out Get Gud with Git.