Anitra and I will be at BSides Tampa tomorrow, and we’ll be giving our presentation, Surviving Your Layoff, at 1 p.m. in the Career track (room 3711)!
If you’ve been laid off, or just want to be prepared, you’ll want to catch our presentation at BSides Tampa, taking place tomorrow at USF!
Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, May 19 through Sunday, May 25, 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
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 hereby declare Benedikt Becker’s (@bennobecks) post on Threads the social media post of the day.
This was just too funny to save for next Saturday’s picdump. I don’t think Jira’s as bad as everyone makes it out to be, but I still laughed out loud when I saw this.
Let me introduce you to a shorthand term that I think will be useful soon: a12y, which is short for automatability, which is the ability to be automated.
(The term a12y indicates that the first letter is a, the final letter is y, and there are 12 letters between them. There’s a similar, better-known. shorthand term, a11y, which is short for accessibility.)
Automation is nothing new. It’s one of the reasons we use technology — from mechanical devices to computers to software and online services — to perform tasks with to reduce the work we have to do, or even eliminate the work entirely.
In the Python courses I’ve taught a few times at Computer Coach, I’ve covered how you can use Python to automate simple day-to-day work tasks and provided examples from one of the course’s core textbooks, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python (the entire book is available to read online for free!).
I’ve also created a number of Python automations that I use regularly. You’ve even seen some of their output if you’re a regular reader of this blog, since the weekly list of Tampa Bay tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events is generated by my automation that scrapes Meetup pages.
MCP is the latest buzzword in both AI and automation, or a12y with AI. Short for Model Context Protocol (and not Master Control Program in the Tron movies), MCP is a standardized way for AI models to go beyond simply generating answers and interact with external tools and data sources, such as APIs, databases, file systems, or anything else that’s connected to the internet and can accept commands to perform actions.
Simply put, it’s the next step in the path to creating AI agents that can perform tasks autonomously.
(Come to think of it, a10y might be a good shorthand for autonomously.)
We’ll cover all sorts of a12y topics in the upcoming Tampa Bay Python meetups! I’m currently working on the details of booking meetup space and getting some food and drink sponsors, but they’ll be happening soon. Watch this blog, the Tampa Bay Python Meetup page, and my LinkedIn for announcements!
BSides Tampa 12, Tampa’s big cybersecurity conference, takes place this weekend at the University of South Florida!
BSides Tampa is one of Tampa Bay’s biggest tech conferences, with 1,900 attendees at last year’s event:
It’s worth checking out, even if cybersecurity isn’t your main focus. For starters, in today’s incredibly networked and AI-powered environment, security is everyone’s concern.
You’ll also learn a lot, whether it’s from one of presentations spread across seven tracks, the villages (the Social Engineering Adventure Village, the Lockpick Village, and the Network Security Village), the two Capture the Flag events, or the people you’ll meet.
BSides Tampa will take place over two days:
The tickets for the main conference are very reasonably priced:
You can buy tickets to BSides Tampa here.
BSides gets it name from “b-side,” the alternate side of a vinyl or cassette single, where the a-side has the primary content and the b-side is the bonus or additional content.
In 2009, the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas received way more presentation submissions than they could take on. The rejected presenters had very good presentations; there just wasn’t enough capacity for them. Those presenters, disappointed at not having their presentations accepted, banded together and made their own “b-side” conference in the spirit of Bender from Futurama.
That event was the first BSides, a small, hastily-assembled event that ran at a BSides organizer’s house at the same time as Black Hat on July 29 and 30, 2009.
Here are some photos:
Here’s the summary of that first BSides from the BSides history page:
It was a wild success: the talks were good, the party was better, and it was clear that the security community was excited at the idea of a conference that focused on conversations and personal interaction with peers. Those involved in the first event had a vision of rolling the idea out at a regional level, enabling local organizers to set up similar conferences in their own area.
In 2010, BSides took place again in Las Vegas, but there were also BSides conferences in Atlanta, Austin, Berlin, Boston, Dallas, Delaware, Denver, Kansas City, Ottawa, and San Francisco. In 2011, it would expand to over 40 events, with Africa and Australia joining the list of continents that had a BSides conference.
Tampa had its first BSides on February 15, 2014, and it’s grown over the years to become one of the biggest Tampa Bay tech events of the year.
BSides Tampa is sponsored by the Tampa Bay chapter of (ISC)², which is clever and mathematically-correct shorthand for “International Information System Security Certification Consortium”. (ISC)² is a non-profit specializing in training and certifying information security professionals.
Join us at BSides Tampa this weekend!
It’s Saturday — time for another “picdump!”
This is 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. There are 103 of them — share and enjoy!
