I’m going to be at VueConf US on Tuesday and Wednesday, which very conveniently takes place here in Tampa!
Between my recent trip to Greece, being handed the leadership of Tampa Bay Python, prepping and giving a talk at BSides Tampa, and working with clients, and given that I’ve been working primarily with mobile app and Python development, Vue.js — and by extension, VueConf — has been off my radar.
However, I’m overdue to get up to speed on Vue, and I’ve been invited to attend VueConf. (Thanks to Tampa Java User Group’sAmmar Yusuf for connecting me and Vincent Mayers for the invitation!)
VueConf will take place at USF’sCAMLS center, where CAMLS is short for Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation. CAMLS isn’t located on USF’s main campus, but in downtown Tampa. It’s a pretty new building, and I’ve never set foot in it; I have heard that it has a very nice lecture hall:
While Vue doesn’t have React’s userbase, it’s got a nicer learning curve, doesn’t require you to import everything including the kitchen sink, better DOM manipulation performance, and two-way data binding. It also doesn’t drive me anywhere near as crazy as React does.
It also did well in Theo’s JavaScript framework tier list — I’ve posted the final results above, and the video below:
Anyhow, I’ll write about my experiences at this conference, with the occasional update on my LinkedIn. Watch this space!
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 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.
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.
poweredUP, Tampa Bay’s annual tech festival organized by Tampa Bay Tech, takes place next Wednesday, May 14 at the Mahaffey Theater in St. Pete. It always features presentations and talks on top-of-mind topics for Tampa Bay’s tech leaders.
It’s a full day of dynamic discussions, panel sessions, and insights from industry visionaries, with these featured track topics:
The Future of Work: Robotics & Intelligent Process Automation
Digital Governance: Managing IT, Data & Compliance
Healthcare Transformation: How Emerging Tech Is Reshaping Care Delivery
From Concept to Coaster: The Tech Behind Universal’s Iconic Experiences
Leading Locally: Spotlight on Tampa Bay’s Tech Trailblazers
Smarter Solutions: Rapid-Fire Use Cases from Companies Solving Big Problems with Tech
It’s a great event for Tampa Bay-based tech people (and aspiring ones) to attend, and to make it even easier to go, there are TWO ways to attend it even more cheaply than the low $79 admission fee:
Attend for FREE by being a volunteer! If you do two hours’ volunteering for at poweredUP, and you get to attend for free! You can sign up to volunteer here.
Here’s the conference agenda:
Time
Topic
Details
12:00 PM
Opening Remarks
Tampa Bay Tech: Meghan O’Keefe
City of St. Petersburg: Mayor Ken Welch
12:15 PM
Keynote
Arnie Bellini, Former ConnectWise Founder & CEO
12:57 PM
The Future of Work: Robotics & Intelligent Process Automation
Leading Locally: Spotlight on Tampa Bay’s Tech Trailblazers
Panel: Kim Anstett (Trellix), Vladimir Voyuts (Dynasty Financial Partners), John Armenia (Accusoft) Moderator: Meghan O’Keefe (Tampa Bay Tech)
3:51 PM
Smarter Solutions: Rapid-Fire Use Cases from Companies Solving Big Problems with Tech
Featuring: Trellix, BlackStraw, CDW, Nix United
4:30 PM
Closing Remarks
Tampa Bay Tech: Meghan O’Keefe
4:35 PM
Happy Hour & Networking
Join me at poweredUP! I’ll be there, and if you want to talk Python, AI, software development, or music (or if you have topic suggestions or requests for upcoming meetups), I’ll be more than happy to.
Once again, here are the money-saving ways to attend the conference:
Attend for FREE by being a volunteer! If you do two hours’ volunteering for at poweredUP, and you get to attend for free! You can sign up to volunteer here.
Tuesday at 10:00 am, online: Computer Coach presents The Interview Cheat Sheet! Ready to ace your next interview? Join our webinar, “The Interview Cheat Sheet: Interviewing Tips to Level Up Your Game,” and gain valuable insights to excel in your interviews. Elevate your interview skills and stand out from the competition.
Tuesday at 6:00 pm: Tampa Bay Product Group presents Shaping the Future of Project & Change Management – An Agile-Focused Discussion!
Join a group of agile experts from local organizations to discuss how to successfully integrate agility into project and change management. This facilitated roundtable discussion will focus on how agile principles and practices can drive successful transformation, along with key considerations to keep in mind.
You don’t need to be an agile expert to gain value from this session. This session is designed to build awareness for those who seek to know what to do to help yourself become stronger or help your organizations approach the opportunities agile can provide it.
Tuesday at 6:00 p.m.: Data Analytics & AI Tampa Bay presents Eric Vogelpohl taking a step back to focus on what’s realistic over the next 6-12 months. The conversation will span the spectrum of perspectives — from cautionary voices like Geoffrey Hinton to the unbridled optimism — exploring how to temper expectations while still embracing the incredible potential ahead. It’s also a chance to reflect on the ethical responsibilities that come with this tech and how we navigate its rapid evolution.
Wednesday from 11 am to 6 pm at the Mahaffey Theater: It’s Tampa Bay Tech’s annual poweredUP Tampa Bay Tech Festival! It’s a day of innovation, inspiration, and connection. This highly anticipated gathering will bring together the brightest minds and boldest ideas in technology for an experience that’s as engaging as it is impactful.
Thursday at 6 pm at Embarc Collective: Tampa Java User Group presents Bootiful Spring Boot: A DOGumentary. Spring Boot 3.x and Java 21 have arrived, making it an exciting time to be a Java developer! Join Josh Long and dive into the future of Spring Boot with Java 21. Discover how to scale your applications and codebases effortlessly. You’ll explore the robust Spring Boot ecosystem, featuring AI, modularity, seamless data access, and cutting-edge production optimizations like Project Loom’s virtual threads, GraalVM, AppCDS, and more. Let’s explore the latest-and-greatest in Spring Boot to build faster, more scalable, more efficient, more modular, more secure, and more intelligent systems and services.
BSides Tampa is open to anyone interested in cybersecurity. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting out, there’s something for everyone!
One of the talks at BSides is mine and Anitra’s:Surviving Your Layoff, which will show you how to make the layoff ride less bumpy and move from layoff to liftoff!
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:
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 and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
Here’s the schedule for AI Codecon, which is still being finalized as I write this:
Introduction, with Tim O’Reilly (10 minutes)
Gergely “Pragmatic Engineer” Orosz and Addy Osmani Fireside Chat (20 minutes) Addy Osmani for an insightful discussion on the evolving role of AI in software engineering and how it’s paving the way for a new era of agentic, “AI-first” development.
Vibe Coding: More Experiments, More Care – Kent Beck (15 minutes) Augmented coding deprecates formerly leveraged skills such as language expertise, and amplifies vision, strategy, task breakdown, and feedback loops. Kent Beck, creator of Extreme Programming, tells you what he’s doing and the principles guiding his choices.
Junior Developers and Generative AI – Camille Fournier, Avi Flombaum, and Maxi Ferreira (15 minutes) Is bypassing junior engineers a recipe for short-term gain but long-term instability? Or is it a necessary evolution in a high-efficiency world? Hear three experts discuss the trade-offs in team composition, mentorship, and organizational health in an AI-augmented industry.
My LLM Codegen Workflow at the Moment – Harper Reed (15 minutes)
Technologist Harper Reed takes you through his LLM-based code generation workflow and shows how to integrate various tools like Claude and Aider, gaining insights into optimizing LLMs for real-world development scenarios, leading to faster and more reliable code production.
Jay Parikh and Gergely Orosz Fireside Chat (15 minutes) Jay Parikh, executive vice president at Microsoft, and Gergely Orosz, author of The Pragmatic Engineer, discuss AI’s role as the “third runtime,” the lessons from past technological shifts, and why software development isn’t disappearing—it’s evolving.
The Role of Developer Skills in Today’s AI-Assisted World – Birgitta Böckeler (15 minutes) Birgitta Böckeler, global lead for AI-assisted software delivery at Thoughtworks, highlights instances where human intervention remains essential, based on firsthand experiences. These examples can inform how far we are from “hands-free” AI-generated software and the skills that remain essential, even with AI in the copilot seat.
Modern Day Mashups: How AI Agents Are Reviving the Programmable Web – Angie Jones (5 minutes) Angie Jones, global vice president of developer relations at Block, explores how AI agents are bringing fun and creativity back to software development and giving new life to the “programmable web.”
Tipping AI Code Generation on its Side – Craig McLuckie (5 minutes) The current wave of AI code generation tools are closed, vertically integrated solutions. The next wave will be open, horizontally aligned systems. Craig McLuckie explores this transformation, why it needs to happen, and how it will be led by the community.
Prompt Engineering as a Core Dev Skill: Techniques for Getting High-Quality Code from LLMs – Patty O’Callaghan (5 minutes)
Patty O’Callaghan highlights practical techniques to help teams generate high-quality code with AI tools, including an “architecture-first” prompting method that ensures AI-generated code aligns with existing systems, contextual scaffolding techniques to help LLMs work with complex codebases, and the use of task-specific prompts for coding, debugging, and refactoring.
Chip Huyen and swyx Fireside Chat (20 minutes) Chip Huyen will delve [Aha! An AI wrote this! — Joey] into the practical challenges and emerging best practices for building real-world AI applications, with a focus on how foundation models are enabling a new era of autonomous agents.
Bridging the AI Learning Gap: Teaching Developers to Think with AI – Andrew Stellman (15 minutes) Andrew Stellman, software developer and author of Head First C#, shares lessons from Sens-AI, a learning path built specifically for early-career developers, and offers insights into the gap between junior and senior engineers.
Lessons Learned Vibe Coding and Vibe Debugging a Chrome Extension with Windsurf – Iyanuoluwa Ajao (5 minutes) Software and AI engineer Iyanuoluwa Ajao explores the quirks of extension development and how to vibe code one from scratch. You’ll learn how chrome extensions work under the hood, how to vibe code an extension by thinking in flows and files, and how to vibe debug using dependency mapping and other techniques.
Designing Intelligent AI for Autonomous Action – Nikola Balic (5 minutes)
Nikola Balic, head of growth at VC-funded startup Daytona, will show through case studies like AI-powered code generation and autonomous coding, you’ll learn key patterns for balancing speed, safety, and strategic decision-making—and gain a road map for catapulting legacy systems into agent-driven platforms.
Secure the AI: Protect the Electric Sheep – Brett Smith (5 minutes) Distinguished software architect, engineer, and developer Brett Smith discusses AI security risks to the software supply chain, covering attack vectors, how they relate to the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, and how they tie into scenarios in CI/CD pipelines. You’ll learn techniques for closing the attack vectors and protecting your pipelines, software, and customers.
How Does GenAI Affect Developer Productivity? – Chelsea Troy (15 minutes) The advent of consumer-facing generative models in 2021 catalyzed a massive experiment in production on our technical landscape. A few years in, we’re starting to see published research on the results of that experiment. Join Chelsea Troy, leader of Mozilla’s MLOps team, for a tour through the current findings and a few summative thoughts about the future.
Eval Engineering: The End of Machine Learning Engineering as We Know It – Lili Jiang (15 minutes)
Lili Jiang, former Waymo evaluation leader, reveals how LLMs are transforming ML engineering. Discover why evaluation is becoming the new frontier of ML expertise, how eval metrics are evolving into sophisticated algorithms, and why measuring deltas instead of absolute performance creates powerful development flywheels.
I’ve just been informed that I’ll be one of the speakers at the 2025 edition of KCDC — Kansas City Developer Conference — which takes place August 13 through 15!
KCDC draws 2000+ attendees each year and features tracks for the following topics:
Architecture
AI and Data Science
Cloud
Data
DevOps
Human Skills
Java
JavaScript
Methodologies and Process Management
.NET
Other Technologies
Security
Testing and QA
UI/UX and Design
My talk
My talk, titled The Best, Most Fun Python Platform You’ve Never Heard Of, is a programmer’s introduction to the powerful, fun, and all-too-often-ignored Ren’Py. While Ren’Py is called a “visual novel engine,” I prefer to think of it as the fastest, most fun way to create Python applications.
Here’s the description for my talk:
Python’s occupied the number one spot on the TIOBE Programming Community Index for the past couple of years, and it’s the preferred programming language in for AI and data science. Perhaps you’ve been thinking about learning it, but the thought of having to do another set of “Hello World” style exercises is filling you with dread. Is there a more fun way to get up to speed with Python?
Yes, there is, and it’s called Ren’Py. It’s billed as a visual novel engine and often used for writing dating simulation games, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a platform that lets you code in Python (and more) and deploy to desktop, web, and even mobile platforms, and with a fraction of the effort required by React, Vue, or Angular. It’s a fun framework that’s been used to produce games you can find on Steam, but it’s got applications well beyond amusement.
In this session, we’ll look not just at the basics of Ren’Py development, but the building of a dating game based on KFC’s official game, “I Love You Colonel Sanders,” a simple turn-based combat game starring Florida Man, and building mobile apps in a way that’s less frustrating than usual.
Chris Ayers is speaking too!
Better still, I won’t be the only Tampa Bay geek speaking — Chris Ayers will be there too, and he’ll be delivering his talk, The Power of Dev Containers and GitHub Codespaces:
Dive into the future of software development with our session on Dev Containers and GitHub Codespaces. Dev Containers bring reproducibility and consistency across any platform with Docker, simplifying project onboarding and setup. GitHub Codespaces takes this a step further, offering scalable, cloud-hosted development environments, accessible from anywhere.
In this session, you’ll gain insights into:
Dev Containers Fundamentals: Understand their role in creating consistent development environments.
GitHub Codespaces Integration: Explore how Codespaces enhances Dev Containers, providing flexible, cloud-based development.
Practical Implementation: Learn to configure Dev Containers for your projects, including tool installation, VS Code extensions, port forwarding, and software setup.
Maximizing Codespaces: Discover how to customize Codespaces for remote development efficiency.
François Martin will be there!
If you were at the March Tampa Bay Java User Group meetup, you saw François Martin deliver a presentation with a not-at-all-controversial title: Why Software Testing is a Waste of Time.
Anitra and I had the pleasure of taking him around Tampa while he was in town, and I even lucked out by being able to catch up with him for dinner while we were in Greece earlier this month!
He’ll deliver two talks at KCDC:
82 Bugs I Collected in a Year You Won’t Believe Made It to Production
How writing just one import the wrong way slows down your website
I’m going to be at VueConf US on Tuesday and Wednesday, which very conveniently takes place here in Tampa!
VueConf will take place at USF’s CAMLS center, where CAMLS is short for Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation. CAMLS isn’t located on USF’s main campus, but in downtown Tampa. It’s a pretty new building, and I’ve never set foot in it; I have heard that it has a very nice lecture hall:
While Vue doesn’t have React’s userbase, it’s got a nicer learning curve, doesn’t require you to import everything including the kitchen sink, better DOM manipulation performance, and two-way data binding. It also doesn’t drive me anywhere near as crazy as React does.
One of the talks at BSides is mine and 
