Bridge Builder: “An individual in the community who is dedicated to building a radically connected tech ecosystem, whether through philanthropy, thought leadership or a commitment to social causes.” The nominees are:
Evan Brenner, Geographic Solutions
Brian Kornfeld, co-founder and President, Synapse
Suzanne Ricci, Executive Director, Computer Coach
Emerging Tech Leader of the Year
Erik Maltais, founder and CEO, Immertec
Kate Dalley, Director of Product Development, PowerChord
Tampa Bay Inno: Tampa Bay startups are getting recognized on a national scale
Here’s Tampa Bay Inno’s roundup of startups here in “The Other Bay Area” who are making waves at the national level. You can read the full article, which I’ve summarized below.
RxLive is a special one for me, as I helped to shepherd it from concept to initial version during my time as Lead Product Manager at Sourcetoad. Best of luck to Mark and Kristen Engelen, RxLive’s co-founders!
I’ll admit it — as an old D&D player and fan of Clash of the Titans, I can’t resist a good “Kraken” pun. That’s why I like SiteWit’s new name, Kliken. Their service lets you integrate marketing campaigns in your site, and they raised $6 million in a Series B.
SKUx, based in St. Pete, creates one-time-use digital incentives to get customers to spend more at retailers. They raised $4 million in angel funding.
Covercasa’s offering is a platform for searching for and buying home insurance. They raised $1 million in angel funding.
And finally, the blockchain development studio Blockspaces, where a lot of local blockchain-related meetups are held, raised $75,000.
“Okay, so these Tampa Bay tech startups in 2020 got some money. What’s in it for me?”
For starters, all this investment activity helps raise the profile of these Tampa Bay-based tech startups in 2020, which in turn helps put Tampa Bay on the tech map. This helps to push the narrative that “The Other Bay Area” is a great place for techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds in which to live, work, and play.
Also, there’s the matter that this money is meant to grow these companies, which in turn means new job openings. If you’re looking for work in tech, you’ll want to check out these companies’ sites and see what openings they have.
Once again, here’s the weekly list of events for events for Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds. Every week, on GlobalNerdy.com and on the mailing list, I scour the announcements for events that are interesting to or useful for those of you who are building the future here in “The Other Bay Area, on The Other West Coast”.
This list covers events from Monday, October 12 through Sunday, October 18, 2020.
I’ve opted to list only those events that I can confirm are happening online. I’m not yet listing in-person events, as we’re still in the middle of a pandemic in one of the hardest-hit states (729,000 cases, which is an increase of 14,000 since last week, and 15,200 deaths, which is up 600 from last week) in one of the hardest-hit countries in the world (7.75 million cases, which is an increase of 350,000 from last week, and 214,000 deaths, which is up 5,000 from last week).
Events — especially virtual, online ones — can pop up at the last minute. I add them to the list as I find out about them. Come back and check this article from time to time, as you might find a new listing that wasn’t there before!
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.
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Agile Open Florida is central Florida’s annual gathering of agile practitioners for sharing knowledge, ideas, and experience, meeting old friends and making new ones, and generally staying on top of the Sunshine State’s agile scene.
This year, Agile Open Florida takes place on Friday, October 16, 2020 from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and it’s happening online!
Virtual Agile Open Florida will be facilitated using Open Space Technology (OST), with the ultimate goal being to connect, learn, and share. Using the Open Space Technology (OST) approach, the Agile Open Florida encourages agile practitioners from around the state of Florida to self-organize around topics that are most important to them. In this framework, participants with common issues and interests share their experiences and learn from others. There is no preset agenda for the event, rather, sessions are created “live” by the participants at the start of the day. In order to get the most out of this event, please come prepared with topics that are of interest to you, either to learn more about or to share your experiences.
The Agile Open Florida will abide by the Four Principles of Open Space Technology …
Whoever comes are the right people.
Whatever happens is the only thing that could.
It starts when it starts.
It’s over when it’s over.
… and The Law of Mobility and Responsibility (also known as the “Law of Two Feet”):
“If you are not learning or contributing where you are, find a place where you can learn or contribute.”
Tickets for Agile Open Florida are a mere $10.00, but if you feel like sponsoring, there’s a $250 sponsor package that gets you 2 tickets, your logo on the conference landing page, and the option for a virtual sponsor booth.
September has come and gone, which means it’s time for the listing of the month’s episodes from Tampa Bay tech podcasts! Here are the ones I know about, listed from newest podcast on the block, to one that’s been around for years.
Friends that Code is the newest podcast on this list, and it’s hosted by Mike Traverso, whom locals may know from the Tampa Bay Google Developers Group meetup and other Google-y events. In this podcast, he showcases…
…some amazing people I know that just happen to write code for a living. Whether they started off intending to code or just happened into it, we get to hear about the types of people you’ll meet, things you’ll get to do, jobs you’ll have along the way, and advice from some awesome coders along the way!
The Mike Dominick Show is the second-newest of the podcasts in this list, and it has an open source focus.
Here are the episodes from September:
Episode 38: Jochen Breuer of SUSE Manager
Mike sits down with Jochen Breuer, who works on Uyuni, Salt, and Cobbler. He’s a maintainer for Salt on openSUSE, an openSUSE Member and a Fedora packager.
Episode 37: Jono Bacon
Mike sits down with Jono Bacon, leading community and collaboration strategy consultant, author, and speaker. He previously led community at Canonical, GitHub, and XPRIZE, and works with a broad range of clients from large enterprises to early-stage startups to help them build engaging, productive communities. He is the author of six books, including the award-winning ‘People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams‘, is a columnist at Forbes, and published in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Entrepreneur, and elsewhere.
Episode 36: Adam Dymitruk
Mike sits down with Ada Dymitruk of Adapt Tech Group to discuss Event Modeling, a way of thinking about software projects that will blow your mind.
At the time I’m writing this, The 6 Figure Developer — hosted by John Callway, Clayton Hunt, and Jon Ash — has posted 158 episodes. It’s…
…a show dedicated to helping developers to grow their career. Topics include Test Driven Development, Clean Code, Professionalism, Entrepreneurship, as well as the latest and greatest programming languages and concepts.
Here are the episodes from September:
Episode 163 – MLOps and ML.NET with Alexander Slotte
Alexander is a Microsoft MVP and a Managing Consultant and .NET Xpert at Excella, based out of Washington DC. He’s the founder and organizer of The Virtual ML.NET Community Conference and the organizer of the .NET DC User Group.
Episode 162 – C# 9 and .NET 5 with LaBrina Loving
LaBrina Loving is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft with over 18 years of experience in the Microsoft stack. In her role, she is focused on helping Startups and ISVs migrate to Azure and modernize their SaaS solutions for cloud. She works with them to leverage the cloud for cutting edge technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Chatbots, IoT/Edge, Serverless, and DevOps. LaBrina is a speaker doing conferences and user groups all over the world and has recently started a Podcast “Disrupting the Cloud” that highlights the journey of cloud newbies and professionals in cloud computing, especially women and BiPOC.
Episode 161 – Next.js with Tim Neutkens
Tim Neutkens is the co-author and lead maintainer of Next.js and is the co-author of the MDX library for dynamic markdown documents. He has a passion for creating scalable applications and improving the developer experience, and has spoken at a number of industry conferences such as dotJS and React. He joined Vercel (formerly ZEIT) in 2017 and co-authored a number of libraries the team was building internally and served as a project advisor. Prior to Vercel, he worked at We Provide for two years as a software developer and has a background in eCommerce and CMS solutions using PHP.
Episode 160 – Visual Testing with Angie Jones
Angie is a Principal Automation Architect, Director of Test Automation University, she is an International Keynote Speaker and Java Champion, and is the creator of more than 25 patented inventions.
Episode 159 – Mo Hampton: Giving Back to Tech without Burnout
Mo is an Army Veteran and Software Engineer. Her passion for web application development led her to the Open Source community to learn full-stack JavaScript. When not thriving off of coffee, meditation or travel, she builds cost-effective, user-friendly business applications.
Of the podcasts in this roundup, Thunder Nerds — “A conversation with the people behind the technology, that love what they do… and do tech good” — has been around the longest, with 271 episodes over five seasons to date. You’ve probably seen the hosts at local meetups and conferences; they’re Sarrah Vesselov, Frederick Philip Von Weiss, and Brian Hinton.
Here are the episodes from September:
273 – 🦈 The Journey of a Developer, & Aquariums on Mars with Krystal Campioni
In this episode, we get to speak with Krystal Campioni: Creative Coder, Speaker, Marine life enthusiast, and Senior Front-end Developer at Shopify. We discuss Krystal’s career at Shopify, creative coding with CSS and Vue, and our current new normal.
272 – 🤝 Talking to a JavaScript Friend with Baskar Rao Dandlamudi In this episode, we get to speak with Design Leader, YouTuber, and Co-founder & CEO at Blush Pablo Stanley. We discuss the fundamentals of design thinking, and how to improve your craft. We also talk about Blush, and how it allows you to customize every piece of an illustration to create your own compositions.
Once again, here’s the weekly list of events for events for Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds. Every week, on GlobalNerdy.com and on the mailing list, I scour the announcements for events that are interesting to or useful for those of you who are building the future here in “The Other Bay Area, on The Other West Coast”.
This list covers events from Monday, October 5 through Sunday, October 11, 2020.
I’ve opted to list only those events that I can confirm are happening online. I’m not yet listing in-person events, as we’re still in the middle of a pandemic in one of the hardest-hit states (nearly 715,000 cases and 14,600+ deaths) in one of the hardest-hit countries in the world (7.4 million cases, 209,000 deaths).
Events — especially virtual, online ones — can pop up at the last minute. I add them to the list as I find out about them. Come back and check this article from time to time, as you might find a new listing that wasn’t there before!
Startup Week Tampa Bay
It’s virtual, and it’s happening this week! Techstars Startup Week Tampa Bay runs Monday, October 5th through Friday, October 9th, and it’s packed with events for you, the Tampa Bay area techie and entrepreneur!
Here’s the highlight video from last year’s Startup Week:
As I mentioned earlier, this year’s Startup Week will be virtual, enabled by Lunchpool’s “virtual table” system, which does a pretty good job of emulating a conference hall with individual tables where you can gather into groups and converse.
This video explains how it’ll work:
Here are some links that you might want to check out:
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!
It’s virtual, and it’s happening next week! Techstars Startup Week Tampa Bay happens Monday, October 5th through Friday, October 9th, and it’s for you, the Tampa Bay area techie and entrepreneur!
Here’s the highlight video from last year’s Startup Week:
As I mentioned earlier, this year’s Startup Week will be virtual, enabled by Lunchpool’s “virtual table” system, which does a pretty good job of emulating a conference hall with individual tables where you can gather into groups and converse.
This video explains how it’ll work:
Here are some links that you might want to check out:
At the Venture Atlanta conference, which happens on October 21st and 22nd, seven Tampa Bay companies will participate. Immertec and Knack were chosen to participate in the early stage companies presentation, while Chattr, Global Safety Management, ProCredEx, SoleVenture and TSOLife will be presenting compnies.
The Mike Dominick Show
