The Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer meetup returns this Wednesday, November 16th, and it’ll happen at The Corner Club in Tampa’s Seminole Heights neighborhood. They’ve got beverages, both alcoholic and non- (including some very good coffee), and great food!
By now, you’re probably aware of the complete dumpster fire that Twitter has become. In fact, there’s a good chance that it may have even become worse by the time you read this.
You’ve probably been hearing about an alternative social network called Mastodon, which exists in something called the Fediverse, and you might be wondering what it’s all about. We’ll show you!
Creative Commons photo by Tony Webster. Tap here for the source.
We’ll also be talking about The Great Resignation in both its forms — leaving a current tech job, and landing a new one. Are you looking for a job? Are you looking to get out of a job? Are you looking to “upskill” for the job you want? We’re here to talk about that, and we’re connected — we might even be able to help you!
The Corner Club
We’ll be at The Corner Club, one of Seminole Heights’ many hidden gems. They’re a neighborhood café with lots of great food prepared from scratch (we recommend the papas bravas potatoes), an interesting drinks selection — with and without alcohol, including some really good coffee — and even local artists’ works on the wall for sale. They’ve got a great outdoor space in the back, which is where we’ll be.
Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer is Tampa Bay’s “No presentations, just conversations” meetup for coders and creatives who want to hang out, make friends, and talk over great food and drink. It’s just people getting together at an interesting Tampa Bay venue, tasting what comes out of the taps and kitchen, talking about what interests us, what we’re working on, and what we’d like to work on.
Do you write or manage code, prose, or poetry? You belong in this group. Do you make art for the eyes, ears, or other senses? Join us. Is your creativity more about business and “the hustle”? You should be here. The goal of this meetup is to bring together all sorts of people from Tampa Bay and making it an even better, interesting, and more creative place in which to live, work, and play.
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, November 14 through Sunday, November 20, 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:
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.
Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer, the meetup that I run with Anitra, returns this Wednesday, November 16th at The Corner Club in Tampa’s Seminole Heights! Join us as we bring the meetup back, talk about switching, finding, or staying in our jobs, and I’ll even help people get signed onto Mastodon! It’s casual, fun, and all conversations, no presentations!
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The main talk will feature André Crabb — a “once digital nomad settled in Tampa” — talking about “mobile app development, its evolution, and life as a digital nomad.” His talk outline includes:
Evolution of mobile development
Existing frameworks
Android
iOS
React Native + Expo
Other frameworks, but in not as great in detail as the ones above
Lifestyle of a digital nomad
Here’s the schedule:
6:00 – 6:30 pm: Networking
6:30 – 7:00pm: Intro slides + quick game
7:00 – 7:30 pm: Lightning talks, 5-10 minute talks anyone can come speak
7:30 – 9:00 pm – Main talk + networking time
This meetup will take place at USF in the “Education Building,” a.k.a. EDU 115, located on 4110 USF Apple Drive:
Let’s get together to commiserate about the state of our bags and the NFT market at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. 🎰 🎉
Where better to drown our losses and question our financial wisdom than a beautiful casino with many bars and restaurants? 🍻🙈
Plus, if we want to gamble more of our hard earned dollars, there are plenty of games to play with better odds of mooning than that rugged project you bought. 💀
I’ll be hanging at the Council Oak Lounge at 7PM with my Alien Frens t-shirt. 🛸🖖💚
I can’t make it, as I already have plans (and it’s my birthday this weekend), but if you’re looking to share tales of rug pulls and regret and enjoy gambling of a different sort, this event might be right up your alley.
CyberX Tampa 2022 takes place next Tuesday, October 25, from 5:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at TheIncLab in Ybor City, and I’ll be there! It’ll be an evening of all things cybersecurity-related with some of Tampa Bay’s largest companies, CISOs, and tech leaders!
Are you free next Tuesday, October 18th from 9:00 a.m. to noon, for an event you can attend either in person or online? If so, perhaps you might want to catch my talk at the upcoming InfraGard Tampa Bay Members Alliance meeting. It’s titled The Secret History of Login!
Here’s the description:
If you’re reading this, the chances are very good that you’ve logged into a system or resumed a session where you logged in earlier. It’s a common enough occurrence that most of us don’t think about it unless we’re in a hurry or if we can’t remember our username/password combination.
Logging in is new enough that there are still many people alive who knew the world before usernames and passwords, yet old enough that it’s developed some problems that will take time and effort to solve. This talk will tell the strange story of how login grew from a last-minute hack to become part of our daily experience. Along the way, you’ll get an overview of some of the ways it’s been implemented, the popular software movement it inspired, how it inspired both a software movement and a whole new category of crime, and some best guesses about its future.
What is InfraGard Tampa Bay Members Alliance?
First of all, they’re affiliated with the FBI! As their About page states:
Our mission is to mitigate criminal and terrorist threats, risks and losses for the purpose of protecting our region’s critical infrastructure and the American people. Founded in 2004, the Tampa Bay chapter has established itself as a leader nationwide, setting the highest standards for programs, training and education. For the last decade, we have proudly contributed to the safety and security of Tampa Bay via an all-threats, all-hazards approach. At the national level, the InfraGard National Members Alliance was founded in 1996 and now comprises over 80 regional chapters, each linked to an FBI Field Office.
InfraGard’s success can be attributed to the unprecedented communication, collaboration and coordination it has forged at the epicenter of America’s most critical resources. Our membership is comprised of individuals that represent private businesses; local, state and federal law enforcement agencies; academic institutions; first responders and more.
All members are vetted by the FBI and pass comprehensive background checks prior to being accepted to InfraGard. The trust inherent in those who have successfully passed these checks is unmatched in any other public-private partnership in the country, making InfraGard a unique and highly successful solution to engaging the private sector in the protection of our nation’s critical infrastructure.
What’s happening at this meeting?
There’s a lot going on at this meeting — in fact, I’m not the only speaker at this one! Here’s the agenda:
Time
Item
9:00 a.m.
Welcome and speaker/topic introductions by Ebony Vaz
9:05 a.m.
Opening remarks by Michael Ritchie, President
9:15 a.m.
Speaker 1: Kate Whitaker, Director of Cyber Outreach, Cyber Florida
10:00 a.m.
Break
10:15 a.m.
Speaker 2: Joey deVilla, Senior Developer Advocate, Okta — The Secret History of Login
11:00 a.m.
Break
11:15 a.m.
Speaker 3: Billy Sasser, Supervisory Protective Security Advisor (SPSA) CISA Region 4 — CISA’s Physical and Cyber Security Resources
12:00 p.m.
Closing remarks by Michael Ritchie, President
You can attend in person or online!
They’re streaming this event, so you have the option of attending online if you can’t make it to the in-person event. Here are the registration details:
Organized by Kate and Greg Leonardo, Tampa Code Camp has been a local tech tradition for years. While it’s been the de facto local conference for people building on Microsoft/.NET/Azure technologies, it goes beyond that to include Open Source, data science, AI/ML, and soft skills sessions. (My own first presentation at Tampa Code Camp was in 2016, when I presented an introduction to React.)
Tampa Code Camp 2022 took place at Keiser University Tampa, who’ve been gracious enough to make their space available a venue for tech events with 100 people or more for the past few years, including Tampa Code Camp and the BarCamp Tampa Bay unconference. They have a spacious lobby that makes for a great reception/registration and sponsor booth hall, a good-sized auditorium for opening keynotes and lunches (made even better by a patio area), and classrooms of all sizes to accommodate all sorts of talks, each one with a reliable audiovisual setup for presenters.
Some of Tampa Code Camp 2022’s presentations
I was so busy either prepping for my presentation, presenting, or just chatting with people that I took all of two photos. Luckily, a number of people who were there took some and posted them on Twitter; I’ve shared them below and they’re linked to their source.
Here’s the opening keynote, given by co-organizer Greg Leonardo, who talked about the unexpected (and often untold) consequences of moving your back end from on-premises to the cloud, often known as the “lift-and-shift.” There are good reasons to move to the cloud, but the rationale (or more accurately, sales pitch) of cost savings has been oversold — in fact, there’s often a cost increase.
Photo by Yours Truly.
Another key message from the opening keynote: running things on the cloud isn’t simply a matter of “our old stuff, but now on someone else’s servers.” It often requires a different approach and some re-thinking about how you do implementation and architecture. Some of the things you did when your servers were on-prem can be much worse when moved to the cloud. Watch out for these “onions in the varnish!”
After Sam’s presentation, I raced to my room to give my talk, Build cross-platform visual novels, simulations, and games with Ren’Py, where I walked the group through the development of a “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style infosec training manual and a turn-based “Florida Man” RPG-style combat game:
While I was talking about Ren’Py development, Art Garcia was a couple of rooms over, giving his presentation, Azure DevOps APIs: Things you can do with the APIs, where he covered ways to do things that you can’t do using the Azure DevOps UI, but can if you use PowerShell, the APIs, and some tricks that aren’t well-documented.
I’d like to thank Tampa Code Camp for not just providing a free lunch (and breakfast coffee and donuts — much apprecated!), but for estimating high in order to ensure that everybody could get a free lunch. It’s little touches like these that add to these events.
I don’t have a photo for Russ Fustino’s session, Web3 – Blockchain Myths for Developers, but we attended that one. Russ has been a local fixture on the tech scene ever since I’ve lived here (nearly a decade!) and we definitely want to catch him. His brother Gary (also a tech scene regular) recorded video of the session, so it should be online soon.
After that, Anitra Pavka gave her talk, Manage your manager for fun, profit, and career success, which covered the valuable, vital, yet often-overlooked topic of working with the one person who has control of half your weekday waking life:
Photo by Yours Truly.
At the end of the day came Joey Hernandez’Cyber Incident Response Exercise – From Tech to Exec talk — an excellent topic, because so many companies get this wrong for a multitude of reasons. He talked about TTXs — tabletop exercises, which in cybersecurity are preparedness exercises where you go through the steps of a simulated security incident.
And he came here from Atlanta to give his talks. I think the Azure team should at least send him some of their nicer swag for doing all this work on their behalf.
Events like this don’t happen without sponsors. First, thanks to Keiser University Tampa for providing a venue!
Events like this go even better when the presenters get a chance to catch up beforehand, hence the long-standing tradition of a speaker dinner. Once again, it happened at the always-reliable, always-fun Tampa Joe’s. Thanks for the food and drinks!
Starbucks was the coffee sponsor. Free coffee? Bless you.
Photo via Leah Parrott.
Thanks to Pomeroy for helping make Tampa Code Camp 2022 happen, and for providing one of the raffle prizes: a Meta Quest 2 VR rig!
Photo via Leah Parrott.
Pomeroy also provided some swag that I needed:
Photo via Leah Parrott.
Photo via Leah Parrott.
Algorand also had a table, and when Russ wasn’t giving his Algorand presentation, he was at the Algorand table, and he answered a number of my questions and hooked us up with nice T-shirts. Thanks, Algorand!
And finally, I’d like to thank Webonology — which is also Greg’s company — for being a sponsor and contributing the grand prize, an Xbox Series X!
Photo via Kate Leonardo.
Please check out these sponsors. They do great work, they supported this great event, and they’re helping to build the Tampa Bay tech scene!
Tech scenes don’t happen by themselves — they need YOU!
What makes a tech scene?
In the end, it boils down to a single factor: techies who take part in building a tech community. There are cities out there with sizable populations of techies that aren’t tech hubs — these are places without people who help build a tech community. There are also smaller places with smaller numbers of techies but have a vibrant tech scene, and these are the places with a handful of active organizers and people who show up for tech events.
Among these active organizers are Kate and Greg Leonardo, who’ve been consistently stepping up and doing the (often, but not always) thankless work of putting together events like Tampa Code Camp and upcoming events for 2023. Thank you, Kate and Greg, for everything you do for the Tampa Tech Scene!
