Category: Programming

Categories
Artificial Intelligence Meetups Programming Tampa Bay

This Tuesday: “Welcome to the AI Jungle! Now What?”

This Tuesday, December 10th, the Tampa Bay AI Meetup will team up with the Tampa Java User Group to feature speaker Kevin Dubois, Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat and Java Champion, who’ll give us a tour of the world of enterprise AI implementation with a presentation titled Welcome to the AI jungle! Now what?

The tl;dr

What the talk will be about

The AI revolution is transforming business landscapes, but many developers find themselves overwhelmed by this paradigm shift. How do we navigate this “Wild West” of tools, models, and platforms?

Kevin will demonstrate how open source technologies can standardize AI development and deployment in enterprise environments. Learn how to leverage familiar tools like containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and GitOps to build AI-powered applications in a secure, repeatable manner.

Discover how open source solutions are democratizing AI development and deployment. Through live demonstrations, Kevin will showcase:

  • OpenDataHub (OpenShift AI)
  • Kubernetes integration
  • Backstage implementation
  • Java application integration with Open Source models
  • Local development environment setup

About Kevin Dubois

Kevin Dubois is a Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat where he gets to enjoy working with Open Source projects and improving the developer experience. He previously worked as a (Lead) Software Engineer at a variety of organizations across the world ranging from small startups to large enterprises and even government agencies.  He brings a wealth of experience to the table, including:

  • Java Champion
  • Active contributor to Quarkus, Knative, Apache Camel, and Podman
  • Member of Belgian CNCF and Belgian Java User Group
  • Multilingual speaker (English, Dutch, French, Italian)
  • International software engineering experience across startups, enterprises, and government agencies

When not revolutionizing enterprise AI, Kevin can be found hiking, gravel biking, snowboarding, or packrafting in various corners of the world.

Come to the meetup!

Come see a great presentation, have some food, meet with your peers in the Tampa Bay area, and participate in our lively and active tech scene.

Once again, you can find out more and register for the meetup on its event page. Hope to see you there!

Categories
Artificial Intelligence Humor Programming

When did GitHub Copilot get so snarky?

This actually hasn’t happened…yet. But there are enough people who practice asshole-driven development for there to eventually be an AI code assistant that behaves like this.

Categories
Programming Tampa Bay What I’m Up To

It’s that time of the week again…

Since March 13, 2017, I’ve posted a weekly list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas. I’ve continued to do this to this day, with me typically assembling the list on Thursday and posting it on Friday.

Today is Thursday, so I’m assembling the list — or more accurately, a Jupyter notebook running some Python code I wrote is scraping various sites and creating a checklist like the one you see in the screenshot above.

Back when I first started the list, I used to put it together manually, but as Tampa Bay’s tech scene and events grew, so did the list. It wasn’t long before assembling the list was eating up the better part of an afternoon, and that’s when I decided to add some automation to the process.

The checklist contains likely candidates for inclusion in the list, and each item in the list is checked by default. The checklist is there to allow me to apply my final judgement as to what goes and doesn’t go into the list.

There’s a hug “deny” list of key words and phrases that cause an event to not make it into the checklist because it doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “tech, entrepreneur, or nerd.” For example, events with the words “real estate” don’t make it into the list — they often contain the word “developer,” which my code is looking for, but that’s not the right kind of developer event for the list.

Would any of you be curious as to what’s in my tech events list-creating code and how it works? Would you like me to do a presentation at a local meetup or on YouTube explaining how it works? Let me know.

 

Categories
Programming What I’m Up To

GitHub Copilot: A free trial that actually worked

There aren’t that many free trials that manage to convert me into a paying customer, but GitHub Copilot is now one of the exceptions. I don’t think I’ve seen a programming add-on tool that’s been this useful or beloved by developers since…well, maybe ReSharper back during my time as a Microsoftie (2008 – 2011).

It’s pretty good — but far from perfect — at generating Python code I’m thinking of writing as I type it in, which has resulted in a speed boost for me. Between Copilot (which I’ve had for free for a bit) and Claude Sonnet (which I’ve been paying for), I’ve been enjoying the new assisted world that I’ve been coding in.

Your mileage will vary with the programming language you’re using and the sort of application you’re working on. If what you’re doing matches lots of examples in Copilot’s training set, you’ll get lots of good suggestions. However, if you’re coding in a more obscure programming language, or writing a kind of application for which there would’ve been few examples to add to Copilot’s training set, you’ll get fewer suggestions, and a good number of them will be wrong.

But for me, Copilot’s a very helpful programming tool that I’ve harnessed in order to do more. Pardon me while I go pull out Atypical Consulting LLC’s credit card…

Categories
Humor Programming What I’m Up To

I don’t remember my book having THIS cover…

Amazon page for “iOS Apprentice (Eighth Edition),” co-authored by Joey de Villa. The book image is incorrect and shows a young woman modelling a crop-top and miniskirt outfit.
Tap the image to see the page on Amazon.

I was pointing someone to the Amazon page for the book I co-wrote a little while back — iOS Apprentice, Eighth Edition — and I saw what you’re seeing in the screenshot above.

I like to think of my technical writing as sexy, but I didn’t think it was this sexy!

In case you’re curious, here’s what the actual cover looks like:

Cover of “iOS Apprentice, 8th edition”
Tap to see the book’s page on the publisher’s site (Kodeco.com).
Categories
Artificial Intelligence Deals Programming

365 Data Science’s Data Science and AI courses are free until November 21st!

If you can carve out a little free time every day between now and November 21st, you’ve got the opportunity to take every data science and AI course offered by 365 Data Science for free — and really free, as in they won’t ask you to enter your credit card number.

  • Need to learn basic or intermediate Python? They’ve got you covered.
  • Want to get up to speed with Pandas or Numpy? They’ve got courses for that?
  • Gearing to up get hardcore and learn the mathematics behind machine learning? There’s a linear algebra course, as well as courses for probability and statistics.

I’m quite sure that the hope is that you’ll start some courses, not be able to finish them by the 21st, and then shell out money to continue. They may even have some Black Friday specials happening around that time to entice you to hand over your credit card number.

But what if you put in the time during the free period and really dug in? You might be able to learn a lot of free.

I’m in the middle of a couple of their math courses, and they’re pretty good. Check them out!

Categories
Conferences Programming

PyCon US 2025 has just been announced!

PyCon US 2025 — the big Python conference — is taking place at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on the following dates from Wednesday, May 14 through Thursday, May 22, 2025!

Here’s the breakdown of that schedule:

Dates What’s happening
Wednesday, May 14 – Thursday, May 15 Tutorials
Thursday, May 15 Sponsor Presentations
Friday, May 16 – Sunday, May, 18 Main Conference Days—Keynotes, Talks, Charlas, Expo Hall, and more
Monday, May 19 – Thursday, May 22 Sprints

The PyCon US 2025 site is now live, and the call for proposals is officially open! You can submit proposals for:

  • Talks
  • Tutorials
  • Posters
  • Charlas

The deadline to submit proposals all tracks is Thursday, December 19, 2024 at 11:59 PM ET (UTC-5). They’ve set up a “Call for Proposals Countdown” so you can view  how much time you have left to submit, and see what the deadline is in your local timezone. You can find out more about proposals on their Proposal Guidelines page.

You can also find out more about the conference in the announcement post on the PyCon US blog.