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Current Events Meetups Programming

Tonight’s developer meetups (Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2021)

Here are the developer meetups in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas that I think you might find interesting and useful. All of them are online!

Women Who Code Tampa — Lightning Talks (6:30 p.m.)

From their Meetup page:

Ever wanted to give a tech talk? Did you build something cool and want to share it? Want to workshop a presentation? Then this event is perfect for you!

A lightning talk is a short presentation. For this event, we are looking for about 6 people to give 10 minute talks with about 5 minutes for questions at the end of the presentation. We are looking for both technical and non technical talks related to programming, career support, education, or other relevant topics. Preference will be given to those giving their first presentation, but we will accept any level.

Tonight’s topics:

  • Breaking to Building: Bug Bounty Hunting for Developers (Justin Hurt)
  • How to Get Hired Fast After Tech Bootcamps (John Swartz)
  • The Importance of Hiring Women in Tech (Angelica Chadwick)
  • Git: Rewriting History with Interactive Rebase (Lydia Hendricks)
  • Life Lessons with Leonardo da Vinci (Vicki Tiller)
  • 3 Tips to Seed Up Your Website (Tameera Corporal)

For more details about this event, see its Meetup page.

Suncoast Developers Guild’s Open Code (7:00 p.m.)

Hey, Tampa Bay developers — come meet your local peers at Suncoast Developers Guild’s Open Code! It’s where local people who work with code can get together, bounce ideas off each other, ask questions or look for help, and get to know each other. This is the kind of get-together that makes a city a tech hub.

From their Meetup page:

We don’t have any particular format, and we won’t be doing any presentations. But we do a brief round of introductions at about 7:15 just to help break the ice and get to know each other a bit.

For more details about this event, see its Meetup page.

GDG SunCoast — Android Study Jams (7:00 p.m.)

From their page:

Each week we will learn a bit more in our journey to become Android developers.

We begin by building different Android apps with the Kotlin programming language. This includes creating multiple layouts and adding user interactivity to our Android apps. We define navigation paths and start an external activity. You will learn how handle complex lifecycle situations and add logging.

We continue our journey by learning about architecture components, such as ViewModel and LiveData. We create a database using the Room library. And display a list of clickable items with RecyclerView. We will load and display data from the internet. Making our app more accessible for all users.

In the final weeks we learn the more advanced techniques of building Android apps using libraries, testing, Jetpack and more to increase the quality of your app

For more details about this event, see this page.

Orlando Elixir Users Group — Functional Data Structures in Elixir (7:00 p.m.)

From their Meetup page:

In this talk, presented by AJ, we will learn how Elixir lays out structures in memory, and how it behaves when we transform data immutably. Then, we’ll use this knowledge to guide how we choose data structures for a real world app.

For more details about this event, see its Meetup page.

Categories
Current Events Programming

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

I nearly forgot that the second Tuesday in October is Ada Lovelace Day! I wanted to get this message out before the day had come and gone.

She’s best known for producing what’s considered to be the definitive documentation for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which was then only a proposed design that could not have been built with the tools of that era. She also realized that the Engine, primitive as it was, could have applications beyond just number-crunching. For the work she did, she’s considered to be the first computer programmer, and I also consider her the first to do my current job of developer advocate.

Today, Ada Lovelace Day commemorates and celebrates the work of women in STEM — that is, science, engineering, technology, and math. Ada Lovelace Day will probably be over by the time you read this, but nothing’s stopping you from some belated celebration!

Categories
Current Events Meetups Programming

Tonight @ St. Pete .NET Meetup: “Get Git in 45 minutes with Jesse Liberty”

Want to make sure that you really understand Git and all its workings? Want to learn from someone who really knows their stuff? Then join tonight’s St. Pete .NET Meetup virtual session with Jesse Liberty, who’ll start with the basics, but ramp up to cover advanced topics such as rebasing, interactive rebasing, and bisect (which is for finding the commit that broke your code).

When I needed to brush up on my C++ during the dot-com boom, I had Stroustrup’s book, but it was this Jesse Liberty C++ book that was my true guide…

…and when I got a developer relations job at Microsoft in late 2008 and had to relearn C# in a hurry, I turned to this Jesse Liberty book:

So along with his Microsoft and Xamarin MVP credentials, and his courses for Pluralsight, LinkedIn Learning, and Packt, there’s also my endorsement (for what it’s worth) that he can teach tricky tech topics in a way that makes it “stick”.

Catch Get Git in 45 minutes with Jesse Liberty ONLINE at St. Pete .NET Meetup, tonight at 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.!

Categories
Humor Programming

Not gonna lie, this comic about pointers made me chuckle.

I’m from that generation that did programming assignments in C and got into iOS development when Objective-C was the only way to do it, so this comic provided me with a little nostalgia blast.

I really should get into Go programming.

Categories
Meetups Programming Tampa Bay

The “Think Like a Coder!” meetup: Monday, October 4

I’m bringing back my Tampa-based programming meetup! It used to be Tampa iOS Meetup, and then Programmers of Portables, but I’m broadening its coverage and renamed it Think Like a Coder!

Think Like a Coder! is a meetup with a mission, which is to help with the programmer’s biggest challenge: How do you apply what you’ve learned about programming to actually write programs? How do you take what you’ve learned about loops, branches, functions, objects, and so on and turn them into applications?

During each meetup, we’ll take on a problem and try to solve it with code. As with my other meetups, these will be “code along with me” exercises — we’ll all learn by doing.

The meetup’s first session will take place ONLINE on Monday, October 4th at 7:00 p.m., and the exercise will be to answer a very “Florida” question: Are Publix subs on sale?

This session will cover scraping — the process of reading the contents of web pages — and then performing actions based on those contents. We’ll work together in JavaScript (and possibly Python) to look at how we can write a program that can answer the question “Are Publix subs on sale?”.

Join us ONLINE on Monday, October 4 at 7:00 p.m. for the first session of Think Like a Coder!

Categories
Programming Reading Material

GoalKicker.com’s free programmer’s notes for all sorts of platforms

I mentioned these FREE ebooks back on Programmer’s Day, but I feel that they merit their own post: GoalKicker.com has a great collection of FREE ebooks featuring programming recipes for all sorts of platforms, from Angular to Android, C to C++ to C#, Java to Kotlin, MongoDB to MySQL, Perl to PHP to Python, Ruby on Rails to React, Swift to Xamarin Forms and more!

You can download them for free here, but if you’re feeling really grateful and generous, you can buy them one or more coffees!

Categories
Deals Programming Reading Material

Happy Programmer’s Day 2021!

Once again, it’s September 13th — the 256th day of the year (on non-leap years)! As the number of values that can be expressed in a single byte, 256 means something to programmers, and as the largest power of 2 that will fit into 365, the 256th day of the year is a perfect excuse to declare it as Day of the Programmer.

Here are some things that you might find useful on this special day…

Want a free programming book? How about a whole lot of free programming books? GoalKicker.com has a series of notes for professionals for a wide array of programming languages and platforms. You can download them for free, but if you’re feeling really grateful and generous, you can buy them one or more coffees!

There’s Humble Bundle’s Python Superpowers bundle, which provides a lot of goodies for $25, including some really good Python video courses, ebooks, and a 6-month free license of PyCharm Professional Edition!

All work and no play makes Jack/Jackie a dull programmer, so why not play some programming games, like Shenzhen I/O, pictured above? Here’s a list of nine coding games that could sharpen your skills.

And finally, if you’re a new programmer or just need a Git refresher, you’ll want to check out Get Gud with Git.