Hey, techies from Tampa Bay and beyond — are you interested in any of the following:
StartupBus
The Metaverse
Web3
We’re holding an online meetup, Meet Me in the Metaverse, on Thursday, July 14th from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. in a web-based virtual reality space to discuss the topics above, and you’re all invited to join us! Register here to attend the event.
This isn’t going to be a Zoom or Teams meeting, but a VR meeting. And don’t worry — you won’t need VR gear — any computer with a browser will do. I took the meetup’s VR environment for a test drive, and it presented itself like a first-person shooter, minus the shooting, where you use the W, A, S, and D keys to move and the mouse to change the direction you’re facing.
Here are a couple of screenshots of what I saw during my quick exploratory run:
My first view of the Metaverse venue. Tap to view at full size.
Walking into the lobby. Tap to view at full size.
The view from the top floor. Tap to view at full size.
I’ll be there — join me! Once again, that’s Thursday, July 14th, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., and you can register here.
StartupBus Florida departs Tampa on Wednesday, July 27, and it’s not too late to get in on the opportunities it presents!
Opportunity #1: Get away from your day-to-day and go on an adventure!
Whether you go to an office, work from home, some combo of the previous two, or are looking for work, StartupBus Florida offers a chance to break away from your daily routine and spend a few unpredictable, exciting, and challenging days on the road building a startup and the application that supports it.
Opportunity #2: Try new tools or use familiar ones in completely new ways!
Have you been looking for an opportunity to try out a new tool, programming language, framework, API or service, but haven’t been able to because you’ve been bogged down with your day-to-day work? StartupBus Florida is your chance!
…or…
Have you been looking for an opportunity to stretch by taking a tool, programming language, framework, API or service that you’re quite familiar with, and using it in new ways or for new purposes? Again, StartupBus Florida is your chance!
The map below shows StartupBus Florida’s 2019 route from Tampa that year’s destination city, New Orleans:
Among other things, it provided us buspreneurs with a chance to see parts of the country that many of us normally don’t get to see and meet people that we normally wouldn’t get to meet.
This’s year’s destination city is Austin, Texas! Since it’s a different destination city, we’re going to take a different route, with different stops in different places with different people. But the opportunity to see different places and people will still be there.
Opportunity #4: Road trip to the delightfully weird city of Austin, Texas!
Austin is just plain fun. It’s a mishmash of alternative, Latino, Texan, and college cultures that combine to make it a great place to get great food and drink in a lively party atmosphere, catch some great live music, see some stunning sights, and meet some great people. It’s also where the semi-finals and finals will take place (remember, you’ll spend the Wednesday, July 27th through Friday, July 29th on the bus to Austin, followed by 2 days in Austin: the semi-finals on Saturday, July 30th and the finals on Sunday, July 31st).
Every resume lists experience working in an office, whether in a traditional office space, a coworking space, or someone’s home. Only a select few list the experience of working on a bus to create a startup and its supporting application in an handful of days. This is the kind of experience that speaks to your skills, resilience, creativity, positivity, and ambition. A ride on StartupBus supercharged my resume, and it can supercharge yours, too!
Opportunity #6: Boost your company profile with a sponsorship!
StartupBus is a crazy idea — what person in their right mind would build a business and its supporting technology in three days on a bus?
StartupBus has also created a number of advances, from Instacart to the advances in careers for many of its participants (Yours Truly included), and it can also advance your company’s profile if you decide to be a sponsor. You too can be part of this crazy idea, and we’ll make sure that your praises are sung if you sponsor us!
(Want to be a StartupBus Florida sponsor and get praise from the entire StartupBus organization as well as Tampa Bay’s number one tech blog? Drop me a line and find out more.)
Do you want in on these opportunities? Register now!
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, July 11 through Sunday, July 17, 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.
StartupBus 2022 will depart from Tampa Bay!
If you’re looking for an adventure, a chance to test your startup skills, and an experience that will make your résumé stand out, join me on StartupBus Florida, which departs Tampa Bay on July 27, when it sets course for Austin, Texas!
On this three-day journey, “buspreneurs” will form teams, create a business idea, build a software demo for that idea, and develop pitches for that idea. When they arrive in Austin, they’ll spend two days pitching their startups to a panel of judges.
I was a “buspreneur” on StartupBus Florida in 2019, the last time the event took place, and our team made it to the finals and got the runner-up position. This time, I’m a “conductor” — one of the coaches on the bus — and our team is here to help you rise to the challenge.
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!
If you’re looking for a startup job, you’re probably wondering “What warning signs should I look for?”. Fortunately, there’s a recent example to learn from: Fast.
Fast CEO Domm Holland in a promotional video for Fast.
Fast was a startup whose product was Fast Checkout, a one-click checkout system for ecommerce. Every step in the online checkout process increases the chance that the customer won’t complete the purchase. Reducing online purchases to a single click is such a big deal that Amazon patented the process in 1997, which has contributed to its runaway success. The patent expired in 2017, and with that came the competition to own the business of providing one-click checkout to everyone other than Amazon.
In 2021, having raised over $100 million in funding from investors that included Stripe, Fast announced that they were opening their east coast hub here in Tampa to greatfanfare:
In a collapse that was incredibly (ahem) fast — even for an overhyped company with a burn rate fueled by stunt marketing — they closed down a mere 8 months later.
How do you avoid working at a startup like Fast? There aren’t any hard and (ahem) fast answers, but there are some lessons you can take from its failure and some warning signs you can look out for. Gergely Orosz ofPragmatic Engineer explains in his video, How to (not) choose a startup to join: lessons from Fast:
How much runway do they have?Runway is how long they can stay in operation if their income and expenses stay the same. In an early-stage startup that doesn’t have any customers yet, runway effectively becomes how many months the company can operate before running out of money.
What’s the burn rate? In the context of startups that raised money in order to get started, a company’s burn rate is the rate that the company is spending that money while it’s not yet making money from its operations. Fast was said to have a burn rate of $10 million per month.
Find out if there’s a clear set of critical business metrics that they track and if they’re available to you. Any startup worth the effort is painfully and continuously aware of the key metrics that determine whether they’re doing the right things or not. The employees at Fast were unaware of how little revenue the company was making or how few customers they had
Other hints
Interview your future manager and a founder.
Talk to investors.
Talk to people who left.
Assume your stock grants are worthless.
Remember that reward is often proportional to risk.
Watch for worrisome numbers, including…
The problem is that the Y-axis isn’t revenue, profits, or anything to do with incoming money. It’s employees.
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, July 4 through Sunday, July 10, 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.
StartupBus 2022 will depart from Tampa Bay!
If you’re looking for an adventure, a chance to test your startup skills, and an experience that will make your résumé stand out, join me on StartupBus Florida, which departs Tampa Bay on July 27, when it sets course for Austin, Texas!
On this three-day journey, “buspreneurs” will form teams, create a business idea, build a software demo for that idea, and develop pitches for that idea. When they arrive in Austin, they’ll spend two days pitching their startups to a panel of judges.
I was a “buspreneur” on StartupBus Florida in 2019, the last time the event took place, and our team made it to the finals and got the runner-up position. This time, I’m a “conductor” — one of the coaches on the bus — and our team is here to help you rise to the challenge.
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!
Arguing Agile is new addition to this list, and it’s also the newest podcast on this list. Hosted by Brian Orlando and Om Patel, two mainstays of the Tampa Bay agile community and familiar faces at local agile events, this podcast features discussions — sometimes just between the hosts, sometimes with a local guest — and they cover all sorts of subjects, all centered around the process of making software in a timely fashion.
Their podcast has been around only a year, but Brian and Om have been absolute podcasting powerhouses, cranking out nearly 70 full episodes in that time, covering such topics as:
If you’re on a software team and you’re looking for ways to improve the way you and your team get things done, you’ll want to check out Arguing Agile.
Here are their 5 most recent episodes:
Episode 67: Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow — On this episode, Product Manager Brian Orlando pitches Enterprise Agile Coach Om Patel on the team optimization suggestions from the book, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow (2019), by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais.
Episode 66: Personal Agility & the Great Resignation, with Joey deVilla — When we think about unmitigated optimism and unwavering positivity, we think of none other than the unflappable – Joey deVilla! On this episode, we talk about how the great resignation has affected us and how a commitment to personal agility helps people and companies through tough times.
Episode 65: A Better Sprint Review Agenda — Does a perfect Sprint Review agenda exist? On this episode, Brian Orlando and Om Patel ask this very question and try to figure it out! Using some original content from one of our favorite Agile Coaches out there, Vibhor Chandel, we review, discuss, and revise our way toward a Sprint Review agenda that we are excited to try with our teams, and that we hope you’ll try with yours.
Episode 64: Bad Agile Experiences, with Curtis Lembke — What creates bad experiences with agile; what do they look like, and how to we deal with them? On this episode of Arguing Agile, Curtis Lembke is back, joining Brian Orlando and Om Patel to talk through Bad Agile Experiences and why some people just totally against agile.
Episode 63: Get More Value from Your Scrum — Do you feel Scrum is not helping you to more effectively create software or solve problems? Do you feel Scrum is just another form of managerial control? Do you feel Scrum is not helping your organization be or remain agile? On this episode, Brian Orlando and Om Patel discuss experiences and share tips to make scrum more effective – thereby producing more value.
Space and Things is the newest podcast on this list, and it’s probably the most comprehensive podcast about space science, research, and exploration. It’s hosted by Emily Carney of Space Hipsters fame, and singer/songwriter/space fan Dave Giles.
STP92 – ‘For All Mankind’ Season 3 Preview – with Krys Marshall — This week we’re joined by one of the stars of AppleTV’s ‘For All Mankind’ – the one and only Krys Marshall who plays Danielle Poole. Season 3 premieres on June 10th, so this is a perfect time for a look back at seasons 1 and 2, plus a little preview into season 3, but don’t worry, there are no season 3 spoilers.
STP91 – Becoming Off-Worldly – with Laura Forczyk — This week we’re joined by Laura Forczyk to discuss her new book: Becoming Off-Worldly: Learning From Astronauts To Prepare For Your Spaceflight Journey.
…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 their 5 most recent episodes:
Episode 245: Releasing Software with Tommy McClung — A software engineer by trade and multiple time entrepreneur, Tommy was the CTO at TrueCar for a number of years and is Co-founder and CEO of Release.
Episode 244: Eric Potter on F# and .NET Interactive Notebooks — Eric helps companies succeed by finding the right custom software solutions to their business problems. He has been a Microsoft MVP since 2015, and is currently Director of Technical Education at Sweetwater.
Episode 242: Temporal with Maxim Fateev & Dominik Tornow — Maxim has worked at companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, and is currently CEO and cofounder of Temporal. Dominik is a Principal Engineer at Temporal. He focuses on systems modeling, specifically conceptual and formal modeling, to support the design and documentation of complex software systems.
Episode 241: gRPC in .NET 6 with Anthony Giretti — Anthony is a passionated developer, Microsoft MVP, and MCSD. He is currently senior developer @ Sigma-HR, specializing in Web technologies. We’re giving away several copies of Anthony’s new book, “Beginning gRPC with ASP.NET Core 6”. Leave a comment below for your chance to win!
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 nearly 300 episodes to date. You’ve probably seen the hosts at local meetups and conferences; they’re Frederick Philip Von Weiss, Brian Hinton, and Vincent Tang.
Thunder Nerds is sponsored by a company that’s near and dear to me, Auth0! That’s partly because they have a great authentication, authorization, and identity service, and partly because I work there in my role as a Senior Developer Advocate!
293 – 💻 Remote Work & Top Talent With Zack Gottlieb — We talk with Zack Gottlieb, VP Head of Design platform at Atlassian. We discuss Zack’s career journey and what it takes to make it to Atlassian. Our main topic of discussion is the Great Resignation in the tech industry. We start the conversation by asking why so many people are leaving in the first place. Then we explore why companies want their employees back in the office. Additionally, we examine what companies are doing to retain their top talent.
292 – 🎯 Paid Media Strategies with Michelle Morgan — In this episode, we talk with Michelle Morgan: International Paid Media Consultant, Writer, and Speaker. We explore the realm of advertising on the most popular social platforms and investigate the unforeseen opportunities in others. Additionally, we discuss Michelle’s organization, Paid Media Pros, which provides PPC videos for advertisers with any level of experience.
290 – 🎵 Little Music Boxes with Travis Neilson — In this episode, we talk with designer, musician, Travis Neilson. We discuss Travis’s career at YouTube Music. We dive into his day-to-day and what it’s like to work at YouTube. Then we explore Travis’s music, specifically his channel Little Music Boxes.
289 – ⚱️ The Digitization of Deathcare with Faisal Abid — In this episode, we talk with Faisal Abid: Speaker, Entrepreneur, Google Developer Expert, and co-founder of Eirene cremations. Eirene provides high-quality, affordable cremation services. Eirene allows families to plan an affordable cremation entirely online or over the phone. Leveraging technology to help provide a better funeral experience to families. Additionally, Faisal walks us through the unique business and technology challenges he faced at the beginning of Eirene.
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, June 20 through Sunday, June 26, 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.
StartupBus 2022 will depart from Tampa Bay!
If you’re looking for an adventure, a chance to test your startup skills, and an experience that will make your résumé stand out, join me on StartupBus Florida, which departs Tampa Bay on July 27, when it sets course for Austin, Texas!
On this three-day journey, “buspreneurs” will form teams, create a business idea, build a software demo for that idea, and develop pitches for that idea. When they arrive in Austin, they’ll spend two days pitching their startups to a panel of judges.
I was a “buspreneur” on StartupBus Florida in 2019, the last time the event took place, and our team made it to the finals and got the runner-up position. This time, I’m a “conductor” — one of the coaches on the bus — and our team is here to help you rise to the challenge.
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!
