Category: Tampa Bay

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Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, June 8, 2020)

Greetings, Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds! Welcome to the June 8, 2020 edition of the list! Here’s this week’s list of online-only events for techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds based in an around the Tampa Bay area. Keep an eye on this post; I update it when I hear about new events, it’s always changing. Stay safe, stay connected, and #MakeItTampaBay!

When will this list include in-person events?

The answer, for now, is “not just yet.”

This past week, Florida has had two consecutive days with more than a thousand new cases per day…

…and in our particular neck of the woods, we’ve seen the highest total of new cases for the week:

With these numbers in mind, I’m opting to list only those events that I know are online only for the time being.

Monday, June 8

Tuesday, June 9

Wednesday, June 10

Thursday, June 11

Friday, June 12

No online events are listed…yet!

Saturday, June 13

Sunday, June 14

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Current Events Tampa Bay

Announcing the Suncoast Developers Guild Summer Solstice Hackathon (June 19 – 21, online)!

Hey, Tampa Bay developers — here’s a chance to build something awesome together! Suncoast Developers Guild is holding an online Summer Solstice Hackathon, and it’s happening in just a couple of weeks: June 19th through 21st! As they put it, it’s an opportunity to “spend the longest day of the year solving the hardest challenges of 2020 with fellow developers, designers, and champions of economic development in our region.”

There will be three key themes for this hackathon:

Pandemic preparedness and recovery: Every day in this region, software developers are solving problems for non-profits, businesses, families, and communities. As COVID-19 has shown us, this recovery depends on solving problems in creative ways. How can we best be prepared for the next pandemic?

Inclusion, diversity, and intersectionality in the tech workforce: Yes, Houston, we have a problem. When a workforce does not represent the communities it serves, it causes harm and hampers vibrant solutions. SDG’s is working to change this; come and help us.

Building a smarter, more connected Tampa Bay: Developers understand both sustainability and problem-solving. Harness our power by solving a Smart City challenge that will elevate us all. Can we build IoT and Smart City solutions that help our region’s residents without hurting their privacy?

There will be three cash prizes for each theme: $1000 for the main prize, $750 for the runner-up, and $250 for the solo participant. That’s nine prizes in total!

Once again, this event will happen online. You can hack in the comfort of your own home — all hanging out will be done on Discord. Registration and participation is free-as-in-beer.

This is a great way to put your skills to good use and test them, get connected with the Tampa Bay community, and make Tampa Bay a better place in which to live, work, and play. Find out more at the Summer Solstice Hackathon site at hack.suncoast.io!

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Tampa Bay

Local hero: Greg Leonardo and Webonology

Greg Leonardo. Tap the photo to see his LinkedIn profile.


Greg Leonardo is an important part of the Tampa Bay tech scene: he’s behind the annual Tampa Community Connect conference (which grew out of Tampa Code Camp) as well as a lot of Tampa Bay-based Microsoft and Azure meetups. Along with his wife Kate, who’s also an important part of Tampa Bay’s tech scene, he runs Webonology, a tech consultancy, and they’re offering their time to help people affected by 2020’s general chaos to get back on their feet.
He writes:

If you know any small business or are a small business affected by the riots and need assistance with technology or options for technology for the business, please reach out to me. I am donating my available time to help these small business owners get back on their feet and/or save their businesses. We will work at providing as much as we can during this time to help anyone get back on their feet.

I know Greg — he’s got a big heart and gets things done. He has my highest recommendations, and if you need his help, you can reach him at info@webonology.com.

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Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, June 1, 2020)

Creative Commons photo by Dhaval Jani. Tap the photo to see the source.

Greetings, Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds! Welcome to the June 1, 2020 edition of the list! Here’s this week’s list of online-only events for techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds based in an around the Tampa Bay area. Keep an eye on this post; I update it when I hear about new events, it’s always changing. Stay safe, stay connected, and #MakeItTampaBay!

For the time being, I’m limiting this list to online events. I know that there’s a lot of frustration about staying at home and staying six feet apart from people outside your own “house bubble,” but rather than follow the advice of armchair epidemiologists and assorted online “Monday morning quarterbacks”, I’m going with the public health official whom I trust the most: my sister, Dr. Eileen deVilla, Medical Officer for Health for Toronto (here’s an interview with her from Friday, May 29).

Monday, June 1

Tuesday, June 2

Wednesday, June 3

Thursday, June 4

Friday, June 5

Saturday, June 6

Sunday, June 7

There aren’t any tech, entrepreneur, or nerd events scheduled…yet!

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

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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Tampa Bay

Suncoast Developers Guild marks two great years with their updated student handbook

Tap the photo to see it at full size.

Suncoast Developers Guild — the tech heart and soul of Tampa Bay’s St. Pete side — has been around for two years! Since opening their doors in the summer of 2018, this coding school has graduated 100 students in the tech community, and there are others who attended their previous incarnation as the Tampa Bay branch of The Iron Yard.

I used to be a developer evangelist who travelled across North America in another life, and I can tell you that one of the signs of a healthy tech community in a small- to medium-sized city is a coding school that acts as a social/technical/gathering place. Here in Tampa Bay, Suncoast Developers Guild fills that role, and it does so spectacularly.

In their blog post Two Years in and Still Improving, Campus Director Katherine Trammell writes about one way they’re marking their two-year anniversary: by updating the handbook that they make available to their students, alumni, and even the community at large. It’s a useful piece of documentation that ambitiously tries to cover a wide variety of topics that a professional software developer will need both while in class and later on, in the real world — from the technical topics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, and C# — to what you’ll have to do when it’s time to go out there and land a job. They plan to expand the handbook into other topics, including “Java, Python, Typescript, Go, Angular.” (I’ll take this moment to cast my vote for Dart and Flutter.)

Better still, the community can contribute:

Our Handbook is also open-source; we look forward to having the community contribute. Community contribution is so significant to us that we added a button that sends contributors to a live Github based editor where they can make pull requests to suggest updates and edits. We’ll take pull requests both large (re-explain something) to small (fix our typoes, please!)

Congratulations on two excellent years, SDG, and great job with the handbook!

Want to see their handbook? It’s at handbook.suncoast.io.

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Current Events Tampa Bay

Tampa Bay’s Geek Breakfast happens online tomorrow morning!

Someday, we who attend Tampa Bay’s Geek Breakfast will reconvene at Jimbo’s Pit Bar-B-Q, and I will have my customary stack o’ hotcakes or biscuits and gravy washed down with a half-dozen cups of coffee. Until that happens, Geek Breakfast continues online, and it’s happening tomorrow from 8:00 to 9:30 a.m. See you there!

Here’s the Zoom link.

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, May 25, 2020)

Greetings, Tampa Bay techies, entrepreneurs, and nerds! Welcome to week 9 of the Florida general stay-at-home order! I hope you’re managing and even thriving. There’s at least one online tech, entrepreneur, or nerd event each day this week. Keep an eye on this post; I update it when I hear about new events, it’s always changing. Stay safe, stay connected, and #MakeItTampaBay!

Monday, May 25

Tuesday, May 26

Wednesday, May 27

Thursday, May 28

Friday, May 29

Saturday, May 30

Sunday, May 31

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

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!