Anitra and I will be at BSides Tampa tomorrow, and we’ll be giving our presentation, Surviving Your Layoff, at 1 p.m. in the Career track (room 3711)!
If you’ve been laid off, or just want to be prepared, you’ll want to catch our presentation at BSides Tampa, taking place tomorrow at USF!
poweredUP, Tampa Bay’s annual tech festival organized by Tampa Bay Tech, takes place next Wednesday, May 14 at the Mahaffey Theater in St. Pete. It always features presentations and talks on top-of-mind topics for Tampa Bay’s tech leaders.
It’s a full day of dynamic discussions, panel sessions, and insights from industry visionaries, with these featured track topics:
It’s a great event for Tampa Bay-based tech people (and aspiring ones) to attend, and to make it even easier to go, there are TWO ways to attend it even more cheaply than the low $79 admission fee:
Here’s the conference agenda:
| Time | Topic | Details |
|---|---|---|
| 12:00 PM | Opening Remarks | Tampa Bay Tech: Meghan O’Keefe City of St. Petersburg: Mayor Ken Welch |
| 12:15 PM | Keynote | Arnie Bellini, Former ConnectWise Founder & CEO |
| 12:57 PM | The Future of Work: Robotics & Intelligent Process Automation | Panel: Jay Rogers (Haddy), Christa Kerlin (Jabil) Moderator: Beth Galic (BAMA) |
| 1:29 PM | Digital Governance: Managing IT, Data & Compliance | Panel: Petar Besalev (A-LIGN), Cathy Ryan Reneer (JPMorganChase), Chris Black (DGR Systems) Moderator: Mike Gabriel (Guidepoint Security) |
| 2:00 PM | Intermission | |
| 2:20 PM | Healthcare Transformation: How Emerging Tech is Reshaping Care Delivery | Featuring: Doug Fee (Moffitt Cancer Center) & Tarun Sondhi (Accenture) |
| 2:52 PM | From Concept to Coaster: The Tech Behind Universal’s Iconic Experiences | Featuring: Teddy Benson (Universal Destinations & Experiences) |
| 3:19 PM | Leading Locally: Spotlight on Tampa Bay’s Tech Trailblazers | Panel: Kim Anstett (Trellix), Vladimir Voyuts (Dynasty Financial Partners), John Armenia (Accusoft) Moderator: Meghan O’Keefe (Tampa Bay Tech) |
| 3:51 PM | Smarter Solutions: Rapid-Fire Use Cases from Companies Solving Big Problems with Tech | Featuring: Trellix, BlackStraw, CDW, Nix United |
| 4:30 PM | Closing Remarks | Tampa Bay Tech: Meghan O’Keefe |
| 4:35 PM | Happy Hour & Networking |
Join me at poweredUP! I’ll be there, and if you want to talk Python, AI, software development, or music (or if you have topic suggestions or requests for upcoming meetups), I’ll be more than happy to.
Once again, here are the money-saving ways to attend the conference:
On Thursday, May 8th from 11 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Eastern, O’Reilly Media will host a free online conference called AI Codecon. “Join us to explore the future of AI-enabled development,” the tagline reads, and their description of the event starts with their belief that AI’s advance does NOT mean the end of programming as a career, but a transition.
Here’s what I plan to do with this event:
Here’s the schedule for AI Codecon, which is still being finalized as I write this:
Last Wednesday, Tampa Devs led a meetup of Tampa Bay technology meetups, and it was a hit! My thanks to Nelson Yee for helping put this event together (and very quickly, too) and for James Gress for his presentation on the state of AI.
I took some photos of the event and am sharing them here. You can find even more photos in Nelson’s post on LinkedIn.
In case you missed organizer Joe Blankenship’s announcement, he’s become quite busy with his new venture, A Valid Company, and won’t have the bandwidth to run Tampa Bay Python.
As not only the organizer behind Tampa Bay Python, but also the Chief Data Officer of Certus Core and one of the people behind the Data4 conference, he’s a tech powerhouse, and we should expect to see great things from A Valid Company! I’d like to thank Joe for all the work he’s done for the local Python and tech communities.
…that would be me.
In case you’re not aware, I’ve been programming in Python since 1999. I had to learn it while on vacation the week before a Python programming job, and said vacation was at Burning Man ’99.
My favorite way to describe Burning Man is like a circus-meets-rave in the desert, and it’s up to you to provide the entertainment. The motto at the time was “There are no spectators; only participants.”
It turns out that most of the partying happens at night, and mornings at Burning Man are relatively mellow. The mornings were when I learned Python, armed with my trusty Toshiba Satellite 4015CDT (Pentium II running at 266 MHz; I’d boosted the RAM to 96 MB) and a paperback copy of Mark Lutz’s book, Learning Python (first edition, of course). I fell in love with the language — after all, any language that you can learn amidst the chaos of Burning Man has to be a good one!
Since then, I’ve been using Python for all sorts of things, including generating the weekly tech events list that appears on this blog every Friday. I’m honored to be the new organizer for Tampa Bay Python!
I’m already working on ideas for upcoming Tampa Bay Python meetups, but if you have suggestions for topics that Tampa Bay Python should cover, I’d love to hear them — just drop me a line at joey@joeydevilla.com or via any of my social media accounts.
I’m working on some new videos for the Global Nerdy YouTube channel, and one of them is on answering questions in the dreaded “behavioral interview.” That’s the interview where you’re asked questions like “Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a conflict on your team. How did you handle it?”
To help come up with ideas for the video about behavioral interviews, I posed some questions to LLMs. As I like to say, no matter how creative or clever you are, it is by definition impossible to make a list of ideas that you’d never come up with yourself.
So I posed this question to Claude, which for some reason, seems to know stuff about me:
How would you describe a behavioral interview, if you had to describe it in the style of Joey deVilla?
And wow, was the response snark-tastic:
Here’s the text of the response:
Joey deVilla’s Guide to Behavioral Interviews
Imagine me adjusting my accordion straps and coffee mug before dropping this knowledge bomb…
So you wanna know about behavioral interviews? Those corporate rituals where they ask you to “Tell me about a time when…” instead of just asking if you can do the damn job?
Behavioral interviews are the tech industry’s version of “Show, don’t tell” – except instead of showing your actual skills, you’re telling stories about when you supposedly used them! It’s like your professional life as fan fiction, where the hiring manager is desperately hoping you’re not writing in the genre of fantasy.
These interviews operate on the radical premise that past behavior predicts future performance. Revolutionary, I know! It’s like assuming that because I once played “Lady of Spain” on my accordion at a Tampa dev meetup, I’ll do it again given the chance and sufficient sangria.
The formula they want is STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result. But what they’re REALLY looking for is STARBS: Situation, Task, Action, Result, Bull$#!t – that special sauce where you frame yourself as the hero who saved the project while maintaining perfect diplomatic relations with that passive-aggressive PM who kept moving the goalposts.
The trick isn’t just recounting what happened – it’s storytelling with a corporate-friendly narrative arc. You need conflict (but not TOO much conflict), challenges (that showcase your skills), and resolution (where you emerge victorious but humble).
Remember: in behavioral interviews, there are no failures – only “growth opportunities” and “valuable lessons” that conveniently transformed you into exactly the employee they’re looking for!
Adjusts glasses, takes dramatic sip of coffee
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go practice my own STAR stories for when someone inevitably asks me about “a time I demonstrated adaptability in a challenging situation” – which is code for “that time I coded for 36 hours straight because someone in management promised an impossible deadline.”
My questions, after reading Claude’s output:
So I did some web searches using terms like starbs star situation task action result bullshit, and couldn’t find any instance of STARBS. It seems to be one of those effectively new creations that an autocomplete-on-steroids can generate.
I’m not gonna lie: I kind of like STARBS, and wish that I’d come up with it myself.
(If you’re interested, see if you can do some searches to find other instances of the term STARBS.)
I’ve just been informed that I’ll be one of the speakers at the 2025 edition of KCDC — Kansas City Developer Conference — which takes place August 13 through 15!
This will be the 16th KCDC, and it’ll take place at the Kansas City Convention Center in downtown Kansas City, Missouri.
KCDC draws 2000+ attendees each year and features tracks for the following topics:
My talk, titled The Best, Most Fun Python Platform You’ve Never Heard Of, is a programmer’s introduction to the powerful, fun, and all-too-often-ignored Ren’Py. While Ren’Py is called a “visual novel engine,” I prefer to think of it as the fastest, most fun way to create Python applications.
Here’s the description for my talk:
Python’s occupied the number one spot on the TIOBE Programming Community Index for the past couple of years, and it’s the preferred programming language in for AI and data science. Perhaps you’ve been thinking about learning it, but the thought of having to do another set of “Hello World” style exercises is filling you with dread. Is there a more fun way to get up to speed with Python?
Yes, there is, and it’s called Ren’Py. It’s billed as a visual novel engine and often used for writing dating simulation games, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a platform that lets you code in Python (and more) and deploy to desktop, web, and even mobile platforms, and with a fraction of the effort required by React, Vue, or Angular. It’s a fun framework that’s been used to produce games you can find on Steam, but it’s got applications well beyond amusement.
In this session, we’ll look not just at the basics of Ren’Py development, but the building of a dating game based on KFC’s official game, “I Love You Colonel Sanders,” a simple turn-based combat game starring Florida Man, and building mobile apps in a way that’s less frustrating than usual.
Better still, I won’t be the only Tampa Bay geek speaking — Chris Ayers will be there too, and he’ll be delivering his talk, The Power of Dev Containers and GitHub Codespaces:
Dive into the future of software development with our session on Dev Containers and GitHub Codespaces. Dev Containers bring reproducibility and consistency across any platform with Docker, simplifying project onboarding and setup. GitHub Codespaces takes this a step further, offering scalable, cloud-hosted development environments, accessible from anywhere.
In this session, you’ll gain insights into:
- Dev Containers Fundamentals: Understand their role in creating consistent development environments.
- GitHub Codespaces Integration: Explore how Codespaces enhances Dev Containers, providing flexible, cloud-based development.
- Practical Implementation: Learn to configure Dev Containers for your projects, including tool installation, VS Code extensions, port forwarding, and software setup.
- Maximizing Codespaces: Discover how to customize Codespaces for remote development efficiency.
If you were at the March Tampa Bay Java User Group meetup, you saw François Martin deliver a presentation with a not-at-all-controversial title: Why Software Testing is a Waste of Time.
Anitra and I had the pleasure of taking him around Tampa while he was in town, and I even lucked out by being able to catch up with him for dinner while we were in Greece earlier this month!
He’ll deliver two talks at KCDC:
