For the curious, here’s a recent pic of my home office, a.k.a. “The Fortress of Amplitude.” The gear configuration changes every now and then, but it generally looks like this. It’s where the magic happens!
Just so you know: today’s my first day at Kforce doing developer relations for HP! More specifically, for HP’s ZGX Nano, a tiny computer designed specifically for running large AI models right on your desktop…and not on someone else’s computers!
The ZGX Nano packs a ridiculous amount of power into a tiny space…
Powered by NVIDIA’s GB10 GPU and a 20-core ARM CPU sharing 128GB of RAM, the ZGX Nano performs at 1,000 teraflops (1 petaflop), which is 1015 floating-point operations per second. It’ll support an AI model taking in 200 billion parameters — 400 billion if you connect two ZGX Nanos together.
I’m getting set up for day one on the job as I write this, so I’m keeping this post short and ending with this gem from a little while back: HP’s Rules of the Garage:
Last week, I interviewed for a developer relations leadership role at a company whose product I genuinely use and admire.
I made it to round 2 of 3, but ultimately wasn’t selected.
While I didn’t land the job and a chance to work with an amazing company and incredible team, I’m honored to have been considered and incredibly proud of the work I put in:
I could simply throw up my hands in resignation and leave all that work and content to languish in a folder on a backup drive or in the cloud…
…but instead, I’m sharing it here. Why?
Because:
I’m sharing the slides that outline my complete developer relations strategy presentation plus my tactical execution plan, anonymized and annotated with speaker notes. You’ll see my “Foundation / Focus / Flywheel” framework, community engagement strategies, and how I approached everything from attribution tracking to expanding into Europe.
My philosophy is that either I win or I learn. I learned a lot from this process, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have engaged with such a thoughtful team.
Next time, I just might win.
This past Tuesday (July 15, 2025), I appeared on a news segment on Tampa’s WFLA Channel 8 evening news, where I was brought in to comment about ways to not fall for AI-powered phone scams. The video from that news segment is pictured above.
While the segment talked about using AI to mimic people’s voices and faces and have them say whatever you want, there wasn’t time to demonstrate this capability — so I’m doing it here.
Here’s a video I recorded back in October 2023 to promote a Python course that I was teaching:
I then fed that video to HeyGen, the AI avatar service, and used it to translate my video into Spanish. Here’s the result:
I don’t speak Spanish anywhere as fluently and smoothly as my HeyGen-generated version, and note that HeyGen went so far as to sync my lips with the Spanish words!
The Spanish voice is also a decent approximation of mine — close enough that it might fool even people who know me well, given a stressful situation full of emotion and other distractions, which is the sort of scenario that con artists try to create in a phone scam.
You should also note that the Spanish video was made with the version of HeyGen from October 2023. I’m sure it’s undergone significant improvements since then.
On Thursday, July 10 at 2:30 p.m. Eastern (11:30 a.m. Pacific / 1830 UTC), tune in to a webinar on rethinking the way businesses pay for knowledge work featuring:
✅ Fatin Kwasny, Founder and CEO of Fractio
✅ Yours Truly, Sales Engineer at Fractio
If your business is still pricing or accepting labor from knowledge workers…
…you’re already losing — and AI will only make it worse.
In this webinar, we’ll discuss how:
We’ll also show some actual data from companies already seeing at least 10x ROI by shifting how they price or accept knowledge work.
Join us this Thursday, July 10 at 2:30 p.m. Eastern (11:30 a.m. Pacific / 1830 UTC) for our webinar, From Time to Throughput: Rewriting Labor Economics in the Age of AI!
It’ll be an entertaining, informative discussion, featuring 45 minutes of presentation followed by a 15-minute Q&A session.
Click here to register for this FREE online event.
Fractio is a SaaS that enables companies to pay for knowledge work on a “per-thing-done” basis instead of the less efficient per-hour, per-project, or on retainer. (Think paying for a rideshare versus paying for a taxi.)
At Synapse Summit 2025, Fractio was the winner of the of the Startup Innovation Award, which recognizes emerging ventures that are making waves and redefining what’s possible.
I’m away from home over the next several days, which means I’m currently using my travel workstation setup!
It includes:
I’ve also using books I left here as laptop and monitor stands:
For the smaller monitor, Volume I of 101 Windows Phone 7 Apps from my time as a Microsoft developer evangelist and Windows Phone community champ.
For the bigger monitor, the old “Holy Trinity” from the Apple Technical Library from back in 1992: Inside Macintosh Overview, Macintosh Toolbox Essentials, and More Macintosh Toolbox, which were essential reading if you wanted to write applications for the Mac during the days of System 7.
And for the MacBook, I’m propping them up with the Software Engineering Classics box with Debugging the Development Process, Dynamics of Software Development, and Software Project Survival Guide, topped off with a copy of the original Dive Into Python autographed by the author, Mark Pilgrim, as a thank you for the review I wrote in Slashdot all those years ago.
A couple of months back, I wrote that one of my proposed talks was accepted for this year’s edition of KCDC — Kansas City Developer Conference, which takes place from August 13th through 15th (Wednesday, August 13 is the workshop day, while the conference days are Thursday and Friday, August 14 and 15).
KCDC draws 2000+ attendees each year and features tracks for the following topics:
My talk’s title is The Best, Most Fun Python Platform You’ve Never Heard Of. It’s 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.
I’ve been working on my talk for the past little while, and I thought I’d share the first couple of slides from my presentation. I may update them between now and mid-August, but if you’re curious, it should give you a sense of what my presentation will be like.
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.
I’m thinking about doing a dry run of my presentation here in Tampa — and for free! — at a Tampa Bay Python meetup in early August. Watch this space (or my LinkedIn account) for the announcement.
Would you like to get the anime template that I used for my slides? You can get it from SlidesGo for free — it’s called Lovely Chibis Anime Characters for Marketing!