I’m going to be at VueConf US on Tuesday and Wednesday, which very conveniently takes place here in Tampa!
Between my recent trip to Greece, being handed the leadership of Tampa Bay Python, prepping and giving a talk at BSides Tampa, and working with clients, and given that I’ve been working primarily with mobile app and Python development, Vue.js — and by extension, VueConf — has been off my radar.
However, I’m overdue to get up to speed on Vue, and I’ve been invited to attend VueConf. (Thanks to Tampa Java User Group’sAmmar Yusuf for connecting me and Vincent Mayers for the invitation!)
VueConf will take place at USF’sCAMLS center, where CAMLS is short for Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation. CAMLS isn’t located on USF’s main campus, but in downtown Tampa. It’s a pretty new building, and I’ve never set foot in it; I have heard that it has a very nice lecture hall:
While Vue doesn’t have React’s userbase, it’s got a nicer learning curve, doesn’t require you to import everything including the kitchen sink, better DOM manipulation performance, and two-way data binding. It also doesn’t drive me anywhere near as crazy as React does.
It also did well in Theo’s JavaScript framework tier list — I’ve posted the final results above, and the video below:
Anyhow, I’ll write about my experiences at this conference, with the occasional update on my LinkedIn. Watch this space!
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:
The Future of Work: Robotics & Intelligent Process Automation
Digital Governance: Managing IT, Data & Compliance
Healthcare Transformation: How Emerging Tech Is Reshaping Care Delivery
From Concept to Coaster: The Tech Behind Universal’s Iconic Experiences
Leading Locally: Spotlight on Tampa Bay’s Tech Trailblazers
Smarter Solutions: Rapid-Fire Use Cases from Companies Solving Big Problems with Tech
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:
Attend for FREE by being a volunteer! If you do two hours’ volunteering for at poweredUP, and you get to attend for free! You can sign up to volunteer here.
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
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:
Attend for FREE by being a volunteer! If you do two hours’ volunteering for at poweredUP, and you get to attend for free! You can sign up to volunteer here.
Here’s the schedule for AI Codecon, which is still being finalized as I write this:
Introduction, with Tim O’Reilly (10 minutes)
Gergely “Pragmatic Engineer” Orosz and Addy Osmani Fireside Chat (20 minutes) Addy Osmani for an insightful discussion on the evolving role of AI in software engineering and how it’s paving the way for a new era of agentic, “AI-first” development.
Vibe Coding: More Experiments, More Care – Kent Beck (15 minutes) Augmented coding deprecates formerly leveraged skills such as language expertise, and amplifies vision, strategy, task breakdown, and feedback loops. Kent Beck, creator of Extreme Programming, tells you what he’s doing and the principles guiding his choices.
Junior Developers and Generative AI – Camille Fournier, Avi Flombaum, and Maxi Ferreira (15 minutes) Is bypassing junior engineers a recipe for short-term gain but long-term instability? Or is it a necessary evolution in a high-efficiency world? Hear three experts discuss the trade-offs in team composition, mentorship, and organizational health in an AI-augmented industry.
My LLM Codegen Workflow at the Moment – Harper Reed (15 minutes)
Technologist Harper Reed takes you through his LLM-based code generation workflow and shows how to integrate various tools like Claude and Aider, gaining insights into optimizing LLMs for real-world development scenarios, leading to faster and more reliable code production.
Jay Parikh and Gergely Orosz Fireside Chat (15 minutes) Jay Parikh, executive vice president at Microsoft, and Gergely Orosz, author of The Pragmatic Engineer, discuss AI’s role as the “third runtime,” the lessons from past technological shifts, and why software development isn’t disappearing—it’s evolving.
The Role of Developer Skills in Today’s AI-Assisted World – Birgitta Böckeler (15 minutes) Birgitta Böckeler, global lead for AI-assisted software delivery at Thoughtworks, highlights instances where human intervention remains essential, based on firsthand experiences. These examples can inform how far we are from “hands-free” AI-generated software and the skills that remain essential, even with AI in the copilot seat.
Modern Day Mashups: How AI Agents Are Reviving the Programmable Web – Angie Jones (5 minutes) Angie Jones, global vice president of developer relations at Block, explores how AI agents are bringing fun and creativity back to software development and giving new life to the “programmable web.”
Tipping AI Code Generation on its Side – Craig McLuckie (5 minutes) The current wave of AI code generation tools are closed, vertically integrated solutions. The next wave will be open, horizontally aligned systems. Craig McLuckie explores this transformation, why it needs to happen, and how it will be led by the community.
Prompt Engineering as a Core Dev Skill: Techniques for Getting High-Quality Code from LLMs – Patty O’Callaghan (5 minutes)
Patty O’Callaghan highlights practical techniques to help teams generate high-quality code with AI tools, including an “architecture-first” prompting method that ensures AI-generated code aligns with existing systems, contextual scaffolding techniques to help LLMs work with complex codebases, and the use of task-specific prompts for coding, debugging, and refactoring.
Chip Huyen and swyx Fireside Chat (20 minutes) Chip Huyen will delve [Aha! An AI wrote this! — Joey] into the practical challenges and emerging best practices for building real-world AI applications, with a focus on how foundation models are enabling a new era of autonomous agents.
Bridging the AI Learning Gap: Teaching Developers to Think with AI – Andrew Stellman (15 minutes) Andrew Stellman, software developer and author of Head First C#, shares lessons from Sens-AI, a learning path built specifically for early-career developers, and offers insights into the gap between junior and senior engineers.
Lessons Learned Vibe Coding and Vibe Debugging a Chrome Extension with Windsurf – Iyanuoluwa Ajao (5 minutes) Software and AI engineer Iyanuoluwa Ajao explores the quirks of extension development and how to vibe code one from scratch. You’ll learn how chrome extensions work under the hood, how to vibe code an extension by thinking in flows and files, and how to vibe debug using dependency mapping and other techniques.
Designing Intelligent AI for Autonomous Action – Nikola Balic (5 minutes)
Nikola Balic, head of growth at VC-funded startup Daytona, will show through case studies like AI-powered code generation and autonomous coding, you’ll learn key patterns for balancing speed, safety, and strategic decision-making—and gain a road map for catapulting legacy systems into agent-driven platforms.
Secure the AI: Protect the Electric Sheep – Brett Smith (5 minutes) Distinguished software architect, engineer, and developer Brett Smith discusses AI security risks to the software supply chain, covering attack vectors, how they relate to the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, and how they tie into scenarios in CI/CD pipelines. You’ll learn techniques for closing the attack vectors and protecting your pipelines, software, and customers.
How Does GenAI Affect Developer Productivity? – Chelsea Troy (15 minutes) The advent of consumer-facing generative models in 2021 catalyzed a massive experiment in production on our technical landscape. A few years in, we’re starting to see published research on the results of that experiment. Join Chelsea Troy, leader of Mozilla’s MLOps team, for a tour through the current findings and a few summative thoughts about the future.
Eval Engineering: The End of Machine Learning Engineering as We Know It – Lili Jiang (15 minutes)
Lili Jiang, former Waymo evaluation leader, reveals how LLMs are transforming ML engineering. Discover why evaluation is becoming the new frontier of ML expertise, how eval metrics are evolving into sophisticated algorithms, and why measuring deltas instead of absolute performance creates powerful development flywheels.
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.
And now, the new organizer…
…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.”
Version 1.0.0
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.
Ben Affleck’s interview scene from “Good Will Hunting”.
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:
Am I really that much of a smart-ass?
“STARBS” — Situation, Task, Actions, Result, Bullshit — is pretty clever. Whose writing did Claude lift that from?
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’m going to be at VueConf US on Tuesday and Wednesday, which very conveniently takes place here in Tampa!
VueConf will take place at USF’s CAMLS center, where CAMLS is short for Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation. CAMLS isn’t located on USF’s main campus, but in downtown Tampa. It’s a pretty new building, and I’ve never set foot in it; I have heard that it has a very nice lecture hall:
While Vue doesn’t have React’s userbase, it’s got a nicer learning curve, doesn’t require you to import everything including the kitchen sink, better DOM manipulation performance, and two-way data binding. It also doesn’t drive me anywhere near as crazy as React does.
