Global Nerdy

An annual Tampa Bay tradition returns tomorrow night: Ignite Tampa Bay, an evening of presentations where each speaker has to get the the point quickly — because they have only 5 minutes to do so.

What’s an Ignite talk?

An Ignite talk follows these simple rules:

• Each speaker has 5 minutes in which to deliver a talk on a topic of their choice,
• and must use exactly 20 slides,
• and the slides auto-advance every 15 seconds.

It’s one thing to describe an Ignite talk, and an entirely other thing to see one in action. I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and use this one as first my example: the one I gave at Ignite Tampa Bay 2015. It’s a defense of Florida Man and Florida Woman, and an explanation of why we need them:

Need another presentation? How about Barry Greene’s talk on emergency preparedness, delivered at last year’s event?

And because Ignite was started by people in the tech community, there’s always a (usually layperson-friendly) tech talk or two. Here’s Sourcetoad CEO Greg Ross-Munro talking about Startup Bus:

Here’s what the official Ignite site has to say:

Ignite Talks is a fast-paced geek event started in 2006 by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis. Since the first Ignite took place in Seattle [in 2006], Ignite has become an international phenomenon, with Ignite events produced in Helsinki, Tunisia, Paris, New York City and over 350 other locations in between.

Ignite’s mission is “Everyone Speaks”. We believe that public speaking builds confidence in individuals and that events like Ignite build community. Our goal is to make it possible for anyone, anywhere, to learn to present their ideas and their stories.

Ignite is also about having fun, and showing that presentations don’t need to be about “death by PowerPoint”.

Why attend Ignite Tampa Bay?

Judging by the traffic stats on this blog, if you’re reading this, chances are that you’re a techie, entrepreneur, or nerd living and working in and around the Tampa Bay area. Ignite Tampa Bay is one of those annual events where you’ll see the biggest concentrations of your peers gathered in a single place. Sourcetoad — with whom I work — will be there, as will the folks from KnowBe4, FairWarning, (ISC)², Tampa Innovation (a.k.a. “!p”), Suncoast Developers Guild, Full Stack Talent, Women Who Code Tampa, Technova Florida, Embarc Collective, and more. It’s your chance to catch up with old friends, meet new ones, share ideas, and make the connections that are key to turning Tampa Bay’s tech scene into a livelier, more robust one.

Ignite can give you ideas. Ignite events are all about sharing ideas, and the constraints of an Ignite talk force the presenter to not just present their idea, but also to distill it down to its core essence. There’s something to be said for the way that the Ignite format makes a presenter think hard about the concept that they want to promote and bring it into focus. I’ve found ideas and inspiration from Ignite talks, and I think you might too.

Ignite has a “recharging” effect. I’ve heard time and again from people who’ve attended Ignite events that hearing Ignite talks helped get them out of a creative or restless rut. It might be seeing people trying to get their ideas across in five minutes, the diverse array of ideas that get presented, or the conversations that happen before, during, and after the event. Whatever it is, Ignite is a great way to get new perspectives and inspiration.

Attending Ignite Tampa Bay

Ignite Tampa Bay 2019 takes place on Thursday, June 6th, 2019 at the Palladium Theater in St. Pete (253 5th Avenue North). Doors open at 6:00 p.m., seating starts at 6:30, and the talks start at 7:00.

Tickets are $25 ($15 for students), and can be purchased either online or at the door.

There will be food trucks in the Palladium parking lot starting at around 5:00 p.m.. The Palladium has a snack bar that serves alchohol and non-alcohol drinks and snacks — be advised that the snack bar is cash-only (there’s an ATM in the lobby). The Palladium has a small parking lot beside it, and there are more lots nearby.

In an article in today’s Washington Post, the following is reported:

Inside several of Amazon’s cavernous warehouses, hundreds of employees spend hours a day playing video games. Some compete by racing virtual dragons or sports cars around a track, while others collaborate to build castles piece by piece.

But they aren’t whiling the time away playing Fortnite and Minecraft. Rather, they’re racing to fill customer orders, their progress reflected in a video game format that is part of an experiment by the e-commerce giant to help reduce the tedium of its physically demanding jobs. And if it helps improve the efficiency of work like plucking items from or stowing products on shelves for 10 hours a day or more, all the better.

The video games are optional for the thousands of “pickers” and “stowers” across a handful of the company’s warehouses. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Developed by Amazon, the games are displayed on small screens at employees’ workstations. As robots wheel giant shelves up to each workstation, lights or screens indicate which item the worker needs to pluck to put into a bin. The games simultaneously register the completion of the task, which is tracked by scanning devices, and can pit individuals, teams or entire floors against one another to be fastest, simply by picking or stowing real Lego sets, cellphone cases or dish soap. Game-playing employees are rewarded with points, virtual badges and other goodies throughout a shift.

Think Tetris, but with real boxes.

Of all the responses to this story, this tweet is my favorite:

Black Mirror Season 5 is lit https://t.co/SgPcqrtbl9

— Blake News (@blakehounshell) May 21, 2019

Photo by Susie Lu. Click to see at full size.

Susie Lu is a Senior Data Visualization Engineer at Netflix, and one of her many side projects is all about bringing data visualizations to places that need them, but don’t have them yet. She’s tackling the humble supermarket receipt — pretty much unchanged over decades — which is a challenge given the terrible resolution of their printers. She’s done a fine job working within those constraints!

Photo by Susie Lu.

From the Fast Company article about her project:

So she acquired a low-resolution thermal printer, the kind used at most stores, and started the process of coding and designing something better. What she created–using a grocery receipt of her own as reference–was a better receipt, with three distinct elements. On top, it features a bubble chart where spending is itemized by category. In her case, “meat & seafood” is a big bubble, representing about a third of her spending, and “snacks” is a tiny bubble, representing only 10%.

Below that, there’s a standard itemized list for reference, too. But each individual item features a bar chart of its own, representing how expensive it was in relation to other items in the category. A $13 ribeye steak fills the bar full, while a $4 chicken jalapeno sausage only makes a small dent. In aggregate, this design lets you skim to see where your dollars went categorically, and by item.

For more, read the whole article and check out her tweet below:

Early prototypes of reviziting the receipt, one piece of a larger question I want explore: how can viz be integrated into everyday experiences? pic.twitter.com/hswtVFp0oc

— Susie Lu (@DataToViz) May 4, 2019