Global Nerdy

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Here’s the scene it references…

…and here’s the mandatory Robot Chicken parody:

Now witness the power of this fully-operational Darth Vader statue
by clicking on it to see it at full size.

Someone gave an old Darth Vader statue to one of my co-workers’ toddlers, and it didn’t work out so well. That’s how it came into my possession, and I plan to make the most of it. It’s now standing proudly beside my desk at the Sourcetoad office, awaiting amusing photo opportunities.

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Update: Banana for scale

George “@gortok” Stocker suggested that I include a banana in the photo for scale, and I’m more than happy to oblige:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

I’m chatting live tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on YouTube with the folks from the Thunder Nerds podcast about the upcoming DevFest Florida conference, which takes place on Saturday, January 19th at the Contemporary Resort in Walt Disney World.

You can watch it below:

The Thunder Nerds describe their podcast as “A conversation with the people behind the technology, that love what they do… and do tech good.” I had the privilege of doing an interview with them at last year’s DevFest Florida…

…and I’m looking forward to chatting with them both tonight and at this year’s conference.

The Thunder Nerds, who have over 160 podcasts under their collective belt, are Jenell Pizarro:

…Brian Hinton:

…and Frederick Philip von Weiss:

They’ll be talking with a number of people who’ll be speaking at DevFest Florida 2019, including Yours Truly, who’ll be presenting to attendees who want to get in on one of the hottest fields’ (data science) hottest tools (Jupyter notebooks)…

…Betty Pierce, who’ll talk about React Native Up and Running:

…Eva Sofianos, who will present Nailing the Tech Interview:

…Michael Prentice, whose presentation will be Composing Accessible UIs With Angular Material Components,

…Santosh Hari, whose talk will be Intro to NoSQL and how to pick a cloud based NoSQL provider:

…and Siva Kumar, whose presentation will be AI Adventures with AutoML:

If you want to find out more about DevFest Florida, or if you simply want to see what’s new in the tech world, tune in tonight to this live chat!

We had some serious agile brainpower gathered in one place on Monday, what with:

• Lyssa Adkins, co-founder of the Agile Coaching Institute and author of Coaching Agile Teams, who was leading a personal agility course earlier in the day along with…
• Alistair Cockburn, one of the 17 developers who met at the Snowbird Resort in Utah back in 2001 and created the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (better known as the Agile Manifesto), creator of the Heart of Agile concept, and a local (he lives in St. Pete), and…
• Maria Matarelli, agile coach and presenter by day, fabulous club DJ by night, and co-organizer of the Tampa Bay Agile Social meetup…

…all gathered for the end-of-the-year Agile Social meetup, which also doubled as a birthday party for Alistair:

It’s not a proper birthday party without Happy Birthday being played in some form, so we did just that. Maria started a DJ set with a more acoustic-sounding mix 50 Cent’s In Da Club (which many people  know only as “Go shawty, it’s your birthday”). In the spirit of agile, I decided to play along with an improvised accordion line, and the result was captured in the video at the top of this article.

After the set, and as is my tradition whenever I meet someone who signed the Agile Manifesto, I had to ask Alistair my standard question: “Was the gathering at Snowbird anything like Hot Tub Time Machine?”

Alas, he said no.

So far, I’ve asked this question to three Agile Manifesto signers:

• Martin Fowler
• Robert (“Uncle Bob’) Martin
• Alistair Cockburn

3 down, 14 to go…

From left to right: Joey deVilla, Lyssa Adkins, Alistair Cockburn, Anitra Pavka.

Tampa Bay has a lot of agile goings-on, thanks to a lively community of agile practitioners and gatherings, including:

• Tampa Bay Agile, which organizes a great many local meetups and is managed by some great people: Stephanie Davis, Evy Vicioso, Becky Hartman, Julee Everett, Adam Ulery, Tami V., Carol Dekkers, and of course, Alistair Cockburn,
• Agile Social, organized by Jennifer Cullen, Ashlie Stevens, and Maria Matarelli,
• A number of Lean Coffee events — these are morning pre-office-hour events where agilists get together to discuss issues on their minds,
• Lean Beer, the after-work agile event that’s like Lean Coffee, but with beer, and created by Fred Mastropasqua.

Want to find out more about events like this in the Tampa Bay area? Follow this blog and my Twitter account (I’m @AccordionGuy) — I post a weekly round-up of upcoming tech events, and agile gatherings are a part of that list!