Global Nerdy

This month’s project: A checklist app

Checklist apps are a mainstay — they’re popular enough for there to be a healthy number of them in the App Store, including these seven big players. At the next Tampa iOS Meetup, we’ll build a simple version that lets users add or remove items from a “to-do” style list, mark or unmark them as complete, and edit the details of any item in the list. Along the way, we’ll cover such items as:

•  Table Views, the UI elements that provide viewers with a visual list
• Segues, which move the user from one “screen” to another
• Classes, and how to use them in object-oriented programming

Bring your MacBook, because this is a hands-on programming exercise! You’ll get provide a “starter” project that you’ll work on as Joey walks you through the process of building a basic checklist app. By the end of this session, you’ll have a working checklist/to-do list app that you can use as a jumping-off point to create your own list-style applications for the iPhone or iPad.

New location

Tampa iOS Meetup had a new location: the offices of Joey’s new employer, Sourcetoad, who are located in Carrollwood on Busch just east of Dale Mabry. It’ll be the home of Tampa iOS Meetup from now on. It’s located in Twin Lakes Office Park, and the map below should make it a little easier to find Sourcetoad in the complex (we’re in unit #1018):

Also…

There will be food and drink — I’m aiming for pizza, for both carnivores and vegetarians.

As we move to our new location, we’d like to thank Wolters Kluwer and John Wang for being Tampa iOS Meetup’s home for the past year. Your hospitality is greatly appreciated!

The details, and how to register for this meetup

• When: Tuesday, August 1st, 2017 at 6:30 p.m.
• Where: Sourcetoad’s office — 2901 West Busch Boulevard, Suite 1018 (see map above)
• How to register: If you’d like to attend this meetup, please register on the Meetup page.

So what’s Tampa iOS Meetup about, anyway?

Tampa iOS Meetup is the Tampa Bay area’s meetup for beginning programmers and developers new to iOS development. We take a hands-on approach because it’s our answer to a question that I’ve been asked again and again, and it goes something like this:

“I’ve been studying iOS development for some time, and I’m still having a problem writing apps. I know how to program specific features in iOS, but I don’t know how to turn a bunch of features into an app.”

It’s one thing to go through tutorials that show you how to program a specific feature. It’s a completely different thing to take the knowledge from those tutorials and then write an app. My goal for Tampa iOS Meetup in 2017 is to show you how to make that leap by walking you through the process of making apps.

If you’re in the Tampa Bay area and you’ve always wanted to learn iOS development but needed some help getting started, Tampa iOS Meetup is for you! It’s a regular gathering aimed at people new to iOS development or software development in general where we cover all sorts of programming topics as we build applications together in a casual, fun, hands-on setting. Find out more at the Tampa iOS Meetup page.

Yours Truly, dressed for software product management success!

Day one of the new job at Sourcetoad started with me going to the gym, heading home, showering, and then getting appropriately dressed, as pictured above.

Then it was off to the new office, whose exterior looks like this:

The view from near Sourcetoad’s future front door (we’re expanding into another office).

The side of Sourcetoad’s building.

The view from near Sourcetoad’s front door (soon to be its back door, as we’re expanding the office).

The office is biking distance from home, but I’ll be driving to work for the next little while. That’s because from June to September, Tampa gets afternoon tropical storms with lots of lightning (Tampa’s the lightning capital of North America), and during those times, a bike a basically a lightning rod that you sit on.

In addition to being my first day at Sourcetoad, it was also the first day for our new mural. Local artists Rebekah Lazaridis and Meaghan Scalise came by in the morning to paint the work.

I got only a momentary glimpse of the artists in action, as I was busy wrangling my new provisions:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

As is tradition when one is on their first day at a workplace with a more startup-like feel, I’m posting a photo of the stuff that’s been assigned to me by Sourcetoad. Among them are:

• 15-inch Macbook Pro. It’s my first new-school Macbook with the Touch Bar and incompatible-with-everything-I-own USB-C ports. But it is a delightfully lean, mean, senior product management machine! The company-provided spare power adapter is a nice bonus.
• Not one, but two additional monitors! This is the first workplace to provide such a perk.
• Sourcetoad water bottle. I’m a regular gym-goer and cyclist (I plan to bike to work when it’s not thunderstorm season), so I can never have too many good water bottles.
• Sourcetoad-branded “Field Notes”-style notebook and mechanical pencil. Because there are times when electronics will fail you.

I spent the morning getting my laptop and various accounts set up, followed by lunch with CEO Greg Ross-Munro and Director of Operations Deborah Neff, most of the afternoon getting briefed on software projects by Director of Projects Nick DeMelas, and the end of the day having a beer with the Sourcetoad crew in the break room. I’m pretty pleased with how Day One went.

It’s Monday, July 24th, 2017, which means that’s it’s Day One at the new job at Sourcetoad, a Tampa-based software development shop that makes all sort of interesting software products, including:

I will be managing the above products, as my role is Lead Product Manager, which means that I may need to add these T-shirts to my wardrobe:

All kidding aside, you might be asking “Really, what does a product manager do?”

My favorite definition comes from Marty Cagan’s book, Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love:

In Inspired, Cagan cleverly summarizes the product manager’s mission as:

to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible.

The Accidental Product Manager breaks down product management into these 5 steps:

• Identify A Need: Your product will never be a success if it doesn’t solve a problem for a customer. Before you spend any time creating product, first take the time to find a customer need that they’d be willing to spend money to solve.
• Identify Customers: The world is filled with lots of customer problems that nobody would actually pay to solve. The dot.com implosion showed that it was easy to create a product that solved a problem that nobody really needed to have solved (remember Pets.com?)
• Create Product: Product managers can get lost in this part of the program. The product that gets created needs to solve the problem better than anyone else for the customers who are willing to pay for it. That’s it.
• Sell Product: Having a product is a good start, but it’s not going to do anyone any good unless you can make your customers aware of it. Once they know that it exists, you are going to have to work with the rest of your company to find ways to get your product into your customer’s hands.
• Support Product: There is an old phrase that says that its 5x easier to sell to an existing customer than to a new one. The only way that that is going to be true is if your existing customer is happy with you. Supporting the product once it’s been bought is not nearly as glamorous as a new sale, but it can be the key to future sales.

You’ve probably seen this Venn diagram in a number of presentations about product management:

Martin Eriksson summed up the three sets that make up the Venn diagram quite nicely:

• Business – Product Management is above all else a business function, focused on maximising business value from a product. Product Managers should be obsessed with optimising a product to achieve the business goals while maximising return on investment. Sorry, this does mean that you are a suit – but you don’t have to wear one.
• Technology – There’s no point defining what to build if you don’t know how it will get built. This doesn’t mean a Product Manager needs to be able to sit down and code but understanding the technology stack and most importantly understanding the level of effort involved is crucial to making the right decisions. This is even more important in an Agile world where Product Managers spend more time day to day with the development team than with anyone else inside the business.
• User Experience – Last but not least the Product Manager is the voice of the user inside the business and must be passionate about the user experience. Again this doesn’t mean being a pixel pusher but you do need to be out there testing the product, talking to users and getting that feedback first hand – especially in a start-up.

The classic X-Men issue where Professor X meets the Shadow King.

Mine is a critical position within the company, and you may wonder if it scares me. Like the management who hired me, I have great confidence in my abilities, but as Professor Charles Xavier once astutely said before one of the greatest battles in his life: Only a fool is without fear.

I’m looking forward to Day One at Sourcetoad and a new adventure!

Other articles I’ve written about the new job

• The job search is over: I’ve joined Sourcetoad!
• (Almost) everything I did between losing my last job and landing my new one

In an announcement made earlier today, the coding school The Iron Yard announced that they were closing all of their campuses, which includes our very own Tampa Bay branch in St. Petersburg and another branch in Orlando.

In their announcement, The Iron Yard’s communications director Leila King wrote:

In considering the current environment, the board of The Iron Yard has made the difficult decision to cease operations at all campuses after teaching out remaining summer cohorts. We will finish out summer classes completely, including career support.

Located in a converted warehouse building on St. Pete’s 1st Avenue South, The Iron Yard was where a lot of local techies devoted 12 intense weeks (and more than $12,000 for the opportunity) to learn how to program. It’s meant for people who are staking their future on a career in software development, and it’s not for the faint of heart or dilettantes. In my three years here, I’ve met the instructors and a good number of Iron Yard graduates, and I’ve even been a guest lecturer a couple of times. I’ve been impressed by what the instructors have accomplished, what the students have learned, and most importantly, where their learning has taken them.

The Iron Yard is more than just a coding school. It’s also a beautiful, comfortable space that serves as a hub for developers and techies on the St. Pete side of the Bay, as it’s the home of a number of meetups and other gatherings. It’s the social heart and soul of the tech scene on the St. Pete side of the Bay.

When I moved here in 2014, The Iron Yard was one of the first places I frequented. It’s where I got to know a lot of people in the local tech community and made some of my first friends here. It’s a key part of the Tampa Bay Tech scene and a big contributor to the local economy and culture, and we’re all be missing something once they close their doors.

So what do we, as members of the Tampa Bay tech and entrepreneurial community, do in light of The Iron Yard’s imminent closing?

First and foremost, let’s recognize the amazing work that the Iron Yard Tampa Bay’s team have done. To Toni Warren, Katherine Trammell, Holly Valenty, Mark Dewey, Angel Murchison, Jason Perry, Gavin Stark, and all the other folks at The Iron Yard: thank you for everything you’ve done. Through the students you’ve educated, the community you served and supported, the friendships you’ve helped make, and the space you created, you’ve made Tampa Bay a better, smarter place.

The Iron Yard crew: Gavin Stark, Holly Valenty, Jason Perry, Angel Murchison, Katherine Trammel, Toni Warren, and Mark Dewey.

Second, let’s make sure that all the people whose livelihoods come from working at The Iron Yard get new jobs! If you’re even only slightly involved in the Tampa Bay tech scene, you know they’re not just high-caliber techies, but also pillars of the community and great people in general. I’m sure that the closing of The Iron Yard has thrown a wrench in their lives and plans, and we as a community owe it to them to help smooth the path for them. If you’re hiring, hire them!

Third — and this is a tricky one — we’ll have to figure out where local aspiring developers will go. How do we fill the need for a place like The Iron Yard when it’s gone? What options will there be for someone who wants a concentrated, structured environment in which to learn how to code and learn how to look for development work?

And finally, the closing of The Iron Yard means that we all need to pitch in and try to create new homes for the meetups and other gatherings that took place there. I’m going to use my newly-minted position at Sourcetoad to see if it can become home for a couple of meetups that have been displaced, but what we really need is a venue on the St. Pete side.

And because it can’t be said enough, I’ll close with this: Thank you, Iron Yard Tampa Bay (and all the Iron Yard locations) for everything you’ve done.

Recommended reading

I’ll leave it to the Gentle Reader to find all the reports about The Iron Yard’s closing. I’d much rather point you to stories about The Iron Yard’s impact on Tampa and St. Pete:

• Programming Academy The Iron Yard Expands To Tampa Bay (83 Degrees Media, August 2014)
• The Iron Yard Graduates Inaugural Coding Classes in Tampa Bay (PRWeb, 2014)
• Becky Hamm: A Better Path to Becoming a JavaScript Developer (Iron Yard blog, April 2015)
• Patrick Vecchione: Restarting a Career After a 10 Year Break (Iron Yard blog, April 2015)
• The shine’s on The Iron Yard (St. Pete Chamber of Commerce, June 2016)
• Campus Spotlight: The Iron Yard Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg (Iron Yard blog, June 2016)
• From the newsroom to the classroom: Sandra’s story (Iron Yard blog, June 2016)
• St. Pete coding school, The Iron Yard, says it has a 98% job placement rate (ABC Action News Tampa Bay, August 2016)
• From going by the book to the adventure of a lifetime: Nick’s story (Iron Yard blog, August 2016)
• Journey to new horizons: Jonathan’s blog (Iron Yard blog, August 2016)
• Full Speed Ahead: Sarrah’s Story (Iron Yard blog, August 2016)
• At tech boot camp Iron Yard Academy Tampa Bay, students learn to crack the code (Tampa Bay Times, October 2016)
• Focus and determination: Tony’s journey from the military to software development (Iron Yard blog, November 2016)
• The pain of learning and the euphoria of understanding (Iron Yard blog, December 2016)
• What I have learned since graduating from The Iron Yard (Medium — Katherine Trammell, January 2017)
• A chat with code school Advisory Board member Jesse Curry (Iron Yard blog, January 2017)
• The creativity of coding: Christa’s story (Iron Yard blog, March 2017)
• The Iron Yard experience: Insight from current students (Iron Yard blog, April 2017)
• Animator, toddler mom, finds good fit in coding (Iron Yard blog, June 2017)
• Ultimate Medical Academy joins Tampa Bay Advisory Board (Iron Yard blog, June 2017)
• Trigaux: Halfway through 2017, a closer look at six drivers of the Tampa Bay economy (Tampa Bay Times. June 2017)
• The growth of coding bootcamps 2017 (Course Report, July 2017)

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.