Global Nerdy week in review (Week beginning Monday, July 6, 2020)

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene this week

This week’s list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for the Tampa Bay area has been posted! Check it out and see what interests you.

In the interests of public safety and its promotion, I’ve kept the list to only ONLINE events. Florida now has over 200,000 reported COVID-19 cases, 10,000 of which were reported on Sunday alone. Publix was slow to set up COVID-19 safeguards, and the recent news about 11 of their employees in the Tampa Bay area testing positive for COVID-19 isn’t a good sign either. You’ll want to stick to online events for the next little while.

Listen to this podcast: The Mike Dominick Show!

Are you looking for another Tampa Bay-based tech podcast? Mike Dominick of The Mad Botter (a consultancy that develops automation/integration software) has a podcast named The Mike Dominick Show that covers technology and open source.

I had the privilege of being the guest for Episode 25 of the Mike Dominick Show, which we recorded on Friday, and it was a fun conversation that covered:

• The Toronto tech scene
• Taking up the accordion
• How I got into developer evangelism
• Learning iOS programming via raywenderlich.com and then joining them
• Remote work and the pandemic
• WWDC 2020 and SwiftUI, Python and Burning Man
• Windows Phone and my time as a Windows Phone Champ
• What I’ve been doing while looking for work
• The hidden opportunities that come with having to stay inside

Find out more in my article, Local hero: Mike Dominick and his tech podcast, The Mike Dominick Show.

Read iOS Apprentice for free, and get other pandemic help with RW Community Care

The great people at raywenderlich.com have put together something to help developers during this time of pandemic and quarantine: RW Community Care. It’s a series of office hours, livestreams, bootcamps, and more, running until August 22 — and all events are 100% free!

One of the features of RW Community Care is the book iOS Apprentice, which I co-wrote with Eli Ganim. It”s a great book if you’re either completely new to programming, or just new to iOS programming. It’s how I picked up iOS programming back in 2012, and it set me on my path as a mobile developer.

iOS Apprentice normally sells for about $50 (it’s got over 1400 pages), but you can read it for free online at RW Community Care.

RW Community Care also features:

• RW Talks: Weekly talks covering all sorts of topics that mobile developers will find interesting, ranging from the deeply technical to the inspiring.
• RW Chat: Can’t attend some of the other live events, or prefer to collaborate on discussions as a community? Or maybe you’re more the type to hash out challenges or problems with a group of like-minded developers? There’s a Discord server that you can join!
• Office Hours: Not everyone has easy access to a senior mobile developer, especially when everyone seems so busy these days and our teams are more physically separate then ever before. Office Hours are the next best thing to having a senior developer right next to you!
• Review My Stuff: If you need someone to help you with deeper questions on your particular project, or to lend a critical eye to your resume or job search, you need Review My Stuff!

Find out more about RW Community Care in my article, RW Community Care: Free community support for mobile developers (and aspiring mobile developers, too!).

New life for old computers

I’ve been spending my quarantine time productively, which includes bringing some old but perfectly good computers that have been lying fallow back into active service. Check out what I did in these articles:

• New life for old computers
• The dirty little secret about the ThinkPad T430’s CMOS battery
• Building a lean and mean (and frugal!) Python development machine with Peppermint OS
• My Smalltalk-80 literature and monitor stand