Status Update
November (it's for Turkeys)
What This Is
This section contains a number of subheadings where I can archive and organize the various things I’m studying/working on from a month-to-month basis. It’s essentially a long list of tersely formatted status updates that I collect and maintain along with some commentary.
Where Have I Been???
I’ve taken a bit of a hitaus from updating these statuses! The past three months have been incredibly busy.
Here are the highlights:
- Organized and ran Tampa Devs’ first hackathon,
- Volunteered as a judge at USF HackJam,
- Gave a talk at the CyberX Tampa cybersecurity conference,
- Designed, configured, and deployed a full suite of analytics tools for Tampa Devs’ web properties,
- Launched Tampa Devs’ awesome new job board (and built its API and integrations),
- Built and launched an online merch store for Tampa Devs,
- Helped launch Tampa Devs’ first affiliate meetup, Tampa Bay Data Science,
- Started a new job with an incredible team at Xpirit USA.
Reading…
Books:
Practical Cloud Security: A Guide for Secure Design and Deployment - Chris Dotson. (9781492037514)
Terraform: Up & Running: Writing Infrastructure as Code - Yevgeniy Brikman. (9781492046905)
Tampa Devs
It’s been an incredible month (and an incredible year) for Tampa Devs!
TADHack Tampa 2022
After much planning and investment, Tampa Devs have successfully ran our first hackathon, TADHack Tampa 2022, in October.
This was a massive undertaking for Vincent and I: More than 120 people attended, and we distributed ~$1,500 worth of prizes to local winners.
You can check out the full rundown of winners & participating teams, along with recordings of each team’s pitches and the awards ceremony, on the Tampa Devs blog.
You may also find our TADHack press release and FAQ to be of interest.

Founding…
Squeak Records
As of this month, Squeak Records’ operations will be winding down. It’s been a good run, but my primary focus has shifted fully to organizing Tampa Devs.
Listening…
- See last.fm.
Presenting…
Prior to my departure from GuidePoint, I also presented my final installment of GPS Live:
(mirror)
Hacking…
I learned all about Cloudflare Workers while I was building the Tampa Devs job board API. It even does server-side page rendering, using handlebars.
I’ve also continued my Ruby hacking on Tampa Devs’ job board integrations.
During the first stateside Xpirit “innovation day” (essentially a company hackathon), my team worked on automatic TLS certificate provisionment & termination for inbound HTTPS traffic into a Kubernetes cluster by using Caddy’s ingress controller.
Watching…
Smoking…
I’ve recently taken an interest in cigars.
My favorites this month come from Drew Estate:
- Liga Privada No. 9
- Liga Privada Nasty Fritas
Playing…
- Drums