The post Saturday picdump for Saturday, June 6 appeared first on Global Nerdy.

This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:

When the event will take place

What the event is

Where the event will take place

Who is holding the event

This week’s events

• Monday, June 8
• Tuesday, June 9
• Wednesday, June 10
• Thursday, June 11
• Friday, June 12
• Saturday, June 13
• Sunday, June 14

Monday, June 8

Tuesday, June 9

Wednesday, June 10

Thursday, June 11

Friday, June 12

Saturday, June 13

Event name and location	Group	Time
Coffee & Games Ginger Beard Coffee	Gulfside Gatherings	9:00 AM to 11:00 AM EDT
Saturday Chess at Wholefoods in Midtown, Tampa Whole Foods Market	Chess Republic	9:30 AM to 12:00 PM EDT
EZ Stock (Stock, Options, Market) 2079 Range Rd	Tampa Bay Technology Center	10:00 AM to 12:00 PM EDT
Crafts & Drafts Fiber Arts Meetup at 3 Daughters Brewery 3 Daughters Brewing	St. Pete Knit, Crochet & Fiber Arts at The Common Thread	11:30 AM to 3:30 PM EDT
Youth Dungeons & Dragons Saturdays (Ages7-12) At Conworlds Emporium Saturday, Jun 13 · 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM EDT	Tarpon Springs Community Fun & Games	1:00 PM
FREE Fab Lab Orientation Faulhaber Fab Lab	Suncoast Makers	1:30 PM to 2:30 PM EDT
D&D (5e) @ Black Harbor Gaming (FULL) Black Harbor Gaming	St Pete and Pinellas Tabletop RPG Group	1:30 PM to 5:30 PM EDT
Encounters: Celebration Event (5.5 dnd) Coliseum of Comics	Adventurers of Central Florida	2:00 PM to 6:00 PM EDT
Saturday Chess @ Driftwood Kava & Roastery St. Pete Driftwood Kava & Roastery St. Pete	Chess Republic	2:00 PM to 5:00 PM EDT
Bitcoin Social in St. Petersburg Beech Kombucha	Tampa Bay Bitcoin	3:00 PM to 4:00 PM EDT
Geeks at the movies: Disclosure Day! AMC Westshore	Geekocracy!	3:30 PM to 5:30 PM EDT
NATIONAL WEED YOUR GARDEN NIGHT Saturday, June 13, 2026 Winners Sports Grill	Tampa (Citrus Park Area) Games Meetup Group	4:45 PM to 9:15 PM EDT
Not the Father’s Day CAH Game Lauri’s House	Cards Against Humanity Orlando Game Night	5:00 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
Board Brews Zephyrhills Brewing Company	Nerdbrew Events	5:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
Warmachine Journeyman League Battlebrush Games	Battlebrush Games: Paint Minis & Play Warhammer/Warmachine	5:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Community Hang-out Night Online event	Nerdbrew Events	6:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Yu-Gi-Oh Evening Tournament Sunshine Games | Magic the Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!	Sunshine Games	7:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT
Return to the top of the list

Sunday, June 14

About this list

How do I put this list together?

It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.

In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.

What goes into this list?

I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:

• • Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
  • Tech project management / agile processes
  • Video, board, and role-playing games
  • Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
  • Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
  • Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
  • Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms

• Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
• Anything I deem geeky

The post Tampa Bay tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events list (Monday, June 8 – Sunday, June 14) appeared first on Global Nerdy.

I’m returning for another appearance this Sunday on This Week in Tech, which will record live at 5 p.m. Eastern / 2 p.m. Pacific / 2100 UTC!

As usual, it’ll be hosted by Leo Laporte and the other guest panelists will be journalist Jeff Jarvis (whom I know from BloggerCon and similar events in the 2000s) and priest/podcaster Father Robert Ballecer.

As usual, we’ll talk about the week’s tech events and what they’ve been up to recently, and I’ll probably talk about joining NetFoundry and working as a developer advocate promoting OpenZiti and the AI platform that builds on it.

You can watch the livestream or the recording on the This Week in Tech YouTube channel.

This will be my third appearance on This Week in Tech for 2026; here are my other two episodes…

January 4, 2026 with Dan Patterson, Sr/ Director of Content @ Blackbird.AI:

The post I’m on “This Week in Tech” this Sunday, June 7! appeared first on Global Nerdy.

In an era over-saturated with sterile, generated pics and diagrams, I thought I’d go in the opposite direction and try to revive this tradition. With that in mind, I made these illustrations that accompany an article in r/NetFoundry: Why Claude’s new MCP Tunnel matters, and how llm-gateway, mcp-gateway, and Agora fit into the same picture.

Here are the backs of envelopes featured in that Reddit post:

Read the post to see what these back-of-the-envelope diagrams are all about!

The post Some LITERAL back-of-the-envelope diagrams in r/NetFoundry worth checking out appeared first on Global Nerdy.

The post Saturday picdump for Saturday, May 30 appeared first on Global Nerdy.

This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:

When the event will take place

What the event is

Where the event will take place

Who is holding the event

This week’s events

• Monday, June 1
• Tuesday, June 2
• Wednesday, June 3
• Thursday, June 4
• Friday, June 5
• Saturday, June 6
• Sunday, June 7

Monday, June 1

Tuesday, June 2

Wednesday, June 3

Thursday, June 4

Friday, June 5

Saturday, June 6

Sunday, June 7

About this list

How do I put this list together?

It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.

In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.

What goes into this list?

I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:

• • Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
  • Tech project management / agile processes
  • Video, board, and role-playing games
  • Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
  • Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
  • Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
  • Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms

• Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
• Anything I deem geeky

The post Tampa Bay tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events list (Monday, June 1 – Sunday, June 7) appeared first on Global Nerdy.

It’s adorable, and it describes the job pithily.

The post This is my new developer relations meme and mantra appeared first on Global Nerdy.

Need context for this one? Here you go:

The post Saturday picdump for Saturday, May 23 appeared first on Global Nerdy.

This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:

When the event will take place

What the event is

Where the event will take place

Who is holding the event

This week’s events

• Monday, May 25
• Tuesday, May 26
• Wednesday, May 27
• Thursday, May 28
• Friday, May 29
• Saturday, May 30
• Sunday, May 31

Monday, May 25

Tuesday, May 26

Tuesday at 5:30 at Hidden Springs Ale Works (Tampa): It’s the last Tuesday of the month, which means it’s time for TampaTech Taps & Taco Tuesday!

As always, it will feature:

Tech – Connect & network with tech industry peers
Taps – Enjoy 15% off your tab as a tech attendee
Tacos – A full taco bar… who doesn’t love tacos?!

No speakers, no presentations – just great conversations and a Raffle (because that’s way more fun! )

Find out more and register here.

Tuesday at 6 pm at Embarc Collective (Tampa): The Tampa Digital Mixer returns! It’s for e-commerce operators, remote workers, digital marketers, Shopify entrepreneurs, Facebook Ads pros and AI enthusiasts and start-up entrepreneurs — an evening of high-impact networking and actionable conversations in the heart of Tampa Bay.

Find out more and register here.

Wednesday, May 27

Wednesday at 12:30, online: Heart of Agile St. Pete – Tampa – Orlando presents an online Coffee Corner with the topicTalking to the People at the Top!

The description:

You know the moment. You’re explaining a delivery approach, surfacing a risk, or making the case for a better way of working — and somewhere mid-sentence, the leader across from you has already moved on.

Talking to the people at the top is one of the trickiest parts of doing Agile work well. The language doesn’t always travel, the priorities feel misaligned, and the stakes are real.

This session is an open, practitioner-focused conversation — no slides, no pre-work. We’ll use the Heart of Agile — Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve — as our lens for those moments. Just an hour on Zoom to swap honest stories about what has worked, what has fallen flat, and what those moments taught us.

You’ll leave with at least one concrete idea to try the next time you need a senior leader to understand what you’re doing and why it matters.

Bring a story. Bring a question. Coffee optional.

Find out more and register here.

Wednesday from 6 – 9 p.m. at Tiki Docks River Bar and Grill (Riverview): The West Florida chapter of ISACA, the global professional association for IT governance, cybersecurity, risk management, and assurance, is holding a Spring Networking Event at the Tiki Docks! Come and meet the folks behind the West Florida chapter and your fellow cybersecurity and tech professionals in a fun setting.

Find out more and register here.

Thursday, May 28

Thursday from 4:00 – 6:30 p.m. at American Legion Post 138 (Tampa): It’s the May 2026 edition of the Tampa/ MacDill AFB Orange Call, Networking Event & Tech Round Table!

In a military context, an “orange call” refers to an alert signaling a heightened cybersecurity state of readiness.

This orange call’s purpose is to gather and network amongst fellow communicators, guardians, and enablers of all ranks, titles, and experience levels, share resources and seek professional development. They will conduct an informal meet & greet and discuss MacDill communicators and missions, including the increasing role of cyber and the importance of defending our nation’s networks.

Find out more and register here.

Thursday from 6:00 p.m. at Entrepreneur Collaborative Center (Tampa): Data Analytics & AI Tampa Bay presents the May 2026 edition of their meetup, where experts present current trends and topics in the analytics field, including AI and ML, data science, business analytics, systems design, database management, data mining, and more!

Find out more and register here.

Thursday from 7:00 p.m. at Embarc Collective (Tampa): Tampa Devs presents XAI Evaluation: How to Know If Your Model’s Explanations Are Trustworthy, with Muntaser Syed!

Popular explainability methods like SHAP, LIME, and Integrated Gradients often yield conflicting results for the same model. How do you decide which one to trust? This hands-on workshop moves beyond “visual intuition” to introduce quantitative evaluation of XAI, providing objective tools to measure explanation quality.
Working through three interactive Google Colab notebooks, participants will:

• Identify Disagreement: Generate multiple explanations on real datasets to see exactly where and why they diverge.
• Apply Metric Frameworks: Measure explanations across three critical dimensions: Faithfulness (accuracy to the model), Robustness (stability), and Complexity (interpretability).
• Build Evaluation Pipelines: Create comparison tables and learn a decision framework for choosing explainers based on use cases like regulatory audits or stakeholder communication.

Find out more and register here.

Friday, May 29

Saturday, May 30

Sunday, May 31

About this list

How do I put this list together?

It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.

In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.

What goes into this list?

I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:

• • Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
  • Tech project management / agile processes
  • Video, board, and role-playing games
  • Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
  • Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
  • Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
  • Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms

• Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
• Anything I deem geeky

The post Tampa Bay tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events list (Monday, May 25 – Sunday, May 31) appeared first on Global Nerdy.

So when I sat down in a packed room at BSides Tampa 13 this past Saturday for a talk titled Dealing with Shadows: A Day in the Life of a Threat Actor Negotiator the timing felt less like a conference session and more like a debrief.

The speaker was Matt Barnett, CEO and co-founder of SEVN-X, a Pennsylvania-based cybersecurity firm. Matt spends his working hours talking to criminals on the dark web on behalf of clients whose systems have just been encrypted, whose data has just been exfiltrated, or  frequently both. He was joined onstage (in spirit, anyway) by his colleague Dave Zofran, who Matt repeatedly tried to make wave at the audience and who, in the great tradition of every backstage engineer at every conference ever, was having none of it.

This was easily one of the best talks of the day. Matt is jokey, sweary, self-deprecating, and irreverent, and the audience stayed well past the scheduled end for a Q&A that ended only because it was time for the closing keynote and raffle for Chris Machowski’s amazing BSides posters. Here’s what I took away.

“My career is a series of clerical errors”

Matt opened by describing his career path as “mostly an annoying inability to say no to things.” Somebody asked him if he wanted to do physical penetration testing. Sure. Forensic analysis school? Sure. Want to talk to criminals on the dark web? Hell yeah. Do you know what you’re doing? Not a clue. We’ll figure it out.

He compared himself to Jim Carrey in Yes Man, which he claimed was autobiographical. As somebody whose own career has been driven in no small part by saying yes to the next weird thing (DevRel, accordion-on-stage, organizing meetups, writing this blog for two decades), I felt seen.

Before getting into the meat of it, Matt did a room survey: students, IT folks (“the unpaid group, maybe the underpaid group”), cyber pros with one-to-five years (“the unjaded ones, because you still believe you can make a difference”), and the over-fives (“the unbothered”). Then he asked if there were any vendors in the room, and offered them the mic. Nobody took him up on it. They know a trap when they see one.

Myth-busting: paying ransoms, double-dipping, and “why does this exist?”

Matt opened with a couple of myths he wanted to put to bed.

Myth number one: Paying ransoms is illegal. Nope. Some payments are illegal, specifically payments to entities on the OFAC sanctions list, which is why you don’t want amateurs handling the wire. Ransom payment as a category is not, in itself, against the law.

Myth number two: You don’t always get what you pay for. Mostly false, with caveats. Double and triple extortion happen, but in Matt’s experience, they’re typically different groups exploiting the same unpatched Fortinet firewall (a refrain that came up roughly every six minutes during the talk; more on that in a moment), and not the original group going back on its word. Reputable ransomware crews are, weirdly, reputable, and that’s because their business model depends on it.

There is, however, no certification body for what Matt does. He has a GCFA, meaning that he’s a certified forensic analyst, but there’s no such thing as a certified-ransomware-negotiator credential. He quoted Jon DiMaggio (whom he says everyone calls ”Joe”) on the state of the field: nobody can really tell you whether you’re good at this job. You learn it the way Jason Statham’s character in The Mechanic learned his trade: “Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”

And on the moral question of “Why do negotiators exist at all? Doesn’t paying ransoms just feed the system?”, Matt invoked Tony Stark from the first Iron Man (alas, he’s no fan of the sequels): “It’s an imperfect world, but it’s the only one we got. The minute we don’t need threat actor negotiators anymore, I will build bricks and beams for baby hospitals.”

The ransomware industry is, in fact, an industry

Probably the most important reframe in the talk (and one I’m going to be repeating to people at NetFoundry and at Tampa Bay AI meetups) is that the mental image of “ransomware operator” most non-security people still carry around is wildly out of date.

The kid in his mom’s basement, surrounded by cold pizza, while she yells about meatballs? Not a thing anymore. Or more accurately, never coming back to a screen near you. Modern ransomware groups are full-on enterprises with:

• Ransomware developers
• Initial access brokers
• Software and codebase maintainers
• AI specialists (yes, really)
• Web devs building the victim portals
• Customer service / “help desk”
• Translators (or rather, prompt engineers driving Google Translate and Claude and ChatGPT)
• HR. HR.

“I don’t know if they have benefits,” Matt said. “The minute they have benefits, I might consider a career change.”

These aren’t lone actors. They’re businesses, and in many cases they’re tacitly or explicitly protected by their host governments because the money flowing back into their towns and villages props up local economies. As Matt put it: they’re heroes where they live. Which is one of those facts about the modern threat landscape that you have to sit with for a minute before you can keep going.

The shift to enterprise has changed everything about negotiation strategy. The old groups sometimes had a moral compass; for example, there was a group that would hand over decryption keys for free if they realized they’d accidentally hit a hospital, and another that announced they were retiring after they hit a billion dollars and then actually published a master decryption key on their way out. Those days are over. Today’s groups operate on margin and SLA, like any other B2B company. They just happen to be in the extortion vertical.

“Why use a negotiator?” Because you know everyone at your company.

Here’s a part of the talk worth keeping in mind should you find yourself or your company at the mercy of a ransomware organization.

Matt asked how many of us had worked at our current job for more than a year. Then more than five. Then more than ten. Then he asked the ten-plus hands: do you have kids? Because if you do, you have worked with these people longer than your kids have been alive. You know your coworkers better than you know your spouse, your friends, sometimes your own children.

Which means when your company gets ransomed, you’re most likely not going to be a calm, collected, rational actor. You’re a person watching your work-family bleed out, and you will do dumb things because of it. This is exactly why, in hostage negotiations, local PD will bring in officers from another jurisdiction the moment they realize anyone involved knows anyone involved. Emotional distance is the whole point.

A negotiator isn’t there because they’re smarter than you. They’re there because they don’t know your accounts receivable manager who just had her first kid, and that distance is, perversely, a gift.

The other thing negotiators bring is pattern recognition across hundreds of cases. There are really only two companies in the U.S. that actually facilitate ransom payments because it’s a risky line of work. Matt didn’t name them, but they’re not hard to find, and the negotiators who work with them have visibility into asks, settlements, durations, and outcomes that no individual victim can possibly have. Which brings us to the data.

Ransomware company discount curves

Hey, actual numbers!

Matt put up actual data from the last 12 months of facilitated payments. I’m reproducing the highlights here because they’re genuinely useful for anyone thinking about cyber insurance, incident response runbooks, or just calibrating their understanding of the threat landscape.

Akira (traditional / technical, business-oriented group)

• Average initial ask: ~$1.3 million
• Average settled payment: ~$429,000
• Average discount: 60–70%
• Average duration: ~20 days

Qilin (pronounced “CHEE-lin”; it’s Chinese and denotes a magical creature close in spirit to a unicorn or magical giraffe)

• Average initial ask: ~$800,000
• Average discount: ~62.5%, but with a hard floor around 50%
• Tighter statistical clustering than Akira

ShinyHunters (the new kids; social engineering and help desk scams)

• Much higher initial asks
• Average discount: ~71%
• Much shorter duration. Matt called it “almost like a fire sale.” I like to think of them as the TJ Maxx or Ross of malware.

The shape of the discount curve is the interesting part: time on the x-axis, percent off on the y-axis, and the curve goes up and to the right. Like buying a car, except the dealership is in a sanctions-adjacent country and the test drive is your production environment.

A practical consequence: if you’re paying for recovery (your systems are down, you’re hemorrhaging money), you pay faster and you pay more. If you’re paying for suppression (they didn’t encrypt anything, they just exfiltrated data and are threatening to leak), you can drag it out for a bigger discount. Which is exactly what we just watched happen with Canvas — Instructure ultimately paid for suppression and “shred logs,” not recovery.

The Black Basta “I had COVID” story

The single best war story of the talk involved Black Basta about a year and a half ago. The Black Basta victim portal, Matt said with what sounded like genuine professional admiration, is gorgeous. Looks like iMessage. Read receipts. Tight UX. “I wanted to send a meme. It doesn’t support that. The first ransomware group that allows GIFs [in their chats] is gonna be a work of art.”

But at the top of the portal: a countdown timer. Six days, twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes, fifty-eight seconds. Tick.

Matt was working a real case, was actually going to pay, and needed to stall. So he asked for more time. They gave him seven days. He asked again the following week. Seven more days. He was feeling pretty pleased with himself when, on the Friday of week three, they finally said: no more extensions. Pay or else.

Then Matt got on a flight home from Denver to King of Prussia, PA (which, as he pointed out, sounds like a Batman villain, as does his other hometown, Wayne, and look, I lived in Wayne; I can confirm it sounds exactly like the kind of place Bruce Wayne would buy a second house). He proceeded to get deathbed sick. Lost an entire weekend. Woke up Monday morning with roughly forty hours left on the clock and a portal full of increasingly unhinged messages from his criminal counterparts: “Are you there? Hello! I’m serious. Don’t make me do what I’m going to do.”

Matt typed back: “Really sorry, I got super sick. I think I had COVID.”

They gave him seven more days.

Matt’s rules of engagement (lightly paraphrased and worth tattooing somewhere)

He’s a flat-fee operator. Never a percentage of savings — because at that point you’re not a negotiator, you’re a co-conspirator with a conflict of interest. (The two negotiators who got federally indicted for actively colluding with ALPHV BlackCat are the cautionary tale he doesn’t want to become.)

He will lie to criminals with abandon, but he won’t lie to clients.

He won’t negotiate in bad faith. If you tell him “just stall, we’re never paying a dime,” he walks. Because he’s seen what happens when threat actors realize they’ve been strung along. He told a story about a client that changed their mind at the last minute after a long negotiation. The group responded by publishing pediatric patients’ Social Security numbers on Facebook. One. At. A. Time, in a slow, painful, drip campaign.

He does not hack back. He has heard of illicit activities waivers. They take two to three years to get and they are not a Get Out of Jail Free card. They are, at best, a “you probably won’t go to jail” card.

He does not facilitate the actual payment, because (a) money laundering, (b) OFAC compliance is a specialty unto itself, and (c) the two payment-facilitation firms have current data on which Bitcoin addresses and chat fingerprints map to which sanctioned entities. He just does the talking.

The four things he wants from every threat actor

When Matt’s at the table, he is always asking for the same four things:

1. The decryption key. Of course.
2. Proof of deletion. Typically a screenshot, ideally a video. He has an eight-hour video of someone DoD-wiping a drive somewhere in his archive.
3. How they got in. No guarantees on how honest they’ll be; sometimes ransomeware operators will literally copy-paste from a different victim’s report. Matt and another negotiator once compared notes and got the exact same “you had a Fortinet firewall” attribution for clients who, respectively, ran Meraki and Cisco.
4. A promise to never do it again. Worth roughly what you’d expect, but worth getting in writing.

If he can get those four, he’s done his job.

Q&A

The Q&A ran long. A few highlights:

Where do ransomware group names come from? Matt blames CrowdStrike. Honestly, fair. “Every cool t-shirt you’ve ever gotten from Black Hat came from the CrowdStrike booth.” I jumped in to point out that Qilin (pronounced “CHEE-lin”) is a Chinese mythological creature usually translated as “unicorn” or, more delightfully, “magic giraffe.”

Is ransomware seasonal? Absolutely. American holidays, especially Thanksgiving, are target-rich, because skeleton crews and four-day weekends mean defenders are slow to respond. Attackers also take vacations themselves. Ransomware drops off in the summer months. Because who wants to be at their computer when the weather’s nice? Even criminals deserve a beach day.

Are you ever personally targeted? Matt’s whole career is built around not announcing himself as a negotiator on the live chat. He plays the dumb IT guy. He’s got a story about a colleague suggesting they ask the threat actor what a “botcoin” is (after one of them mistyped “Bitcoin” in a chat), and the threat actors spent two days patiently explaining cryptocurrency to him. “Best time stall ever.”

What about emotional toll? Matt has been a paramedic, a cop, and a firefighter. “I don’t know of a crisis I haven’t run head-first into. It’s a programming defect from up top.” Then: “Better living through pharmacology. Oh God, don’t call my therapist.”

What industries get hit hardest? Manufacturing. Not necessarily the most often, but the hardest, because of legacy systems. He told a story about a Pennsylvania university that literally cemented a Novell NetWare box into a basement wall during construction because it was running directory services and they didn’t want to unplug it. It’s been running since the ’80s. It’s still there.

Why I’m writing this up

Two reasons.

One: BSides Tampa is a regional con and the speaker quality this year was outstanding. Matt’s talk in particular deserves a wider audience than the room it ran in. It could’ve been a keynote.

Two: I spend most of my professional life right now thinking about zero trust and AI-plus-network-security at NetFoundry, and what Matt’s talk drove home (better than any threat report I’ve seen lately) is that the human layer of incident response is where most of the leverage is. You can do everything technically right at the perimeter and still lose a six-figure negotiation because somebody on your team panicked, told the truth at the wrong moment, or said the magic words that flipped a transactional extortion into a personal vendetta. Zero trust as a philosophy (not just a product category) is partly about acknowledging that humans will always be the soft target, and designing accordingly.

Also: I am now permanently delighted by the idea that every ransomware negotiator on the planet should adopt the alias “Matt” so that threat actor groups go forever convinced that U.S. companies are staffed by an army of identically-named slow-witted staff who don’t know what Bitcoin is. Matt, if you read this, I’m in. Sign me up.

Big thanks to Matt Barnett and SEVN-X for an outstanding session, and to the BSides Tampa crew for putting on one of the best regional security cons in the Southeast!

The post Notes from BSides Tampa 13: “Dealing with Shadows” or “A day in the life of a threat actor negotiator” appeared first on Global Nerdy.

The reason poweredUP Tampa Bay Tech Fest led to those jobs is because a lot of tech industry people here in “The Other Bay Area” also attend. If you’re looking to meet technology leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and students, they’re at poweredUP, and they make it an opportunity-rich environment.

They’re mixing up their usual formula this year with a new format whose aim is to give attendees both the big-picture view of where technology is heading in Tampa Bay and the practical knowledge they can take back to their teams.

Here’s what’s on the agenda:

• Job Seeker Hiring Event with High Tech Connect
  This will start at 10:30 (a little earlier than the rest of the conference) and it’s your chance to see who’s hiring and who’s looking! Bring your resume and your A-game.
• The State of Tech – Tampa Bay
  They’ll kick off the day with a forward-looking conversation about how technology (and especially AI) is shaping Tampa Bay’s economy, workforce, and innovation ecosystem. They’ll have regional leaders, founders, and industry experts talk about the momentum building across our tech community and what it means for the future of our region.
• Networking + Exploring Geek Row
  My favorite part! It’s happens in the part of the Mahaffey with the big windows and the view of the Bay, where you can connect with fellow attendees, meet innovative companies, and explore the Geek Row exhibitor area, where you can see what the local tech companies and orgs are up to.
• Technical Keynote + Deep-Dive Sessions
  In the afternoon, poweredUP shifts into technical programming, featuring an inspiring keynote and multiple tech tracks focused on real-world implementation and best practices across today’s most important technologies.
• More Networking + Happy Hour
  Wind down and reflect on the day’s insights with fellow attendees at our celebratory happy hour. Enjoy two complimentary drink tickets (21+) and build lasting connections in a relaxed setting.

Over the years, poweredUP has become a cornerstone event for Tampa Bay’s tech community, bringing people together to learn, collaborate, and spark new ideas about what’s next.

And I’ve said before, it’s led to some very nice outcomes for me. Go on May 20 and be part of the conversation shaping the future of technology in Tampa Bay!

Here’s where you can register for poweredUP Tampa Bay Tech Fest.

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There are plenty of reasons to attend BSides Tampa, a cybersecurity conference that brings in 2,000+ attendees, including…

• Great keynotes and presentations across seven tracks: keynotes, red team, blue team, cloud security, GRC and privacy, appsec, and AI and emerging
• The exhibitor hall, where they don’t scan your badge, which means that you won’t get spammed as a result and they won’t sell your info
• Interactive villages: malware, social engineering, IOT, network, lockpicking
• A chance to meet the technology and cybersecurity professionals in the area, including these two…
  

But the most compelling reason I can think of to go is…

Let me repeat that:

80 percent of success is just showing up.

Let me illustrate with a story. Last May, techie-about-town Ammar Yusuf said he could hook me up with a free ticket to VueConf, which was taking place right here in Tampa.

I’d just come back from an expensive two-week trip, and I was still operating as an independent consultant. The spring and summer of 2025 were pretty slow; the well of clients was running dry.

I was strongly tempted to turn down the free ticket so I could devote more time and energy to finding my next job or client. Some might argue that it would be the smart thing to do.

But I decided to take the free ticket and go to VueConf instead, because I remembered all those times when showing up led to great things. Again, I remind you:

At VueConf, I met one of the organizers, Pratik Patel. When he came here in February, I decided to say hi and attend the Java User Group meetup where he gave a talk about AI architecture, pictured below:

I ended up chatting with Pratik, who then offered both me and Anitra free tickets to the Dev/Nexus conference in Atlanta that would take place a couple of weeks later. It was short notice, and Atlanta’s a 7+ hour drive from Tampa. But we remembered the rule:

So we went, learned a lot, and had a great time:

And while we were at Dev/Nexus, I ran into Pratik, who was walking the exhibitor floor with Venkat Subramaniam, who knows me because I show up to his talks whenever he comes to town.

Here’s the “Bollywood Buddy Movie Poster” photo taken at the meetup where I met Venkat:

When I ran into Pratik and Venkat at Dev/Nexus, Pratik suggested to Venkat that I speak at the Arc of AI conference that would take place the following month. Venkat thought that would be a good idea, and asked me to submit a couple of talk proposals. So I did, even though I was knee-deep in contract work and a job search, because…

My submissions got accepted, and the result was my talk about writing documentation and example code for consumption by AI agents:

…and I met a lot of people:

And here’s the kicker: not only did I get to meet new people and attend (and speak) at conferences, but all this helped me land my current job at NetFoundry. The fact that I’d managed to land a speaker gig at Arc of AI was a key point in my job interviews. And I wouldn’t have the key point for that interview if…

• I didn’t speak at Arc of AI, which wouldn’t have happened if
• I didn’t apply to speak at Arc of AI, which wouldn’t have happened if
• I didn’t go to Dev/Nexus, which wouldn’t have happened if
• I didn’t go to Pratik’s talk at the Tampa Java User Group meetup, which wouldn’t have happened if
•  I didn’t go to VueConf with the free ticket Ammar gave me.

The lesson here is simple:

So if you don’t have prior commitments and you can afford to do so and you’re in a tech/tech-adjacent/cybersecurity/cybersecurity-adjacent field — and especially if you’re looking for work — consider going to BSides Tampa tomorrow, because you know what showing up can do for you!

Once again, ticket prices are:

• $45 for general admission
• $30 for students and military

…and you can save 20% by using Tampa Devs’ discount code, TampaDevs20_BSIDESTAMPA_2026.

The post Go to BSides Tampa, because 80% of success is showing up appeared first on Global Nerdy.

This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:

When the event will take place

What the event is

Where the event will take place

Who is holding the event

This week’s events

• Monday, May 18
• Tuesday, May 19
• Wednesday, May 20
• Thursday, May 21
• Friday, May 22
• Saturday, May 23
• Sunday, May 24

Monday, May 18

Tuesday, May 19

Wednesday, May 20

Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Duke Energy Center for the Arts – Mahaffey Theater (St. Pete): poweredUP Tampa Bay Tech Fest returns! It’s one of the largest technology conferences in the Tampa Bay region and brings together hundreds of technology leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and students for a full day of learning, insight, and connection.

This year, they’re going with a new format designed to give attendees both the big-picture view of where technology is heading in our region and the practical knowledge they can take back to their teams.

Find out more and register here.

Wednesday at 6 p.m. at Embarc Collective (Tampa): Clarky AI presents an AI-focused happy hour bringing together developers, founders, business owners, AI companies, and enthusiasts. Tickets are $30, and the price includes two drink tickets.

Find out more and register here.

Thursday, May 21

Thursday at 6:00 p.m. at Entrepreneur Collaborative Center (Tampa): Tampa Bay AWS User Group presents Automating AWS Cost Reduction with Open Source + n8n + AI!

Join Sam Kasimalla (Enterprise Architect, ex-AWS engineer) and Rohith Kandi (Cloud Engineer) for an exclusive session on building actionable checklists to reduce your AWS costs. Sam will demo his open-source AWS scanning script (Apache 2.0 licensed, safe to run with a minimum read-only IAM policy) which audits every facet of your AWS environment and outputs a prioritized action list. This is brand new content, not available on YouTube or anywhere else.

You’ll learn how to leverage native AWS billing tools and where third-party applications fill the gaps, with hands-on coverage of Conquerors AWS Cost Auditor, Cloud Custodian, Komiser, and Infracost. Sam and Rohith will also show how to wire these tools together using n8n and AI to automate workflows like generating Jira tickets, or tickets in your system of choice.

Find out more and register here.

Friday, May 22

Saturday, May 23

Sunday, May 24

About this list

How do I put this list together?

It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.

In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.

What goes into this list?

I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:

• • Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
  • Tech project management / agile processes
  • Video, board, and role-playing games
  • Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
  • Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
  • Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
  • Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms

• Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
• Anything I deem geeky

The post Tampa Bay tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events list (Monday, May 18 – Sunday, May 24) appeared first on Global Nerdy.

Is you career safe in the age of AI?

That’s what we’ll discuss in a panel called AI Is Stealing Your Job — What can you do about it ? A Gen Alpha Perspective.

I don’t need to tell you that AI’s already replacing jobs (or at least being used as an excuse), reshaping industries, and rewriting the rules of the workforce and the ways we work. Wouldn’t it be nice to get some perspective?

Join us this Tuesday! On the panel will be:

• Sam Kasimalla as the host. You’ll know him from all sorts of local events, including Tampa Java User Group. He wears many hats, including IT business owner, ex-FAANG engineer, and Board of Director MATA.
• Dakshesh Kaki will provide the Gen Alpha perspective. He’s a TED Talk speaker, multiple FBLA award winner recognized by the CEO of Publix, and he’ll bring his generational lens to the future of work.
• Your Truly will be the Gen X representative.

Each of us has their own take and tactics for the era of AI. Come watch this online show and learn!

Find out more and register here.

The post “AI Is Stealing Your Job”: An online panel happening this Tuesday, May 12 at 8 p.m. appeared first on Global Nerdy.