Let’s write an app that tells you if Publix subs are on sale!

It’s the return of the former Tampa iOS Meetup / Programmers of Portables meetup, under its new name and mission: Think Like a Coder!

Think Like a Coder! takes the same approach as the previous meetups: We start with an idea for an app, and then attempt to write that app. Along the way, we cover the techniques and tools necessary for writing the app.

The difference between Think Like a Coder! and the meetups that came before it — Tampa iOS Meetup and Programmers of Portables — is that we‘re not limited to any specific platform. From the web to the desktop to mobile to IoT, we’ll trying writing programs for all sorts of platforms!

Our mission is to help you make the leap from knowing how to program to knowing how to WRITE programs. This is a skill you can master, and you do so by learning to think like a coder! In this meetup, we’ll work together toward that goal, and sharpen our collective skills along the way.

We’ll start with online meetups until the COVID-19 numbers drop further, and then we’ll see about going in-person.

Here’s what this meetup will be about:

The perfect answer to “Tell me you live in Florida without saying you live in Florida” is the question “Are Publix chicken tender subs on sale?”

It’s fairly easy for you, a human, to find out if they’re on sale. But what about a program?

In this session, we’ll look at writing programs that can read the contents and source code of web pages and then perform actions based on them. This is called “scraping”, and it has all sorts of uses — including finding out if Publix chicken tender subs are on sale.

We’ll work together in JavaScript and Python in a “code along with me” fashion to build applications that will check a known reliable source of “Pub Sub” information and answer the question: “Are Publix chicken tender subs on sale?”