We’re two weeks into 2024, but Happy New Year, anyway. I had some things that I wanted to write about last month, but I couldn’t. For some reason, WordPress suspended my coding blog in December. There was a link to a message in my dashboard that was supposed to have details, but it just took me to their terms of service with no indication of what the breach was. I appealed it when I saw it and finally, a few days ago, I found that the site was available to be viewed again. There was no follow-up message to explain what the root of the issue was and no message to let me know when the site was restored, so I don’t know how to prevent it from happening again.

Moving on from that though, I’ve been networking and going to meetups and events whenever I can. It’s been a lot of fun meeting people and learning about what brought them to coding or tech in general. Here are some updates:

Learn Teach Code

I’ve been attending the Learn Teach Code meetups in Koreatown when I can. Since the first time that I went in November last year, I’ve been there 5 times. The first one was at Anju House, a Korean restaurant, but all of the subsequent ones have been at Cafe Loft, which is their usual location. Anju House was their alternate when Cafe Loft was being renovated. I’ve also been more active on their Discord server. It’s a good way to keep in touch with people who I’ve met there while not at the meetups.

Last week (Jan 11th) was their 2nd session for the new year. I missed the first one (Jan 4th) because I was with family, and apparently there was a huge turnout. They filled the room that they usually reserve and had to send more people upstairs. There were around 30 attendees. Last week’s session had about a dozen people. A few were first-timers and had interesting backgrounds. I spoke with one for a while about his interest in augmented reality. He’s currently doing back-end work in Go and is learning Rust. There was another who was interested in bootcamps. I can’t remember which one he’s enrolled in – it might have been Hack Reactor. I told him about my experience at Lambda (now Bloom Institute of Technology) and we talked about 100Devs since I went through their Huntober event (which lasted until Christmas). He and another person who I hadn’t met before had questions about the experience and curriculum. I also let them know about Resilient Coders, which is the bootcamp that Leon from 100Devs teaches at professionally. A lot of Resilient Coders material makes it’s way into 100Devs and some RC staff assist at 100Devs with career advisement.

Tech Forum: Rancho Cucamonga

Last weekend (Jan 6th), I also attended a tech meetup in Rancho Cucamonga called (appropriately enough) Tech Forum: Rancho Cucamonga. It was different from Learn Teach Code in that LTC is programmer-centric and this was broader because it was “tech”. There was a guest speaker and attendees included people from different disciplines – programmers, designers, different flavors of engineers, business owners and others. The designers weren’t necessarily web designers or application designers either – some of them designed in the real world.

Some of the attendees operate web and software development companies. One of them is a director at Stack Overflow. The speaker has a background in industrial and product design and has designed products for large companies like Gilette, including products that generated billions of dollars for them. Two of the attendees were a pair of women who owned a company that consulted to other firms around some kind of information design. Some of the engineers also programmed the devices that they designed – they built a lot of hardware including working with circuit boards and the like and had been doing it since the 70s and 80s. They’re like the Steve Wozniak generation.

Tech Forum met in a co-working space called FoundrSpace. It was my first time at one of these places and I was impressed with the environment. There were desks centralized in the main room that were wide enough for people to have personal space yet still converse with each other if desired. There’s coffee available from one of the local companies from Rancho who have apparently grown to a size that they ship internationally now. There was free beer on tap, and the coffee company and co-working space paid for breakfast which included an assortment of hot sandwiches, donuts and yogurts. One of the sponsors was the host’s application development company.

Unlike the more casual Learn Teach Code meetups, TechForumRC has a speaker and theme at every session. This was their 4th session and the theme was about design thinking. I believe the three previous sessions focused on different aspects of AI. The speaker’s name was Craig Provost. He’s an industrial & product designer who also teaches about “Design Thinking, Live Facilitation, Design Strategy, Customer/User Research, Industrial Design, Branding/Messaging, Creativity Workshops, and Graphic Recording”. I wasn’t familiar with the term design thinking before, but I’ve applied some of it’s principles when working at the EMR that made up the bulk of my career.

Craig’s session was engaging and geared towards getting a feel for the attendees’ accomplishments and misses from the past year and their goals for the new one. He polled the audience via questions that were answered with raised hands and asked questions that were answered on sticky notes which were collected onto larger sheets so that we could see the collected thoughts and use them for conversation and networking with each other. Some of the polls included asking about tools that attendees had used for communication during the past year, their goals for the new year, what new technologies had made an impact on their lives over the past year, any skills or technologies that they planned on learning during this year, activities that they planned on engaging in during the new year and predictions (challenges and opportunities) for 2024.

I spoke with a few people after the main session and had some interesting conversations about user interfaces, hardware design, the job hunt, working with non-profits, programming and a few other things. The interface discussion was really interesting. There were initially two people who brought up different things, one was about the next evolution of user interfaces, which he was very interested in, and the other was about AI. I remember him saying that he didn’t think that the next interface would be as radical as reducing dashboards down to a single prompt for input, which is similar to how we currently interact with technologies like ChatGPT, and I explained the concept of the PAN (personal area network) to him. It’s something I first read about about 20 years ago: a network that follows the individual and syncs that person’s devices and data to the individual. Right now, smartphones might be the closest representation of what it might contain. I thought that it could be combined with AI and dashboards to result in a richer UI of sorts, and he was interested in moving away from screens, which dovetailed the ideas.

I plan on going to more of these meetups, as the attendee base is very different from the programmer ones and brings really interesting ideas and perspectives with it.

Google DevFest

Last month (Dec 15th), I went to Google DevFest in West Hollywood (Plummer Park). It’s essentially a conference sponsored by Google that’s similar in makeup to the event I went to in Rancho. The scale is a bit larger, with more attendees and speakers though. There were two areas with different tracks, one for students and one for professionals. Each track hosted a set of presenters who spoke about different topics. I went to the room that hosted the pro track.

I met up with a few people who attend the Learn Teach Code meetups in Koreatown – but I didn’t know they’d be there initially. I also met up with a friend from 100Devs who I’d been speaking with on Discord and who I subsequently introduced to the LTC people here and who then joined me at LTC meetups after and at the Tech Forum: Rancho Cucamonga meetup. This was his first event and our first time meeting each other. We’ve attended a few networking events together since then.

This was the pro track:

• Integrating Visual Communication & Storytelling by Vaishnavi Venkata Subramanian
• Build Your Own GenAI Model by Vikram Tiwari
• 3 Habits to Supercharge Your Career Growth by ​​Michelle Brenner
• Insights from Women in AI
  • Panelists:
    • Aishwarya Dev, Women Techmakers Ambassador
    • Erica Chuong, Customer Engineer, AI/ML, Google
    • Sophia Orlando, Solutions Engineer, GitHub
    • Isabel Tewes, Senior Product Manager, Google
  • Moderator:
    • Emily Anderson

And this was the student track:

• Adventures through LLMs: Tracing Origins & Charting a Safe Future by ChengCheng Tan
• BigQuery Studio and BigFrames: Unlocking the Power of Scalable Data Science by Jeff Nelson
• LeetCode Interview Session by Bryan Bergo
• Run Your Web App on Google Cloud by Martin & Sequoia Omander
• Upping Your LinkedIn Game by Matt Kaufman

Due to some scheduling issues, I ended up arriving a little after the conference began, so I missed the presentation on “Integrating Visual Communication & Storytelling”. I saw about half of the “Build Your Own GenAI Model” presentation and then sat for “3 Habits to Supercharge Your Career Growth” by Michelle Brenner, who I chatted with for a few minutes when her presentation was over. I had previously heard her speak a little at an online meetup that I attended earlier in the month that was co-hosted by Learn Teach Code LA and Women Who Code LA, so I was interested in seeing her live. I didn’t get to go to her breakout room during the online event because there were a lot of speakers in different rooms at the same time and I had started in another room and remained there for a very long time, but I’m attending again when they have another session this month, so maybe I’ll get to hear her speak in more depth at that.

Both Google DevFest and the collaborative online meetup between LTC and WWC used a structure in which speakers presented at the same time in different areas. I’ve found that I prefer a different format in which only one presentation happens at a time because I want to see all of the speakers and find myself missing out. In that regard, l like the meetup in Rancho which brings speakers up one at a time for the entire audience. They’re all beneficial though.

Virtual Monthly Mentorship Mixer (Learn Teach Code & Women Who Code LA)

As mentioned in the previous section, a few days before Google DevFest (Dec 12th) I attended an online collaborative event between Learn Teach Code and Women Who Code LA. It’s apparently a monthly event hosted on Zoom. There are a lot of speakers who each have their own breakout room and attendees are free to join any that they’re interested in and jump from room-to-room. This is the event in which I came across Michelle Brenner, who I later saw and spoke with at DevFest.

The mentorship mixer focuses on smaller groups with more direct conversation with mentors in different areas in tech. A lot of it is career-focused, which really appealed to me as I’m currently on the job hunt. It’s beginner-friendly as well. This session’s list of mentors and topics included the following:

• Michelle Brenner (Senior Software Engineer) – Career advice, conference speaking, Netflix
• Skawn Koski (Frontend Developer) – JavaScript, React, CSS questions, job search and resume advice
• Wai-Yin Kwan (Software Engineer) – Changing careers from a non-tech background, bootcamps vs. self-learning, tech careers in non-tech-bro world, diversity in tech
• Lydia Yeung (Senior Recruiter) – Recruiting Q&A, resume review, interviewing, offers, etc.
• Liz Krane (Software Developer – and founder of LTC) – Self-taught career changing, JavaScript, functional languages, meetups, networking, public speaking, burnout, neurodiversity
• Keri Medeiros (Support Engineer) – Working at a startup vs. big tech, changing careers from a non-tech background, support engineering, ecommerce, remote work, networking remotely
• Jenny Spadoni (Software Engineer) – Bootcamps vs. self-taught developer paths, big tech apprenticeships, imposter syndrome, soft skills
• CJ (Software Engineer) – Transition into tech, motivation, DEI, startups, FAANG interview preparation
• EAN (Senior Software Engineer) – Game development, self-taught vs. bootcamp vs. academia tradeoffs and approaches
• Andy LoPresto (VP of Security) – Interviewing, hiring, startups vs. big tech, managing teams, open source software, security

There were also some backup mentors who moved about into different rooms:

• Stephen Kwok (Bioinformatician and Data Scientist) – Data science, data analytics, AI/ML, bioinformatics, working in biotech, transitioning from academia to industry
• Gary Cheung (Software Engineer) – DevOps, prompt engineering, work-life balance, working as a new parent, remote work, becoming a high-performer, financial health, mental health, industry certifications, education and degrees
• Ramiro Herrera (Software Engineer, Senior Java Developer) – Working at enterprise companies, career advice
• Nicole Chow (Senior Software Engineer) – her topics weren’t listed

There were a little more than 40 people at this event. After introductions, people broke out into smaller groups in breakout rooms. I was in Shawn Koski‘s room for the bulk of the session because he spoke about the job hunt and resumes and had JavaScript, React and CSS listed, which are key technologies that I make use of. I had originally intended to move from room-to-room and network as well as get an idea of what each speaker was sharing, but instead, I found myself in deeper conversations with Shawn and the other people in the room. Some people did leave the room to explore others, and new people joined this one, so there was a dynamic mix of people the majority of the time. I had wanted to go to every room though because all of them spoke about career topics that interested me. I’ll see what happens next time, but I imagine that something similar will occur.

I did network a bit and connect with a few people from this event on LinkedIn. Some of them have had lengthy conversations with me about their job search, their backgrounds and general career advice. I enjoy it, but over time it does turn into a large time investment, especially when speaking with multiple people. It’s fun though, and also provides some benefits to mental health. It’s reassuring to be able to speak with people who are in similar situations and have similar experiences to me in tech.

Online Meetups and Networking

It’s interesting to me how bits of one event can bleed into another. When I attended the collaborative Virtual Monthly Mentorship Mixer between Learn Teach Code and Women Who Code LA, I came across Michelle Brenner, who I then met at Google DevFest. The 100Devs Discord put me in touch with a person who lives in Corona, which is close by to where I am. I chatted with him for a week or two and found that he’s also in Learn Teach Code but had never attended a meetup. So, I invited him to meet at Google DevFest, which we did, and then I ran into other members of Learn Teach Code there and introduced him to them. He stayed and spoke with them when I left to get my kids. We’ve done a bit of collaborative coding since and shared resources – including his referring me to someone who interviewed me for an ecommerce position. He and I then met at the event in Rancho Cucamonga.

At last week’s Learn Teach Code meetup, when I spoke to one of the new people about augmented reality, I brought up the user interface conversation that I’d had at Rancho. It struck me that augmented reality could be combined with personal area networks, dashboards and AI to combine into exactly what the person who I spoke with at Rancho was looking for. I mean to bring that up to him if I see him at the next meetup. The cross-pollination of ideas really appeals to me at these venues.

I’m also finding that networking has a huge impact on the job hunt, which is something that I’ll probably talk about a little in another post. This one has grown too long to tack on more material already. But, in a nutshell, speaking to people online and then meeting them IRL, having commonalities with them and helping them when I can has opened doors that I wouldn’t otherwise have had access to. I’m in the midst of preparing for another interview this week due to reaching out and speaking with another person. There’s this idea that programmers are introverts and night owls who stay up in the dark and only come alive behind computer screens when they’re staring at arcane lines of code and coaxing indecipherable responses out of their machines. I’ve found that this really isn’t the case, and that there’s such a breadth of variety in what brings people to tech (and coding) and what their skills and experiences are from their past lives in other fields. It’s fun that there are people who skew a little closer to the “hacker” stereotype that proliferates in media, too, though.