Paying it forward for the community
TL;DR I donated my ticket for JSConf Colombia scholarship. I’m thankful of the community that helped me get started in my job, my side project, and public speaking. I hope I can help bring more people into the community.
Earlier this summer, I planned a trip to Medellin, Colombia to attend JSConf Colombia. My friends told me it is a beautiful city and JSConf Colombia is one of the conference not to be missed.
I was also very excited how affordable conference ticket was ($99 for early bird ticket). Even though I am making international trip from New York to Colombia, it fit in my personal conference budget.
Making personal budget for community conference
Many tech company in U.S. has educational stipend for developers to attend conferences and trainings. I have worked in one of those company before, and I’m grateful I g0t to go to OpenVis Conf this year with that.
Middle of this year, I changed my job and joined small team of 4. This meant no more education stipend but I got a little bit of salary raise. (I got so much more than money by joining this team but that’s other blog post!)
One thing I wanted to do with extra $ was to make a point to go to community conferences. Community conferences are amazing. You should go to one if you haven’t already. You will make long time friends and get to meet people who made things you use everyday. Good conference leave you with full of inspiration for your next project and network of people you can turn to with questions.
If you are developer of JavaScript kind, there are so many wonderful conferences organized around the world, but I particularly wanted to go to JSConf Colombia.
Why JSConf Colombia
Last year, Juan Pablo Buritica, one of the organizer of JSConf Colombia, spoke at QueensJS how him and his co-organizers are building developer community in Colombia, state of becoming an engineer in non-western country, and experience of their community members learning to code when English is not your first language (Which I care a lot from my personal experience). I am based in U.S. and I rarely get to hangout with people like me who learn to code while also struggle to understand English instructions. I wanted to go meet them as well as support my friends like Juan and Catherine who make these events happen. (They’ve also co-orgnized conference in NYC called EmpireJS and EmpireNode which was my first experience of speaking and attending community conference.)
Community Conferences helped me A LOT
One other great aspect of community conference is support you get from speaking at theses events.
This spring, I got chance to speak about my little experiments of using JavaScript to knit at EmpireJS and JSconf in Florida. I met alot of pepole and discussed my knitting project as well as my interest in making welcoming environment for non-native English speakers. With lots of encouragement & recommendation from those I met at conferences, I started getting invitation to speak at more places. This fall, I am speaking at 5 conferences. Every time I travel to new places, I meet more people who then helped me move further with my project.
For my project, within 4 months, I moved from just hacking on floppy disk emulator for my knitting machine to making punch card computer & developing domain specific language for knitting. For my career, I got new job without any resume or cover letter. (I was told “We knew what you are doing, your conference talk was your cover letter” .)
More people should experience what I gained from the community!
Unfortunately, traveling to 5 different places in U.S, Europe, and Asia meant I had to cancel my JSConf Colombia trip. I could’ve easily sell or give away my ticket. But I wanted my ticket to be used by locals so more newcomers can experience what community conference is like. I also wanted to make sure accommodations are covered for those attending. In my experience, finding budget hotel or airbnb to stay during my travel is more headache than getting conference ticket. I had already budgeted out hotel stay in Medellin on my book so I decided to donate that money as well.
Later I heard from Catherine that they managed to fit both travel & accommodation for one local attendee which must took them so much coordination and negotiation effort. Props to them !
I can not express enough how much support I got from this community (both financial support to fly me to speak and technical support & cheer on my project progress). So this is my very small act of paying it forward for others coming to this community.
I plan to travel and attend more conferences next year, it really is great experience. If time is tough, I may apply for scholarship (who knows what’s gonna happen next year), but I’ll try hard to go to these events, and I’ll support in anyway I can to bring more people to community conference.
Here is a list of Community Conferences I admire !
- RejectJS
- EmpireJS
- EmpireNode
- TXJS
- CascadiaFest
- JSConf family (JSConf, JSConf EU, JSConf Asia, JSConf Colombia and many many more!)
- Open Source &Feelings
