The importance of building community in tech
This past week I had the incredible opportunity of speaking at the United Nations on behalf of my company, Agolo. The experience made me reflect on how I came to be here and the people that helped make it possible. The theme that kept coming up in my mind was community.
The event I spoke at is called Meteor Camp, and is part of an initiative by the UN to support open source software. Meteor is a full-stack JavaScript framework, which we use at Agolo. My introduction to Meteor came about through a local meetup in New York City — Meteor NY — about one year ago.
I have to say that if it weren’t for the support of this meetup and its organizers (Alim S. Gafar, I’m looking at you), I wouldn’t be where I am today.
After graduating from a coding bootcamp a year ago, I had zero real-world experience as a developer. Around this time, when I came to my first MeteorNY meetup, I was bombarded by confusing terms such as DDP and struggled to understand how Meteor worked. Fortunately, a few of the meetup members were happy to help show me the ropes. One of them took me aside and helped me build my first “Hello World” app.
I realize that this must’ve taken a lot of patience. I know that many developers who attend tech meetups are only interested in discussing advanced topics related to their technology. Because of this, sometimes newbies feel alienated or shut out.
I never felt like that at the MeteorNY meetup. One month after my introduction, I had learned Meteor and built some simple apps. Two months after and I was a lightning talk presenter (something that got me a lot of job offers, including my current one).
As an organizer for the React Native NYC meetup, I have tried to take some of these lessons and apply them there as well. I try to make sure that we actively engage every new member and understand what they hope to get out of it. I try to make sure that newcomers don’t feel shut out by the confusing terminology and tech elitism.
Of course, this isn’t always easy. The world of JavaScript is as vast as an ocean and there are plenty of things to be confused about! But I will say that the best presentations I have seen are real stories of people who learn a new technology and build something meaningful.
At our last meetup, Brian Polonia demoed an application he had been working on over a few months. It was an iOS app that notifies you when you perform a squat correctly. Brian was able to hook his app into the gyroscope functionality of the iPhone in order to get this to work. Two months prior to his presentation, Brian was a first-time attendee of our meetup and was just getting acquainted with React Native and web development in general. This was truly an amazing story.
There need to be more stories like mine and Brian’s. There needs to be more inclusivity in tech and in tech meetups. We should stop shutting people out of the conversation just because they don’t understand the latest build tools or flavors of data management. We can explore the edges of technology while also creating a welcoming environment for newbies. The two need not be mutually exclusive.
Next time you’re at a tech meetup, make an effort to get to know new members. If someone doesn’t understand a technical concept or isn’t aware of a particular library, be the one to introduce them. They will be grateful that you did. And you might just find that breaking down concepts and helping people understand them helps you to understand them more deeply too.
Follow @tomgoldenberg on Twitter.
Author of mobile development tutorial Build React Native.
