March Meetup Madness in #Melbourne
A roundup of Meetups in Melbourne in March
Hi! 👋 I’m a Junior Dev over at Xero accounting app, and I’m a regular meetup attendee! March was particularly crazy! I attended 9 meetups, three of which I organised, one which I mentored at and everyone where I learnt something!
This is my first Meetup RoundUp I’ve written, but I decided I wanted to keep track of all the cool things going on and hopefully inspire others to get out in their local community!
Presented in chronological order because ranking them any other way would be insanely impossible! Expect for maybe by food quality hahaha 🌮
MelbCSS
Meetup.com Link 🌮🌮🌮
The CSS Meetup is always fun. It’s at the pretty hip warehouse office of 99designs in Melbourne, Australia, and they always have the best food (burritos) and good selection of drinks. Most importantly they have great speakers. This month was no different, with Michael Taranto, a UI Craftsman at SEEK talking about “Teaching CSS to talk like a designer”
Michael has implemented a way of talking about CSS that is universal between designers and developers. No more “one pixel to the left” kind of back and forth happening here. He described it as a “ubiquitous design language” and it’s a concept that had never ever crossed my mind, but as soon as I heard it, I ❤ it!
You can actually watch the entire thing on YouTube and Follow Michael on Twitter.
The night was capped of by a cool recap of all the awesome things happening in Melbourne, and followed by some good chat and networking. I was personally inspired from a discussion with Mark Dalgleish, about reflecting on the past, and that features in an upcoming meetup later in this post!
Internationals Womens Day: Be Bold For Change with Xero and Junior Dev
This was one of the highlights for me, and it sounds conceited as fuck as I co-organised it, ahaha, but I wasn’t a speaker! I co-run a community called Junior Dev with Luke Mesiti and we approached our work Xero about collaborating in an event for International Women’s Day. It was really important for me and Luke to highlight awesome developers on the night, and we didn’t have to go far to find five incredible female developers in Melbourne.
They all told their stories, broke down the stereotype of what a “developer” has to be, and inspired the crowd. Sharon Chen, Christie Metson, Jenny Tran, Melissa Kaulfuss and Sue King all told their unique and authentic tales. There was laughs, there was feelings of empathy when hearing about the lows, but everyone came away inspired.
FreeCodeCamp Melbourne Study Group
This is another one that I organise, 💁 and it’s always good to catch up with the freeCodeCamp community! It’s an informal study group, but we encourage attendees to do Lightning Talks and talk and help each other out! We run it every two weeks, so it’s pretty regular and low key. I am continually inspired by the FreeCodeCampers that are self-teaching themselves code.
Code and Tell
I swear this isn’t meant to be the “LJ Show” but this was another meetup that I co-organised with Luke for Junior Dev! It’s a “hack night” for Junior Developers, but we decided to put a spin on it and have people also give a “Show and Tell” style opportunity at the beginning. Only five or so minutes, it’s a time to show off something cool they have worked on. We had Patrick Smith kick it off, who showed us that really cool libraries where you can build static websites from Trello boards! Want to add another item to your portfolio, with pictures and all? Add another Trello card! Using React and some other cool tech, it was pretty interesting!
We then heard from a self taught programmer Alexander Garber who used Code Kata’s to teach himself Ruby and had one of the most organised home whiteboard set ups I’ve ever seen! You can read about him here.
After the Show part was over it was time to Code! We had a bunch of awesome mentors floating around versed in all different technology stacks, we had people get Webpack set up for the first time, all the way to helping someone with some CSS issues! It was great to see how open and encouraging the Senior mentors were to the Juniors.
Girl Geek Dinner at Xero
Okay, I admit it. This is the LJ Show! I was actually a speaker at this one! Girl Geek Dinners is a world wide organisations that host dinners at different tech companies and have speakers from the companies. My employer Xero hosted one and asked me to be one of the three speakers! I was pretty excited and nervous, firstly Laura Cardinal and Michele Gleeson are two incredible women and to be put up with them was an honour! Secondly, although I hosted events and done a few little things before, this is the first time it was my name up on the line up doing a public speaking event! All eyez on me, for a few minutes as least! Eeeep!
As mentioned earlier after a convo at MelbCSS with Mark, I decided to reflect more on where I had come from, prior to actually getting my developer job. The facts of my story are pretty straight forward, but there was a lot of emotion behind every decision. I felt like it was the right audience so I wrote a “Letter to My Younger Self”. There were tears, some things are just too confronting to say out loud, but I did it! I was encouraged by hearing both Laura and Michele speak before me, and see the awesome, bold and courageous leaders that I have around me at work!
Knit One with Kris Howard
FINALLY! It’s funny, this seems to be a common sentiment for anyone seeing Kris’s talk!
Kris Howard is an incredible advocate for tech. Based out of Sydney she advocates for YOW!, but thankfully is down in Melbourne more often than not! Kris’s “Knitting talk” is infamous! She is a hilariously good speaker, knitter, and all around tech head! It was cool to hear how programming is a lot like knitting, and coming away from the talk I have super duper respect for all the knitters in the world!
NodeGirls Workshop Melbourne
NodeGirlsMelbourne Twitter 🌮🌮🌮
NodeGirls is an international organisation with the Australian chapter being started by Tanya Butenko, where for a Saturday every x number of weeks, a bunch of mentors help women new to coding, go through a Javascript and Node workshop. There was a huge turn out, this being the second one in Melbourne that I’ve mentored at, with ages ranging from young to not so! It was really cool to see what could end up being the very first step in some of these women’s coding journeys! Mentoring is also really rewarding personally, being able to help people, especially when I was at the same level just a year ago, is really special.
FreeCodeCamp Melbourne Study Group (AGAIN)
Like I mentioned, I run these every two weeks, so this happened again this month, we coded, we helped each other, it was ace! Absolute beginners are welcome and I often help people get started on FCC.
Online Volunteering: Changing the way we give back.
GA Vollie Meetup 🌮🌮
I went along with this one because I’m pretty passionate about social change and startups, and Vollie is a local Melbourne Startup helping enable change. Their platform connects social change organisations to online volunteers. Not exactly a new concept, but it was great to hear about what they are doing and how, and the feedback from the social change organisations in the audience was really great. It turned into a pretty good discussion about pain points for organisations, which was interesting to hear.
Between this I also worked full-time where I moved into a new team at work doing iOS Development, Luke & I released our third edition of the monthly Junior Dev Newsletter, and in a shocking twist of fate, I met someone and started squeezing in a few dates! 😍 I love the local tech community in Melbourne and really encourage everyone to get involved in their local communities!
PS: 🌮🌮🌮 === excellent food!
