The JuniorDev Annual Review 2017
I mean really, it’s just our year in review slash Thank You blog post! But trust, it’s epic! ;)
Boom!
- 21 Free Events
- 41 Local Speakers
- Over 50% gender diversity for speakers
- 2 Refactor Workshops
- 1 Conference Track
- 1172 new members (on Meetup.com)
- 8 Newsletter Editions
- Launched Character Decoding: An Interview Series, with Mia first up
- Launched in Perth, WA
- Went on a Radio Show as guests
- LJ & Luke did a talk about Junior Developers at The Web Meetup
- 1 Conference Announced ( Levelsconf.com )
- Countless conversations
- Priceless pieces of advice and knowledge shared
- Infinite friendships
Thank you!
To everyone who has come to an event, shared the word with their friends, and colleagues, who have supported this community from day one or from one day ago. . thank you! From Lina and Chloe and Luke wanting to share stories and creating Social, to Luke and I sharing resources and knowledge, everything has revolved around bringing Junior Developers together, having some fun along the way, and we can’t say how awesome it’s been to meet so many great people and share this all with you.
A little Recap..
There was so much happening, and it was all great, of course, but here’s an overview of just some of the cool things we all did this year!
International Women’s Day, we brought together 5 awesome developers who spoke about their journey and experience, was a really incredible night with many stories shared from these insightful women.
Luke and I did a lot of JuniorDev work over beer in the first half of the year, it’s incredible how much time community takes, all outside of our regular jobs, so we often found ways of combining our free time activities with Junior Dev. We (unfortunately) moved to 7:45am meetings half way through the year, productivity soared, however, beer sales declined in local Richmond bars!
What were we working on? Well, the Newsletter, our little website, Refactor workshops, local meetups, but a lot of the effort until August was DDD Melbourne, were we hosted a JuniorDev Track as part of this huge Developer Conference!
We hosted an Ideation Night, where anyone could come and we had experienced local speakers give us their insight, and helped attendees come up with talk topics!
Then the conference itself, where Mark Brown II blew us all away with his charismatic cross fit and coding talk!
Every second month Social was kicking on and kicking off! Here’s Cathy, a staple of our community talking about landing your dream career!
When we weren’t at the bar being Social, we were at the light and bright basement of our awesome sponsor Zendesk, for our bi-monthly meetup Code & Tell. JuniorDevs brought down their laptops and got stuck into code, with mentors from Zendesk and Xero helping devs solve problems!
So much of the community comes from things the JuniorDev team wants, and as a Junior Developer I wanted more hands on, in person, training. That was also low cost and fun. Not much to ask for ay! And nothing existed, so we created it. Refactor Workshops were born, and all around good guy and dev, Matt Hilton agreed to jump in with us to the unknown. We crafted a full day workshop around the Build & Deploy pipeline, and it was great!
One of my personal fav events (am I allowed to have favourites? Or is this like a child/parent thing when you’re an organiser?!) was the What it’s Like to Work at A Product Company.
We noticed in our chats at Code & Tell and Social, that not everyone really knew what this “Product company” thing meant, we never thought of it like that, as we worked in one! So we kicked off this Series with an awesome line up of speakers and it was rad.
This was one of my favourite panels I’ve ever witnessed.
I was really excited when this came around, as we launched in my hometown of Perth! With over 90 people coming out to see the talks and check out what it was all about, I was pretty happy. And to have one of our fav people Kris Howard in the audience and see it all go down, was pretty cool too.
We then realised that all these awesome chats we’re having weren’t that scaleable and that so many people in our community had inspirational and insightful things to say, so we kicked off the interview series Character Decoding with Mia!
We were then stoked to have Mia come aboard with the JuniorDev Bookclub, where every second Monday night she hosts a discussion about the book, retro style!
We also did some other crazy things, like bringing in four Junior Developers from Zendesk, REA Group, and PageUp People, into the Xero hackathon just for fun (and knowledge sharing, cross-industy collaboration) and they hacked alongside Xero devs on real hackathon projects! In what’s dubbed as HackXchange a few weeks later some of the Xero Junior Developers headed the REA for the amazing hackathon. We hope to continue this exchange next year, so reach out if your company does a hackathon!
This one flew under the radar but I was pretty happy to get on Reddit ahaha. #LifeGoals Just glad it wasn’t for something dumb I did!
Oh yeah, we have out A LOT of stickers! Our own MASSIVE ones, hehe, and a swag of others!
Hard getting into Open Source? Not with Junior Dev and Hacktoberfest! Ol’ mate Josh ran this Hacktoberfest event with us and we say over 25 Junior Devs make PR’s into Github repos! Many first timers!
November saw us do a night of Tech Talks at Code & Tell at the ever cool Zendesk! In one of our biggest events ever ( over 90 people, up their with Perth’s launch ) we have 5 incredible speakers do an amazing job, taking us through technical journeys.
And we celebrated that night, as it was the day Australia said #YES ! We’re an opinionated community, that’s how Luke and I talk about it sometimes, we have a strong Code of Conduct, values that we put into every event, everything we do, and we were stoked to share that day with our fellow Junior Developers.
Because we must secretly hate ourselves, we decided to push out one more Refactor Workshop before the end of the year. To be honest, it was pretty much demanded of us, that we do one on Testing, so we did! And it was awesome. Here you can see the newly invented game of Testing Pyramid Ping Pong!
For both the Refactor Workshops this year, we have over 50% female participants, and 100% amazing Developers. It’s really awesome to have people come out on a Saturday, lay down some cash ($60 for those curious) and deep dive into these topics.
Oh yep, just when we thought we were done, late November saw me heading to Perth for the second JuniorDev Perth, which was pretty cool. A night all about Failure, it was an epic event, luckily, with only one failure, which was, of course, me stuffing it up! Ha ha. The speakers inspired and delighted and the event was sponsored and hosted at the really incredible Readify office.
Both battling through some really weird summertime sickness, we were stoked to be invited in the the ByteinIT radio show where Luke and I had a chat about the community and announced Levels Conference. I thought my voice was kinda husky and sexy at the time but I listened to the podcast later, and NOPE!
And because we somehow always to make things weird, we announced our conference with no details, no date, no location, no speakers. Just the name. Levels And we released a set of tickets called “Faith” tickets. Because if you know us at all, you’ll know it’ll be dope (lol) but you’ll need to have a little faith. And we’ve been stoked by the response so far! Faith tickets are available until we release some details, and then the cost will rise a bit. But not to usual conference prices, as that’s the point, it’s a conf Juniors can attend!
And there was plenty more going on around that, we had a bunch of other great events, so many cool speakers, everyone that come down that’s always happy to chat with us, we love it!
Thanks for a ripper 2017! See ya’ll soon!
