What I’ve learned exploring the developers communities
From Paris to SF through NYC
I’m a full-stack developer at Mention with a specific focus on the front-end side and user experience. Before joining Mention, I was co-founder and CTO of UniShared and VideoNot.es, part of the Imagine K-12 2013 Winter batch.
This post originally appeared on the Mention’s blog.
Over the last two years, I’ve had the opportunity to travel a lot for the work that I was doing, going mostly from Europe (where I was born and currently live in Paris) to the U.S.
Last year, I spent six months in San Francisco and Silicon Valley for UniShared and VideoNot.es, the two companies that I co-founded with Clément Delangue, following our selection at the Imagine K-12 accelerator.
This spring, I spent two weeks in Mention’s NYC offices with some of our U.S.-based team.
As a developer, I’m always eager to meet my peers and to discover how communities interact, taking part in the different topics that are discussed, and learning from the diversity of other peoples’ backgrounds.
Expanding your community through travel is a great way to grow as a person by interacting with fascinating people — and this is especially true for the work environment.
From these travels, I’ve learned a lot of insights about developer, tech, and startup communities, and now I’d like to share them with you.
I don’t pretend to have captured the full picture in a single blog post, and I’m sure there are many subtleties to these communities that I’ve missed, but I think I’ve got the most important parts down here.
Identity
San Francisco
The energy that you will meet amongst developers and entrepreneurs in San Francisco and the Bay area is unlike any other. It’s a very international culture, composed of people coming from all around the world. From the outside looking in, it could look like an easy work environment, having all of these amazing minds, infrastructure, and money to potentially achieve your dreams.
However, from the inside, it’s a very competitive and challenging environment surrounded by entrepreneurs and startups trying to create their own place in this world. It’s a fast moving place, always looking for new challenges to tackle.
If you share this mindset, you will have infinite occasions, from Hackathons (VideoNot.es was born in one at Google) to Hackerspaces, to build and test your ideas with talented and open-minded people.
New York City & Paris
In NYC and Paris, things are very different. They’re still relatively young, but fast growing tech environments. These two scenes feel very similar to me in that most of the people you’ll meet work in a more corporate context, unlike the startup mindset in SF. Yet, it’s still important to recognize that the startup ecosystems for both these cities are starting to catch up.
Corporate contexts come with their own set of challenges, mostly related to the continual search for innovation. But the people I’ve met in NYC and Paris seem ready to tackle these challenges, and companies in both cities are now taking real measures for true innovation in order to stay competitive and attract talented people (especially away from Silicon Valley).
Finding Events
You might be wondering how to find places and events to meet people while traveling abroad. For tech communities, Meetup is your best companion. No matter where I’ve traveled to, I’ve found many communities to discover thanks to this great service. Also, if you’re “Internet friends” with anyone living in your destination, don’t hesitate to reach out and ask for recommendations, they’ll likely be happy to help. Lanyrd can also be a great resources for events in cities across the globe. At the bottom of this article, I’ve also listed additional resources for finding events in SF, NYC, and Paris.
Since time is limited when you’re traveling, the hardest part is picking the right events to attend. I personally try to engage with communities related to my interests (technologies I use at work, or am currently interested in) in order to have informed conversations with people. I do love discovering new things, I just do that in Paris where I’m more confident and comfortable at the moment.
I usually try to attend multiple events, all starting at the same time, to get the most out of my journey. Don’t follow my lead on this one. It’s generally a bad idea since you’ll spend most of your time commuting (even if all the events are close) and you’ll miss the talks, along with missing great opportunities to engage with attendees.
Keep in touch
Meeting with people is the first step to building new relationships, but keeping in touch with them is the most important and difficult part.
First, don’t forget to connect with them afterward: follow/add them on Twitter/LinkedIn (you may discover mutual connections), or just simply get a business card. If you had great discussions, don’t hesitate to send people an interesting resource to follow-up the discussion.
For example, while in NYC, I had the chance to meet with John K. Paul again — this time at the NYC HTML5 meetup that he organizes. I first met him last year at dotJS in Paris (where he did a great talk). It was awesome to have the opportunity to meet him again, following-up on our last discussion, and discovering his personal environment in NYC.
Keeping these kinds of links active is the most difficult part but also the most rewarding, so don’t forget it!
Cultural Nuances
The Introduction
Taking the first step when it comes to meeting people and getting out there is not always simple, to say the least, especially when considering cultural differences. First comes the language barrier. Second, the way you introduce yourself to people can be very different.
Fortunately, once you understand that people share the same desire as you to meet new people, things get way easier!
In the Bay Area and NYC, people are really open to meeting new people, and in just a couple of seconds you’ll find yourself often engaged in an intense conversation about the topics of the day.
In Paris, things can be a little bit more formal and difficult to get a conversation going, depending on the audience. People are not all that used to spontaneous strangers coming up to them. You just need to get used to it. Keep in mind that in the end, people are always pleased to meet you (in Paris, I guess French wine helps a lot too!). Meanwhile, it’s still a small community and you will quickly meet the same people over and over again, giving you many occasions to follow-up.
Here’s a funny thing that I’ve noticed in SF and NYC: you introduce yourself by talking about what you’re doing, why you’re there, etc. Once you’ve been introduced, you shake hands and tell your name. It might sound natural to you if you’re from this culture, but coming from one where you’re doing the exact opposite, it’s always very funny to experience!
Timing
In Paris, meetups generally start around 7:30 PM, which corresponds more or less with the end of the business day. Talks begin at this time and depending on the meetup, the food and networking part is happening between or at the very end of the session (which, depending on the speakers/topics can be very long).
When I arrived in NYC, based on these experiences, I started heading a little bit late to meetups, which usually start around 6:30-ish (generally, I’m more interested in the networking part than the talks). I learned the hard way that in NYC, things are reversed and the networking/food part takes place before the talks. It’s a practical detail, but still a very important one when you want to interact with people.
Topics
In SF and NYC, I attended higher-level talks discussing bleeding-edge concepts and the future of technology. I guess this is related to the number of large companies with more complex use-cases and people actually working on them there.
For instance, while in NYC, I attended to a very interesting panel on the future of databases featuring people from Oracle, NuoDB, CouchDB, and AppNexus. To be able to discuss this kind of topic, you need both people working on the subject (in this case, database editors) and companies using them for real-world use cases.
In Paris, we have some companies (like Criteo) which talk about more advanced topics, related to their scale, but most of the time you’ll be listening to feedback from early-adopters (on Docker for example) or about a specific technology / library, which is fine too!
Te(a)chnology
In SF, NYC, and Paris, there are more and more initiatives these days to help people learn coding and developing. As a professional developer, this is something that I really want to get involved with in the coming months because I’m convinced that technology must be accessible to the widest possible audience.
The importance of these initiatives in a community is a very good sign of that community’s level of development.
In the future, I think that everyone should be able to create things and communicate around their ideas on the Internet. This is such an amazing opportunity that we should not miss. As professional developers, it is our role to help people learn our tools and create basic things, such as setting up a website from design to hosting.
For instance, here at Mention, I work a lot with Alex, our Community Manager, to help him learn more CSS on top of the HTML he already knows from when he was a kid. This allows him to design beautiful, contemporary newsletters and add extra tech-heavy content in blog posts by himself. He is now on Github and published his first open-source code recently, which also gave him the opportunity to learn the Git source management system. How amazing is that?!
Teaching technology to future generations is another big challenge. Recently, the French Minister of Education has announced that Computer Science courses will be proposed in primary schools starting next September, and in the UK, they’ve already started this movement. Initiatives like Code.org started by companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, are also aiming at the same goal: prepare the future generation for the world they will live in.
Women in Tech
As you focus on the people you meet here and there, the roles that women play in tech and startup communities are very important indicators of the community’s strength and maturity.
In both SF and NYC, I’ve met a really encouraging amount of women working in tech positions — and a lot of people who are very passionate about making sure there’s more. I believe that everyone in our industry must demand more senior positions for women, and in SF and NYC, I see good signs for the future in this regard. In Paris, unfortunately, this is not something that’s very developed yet (even if there’s growinginitiatives) and I hope things will change in the future!
If interested in women in tech initiatives, check out Girls Who Code, Women Who Code,Tech Women, nPower, and WeTech.
The Conference Scene
Beyond local communities (mostly meetups or coding schools), you can judge how advance the tech scene of a city is by looking at the number of large important events happening there.
The biggest ones among them, Google I/O and Apple’s WWDC are obviously happening in SF, where things are mostly moving nowadays.
I haven’t spent that much time all at once in NYC (to allow me to go to multiple events per trip), but I understand that more and more startup and tech events are happening all the time, such as TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, The Next Web U.S. Conference, 99u,Generate, and Brooklyn Beta.
We’re not at this stage yet in Paris, but we’re lucky enough to have a few big events that are growing and more and more of them are coming to us! For instance, LeWeb is one of the biggest events in the tech industry and it’s happening both in Paris and London.
Speaking only of technical-oriented events, Paris acts as a hub for Europe and things have been moving fast over the last one or two years.
Thanks to our friends at dotConferences, we now have the chance to welcome amazing speakers from all over the world, and in very nice venues (one of the numerous advantages of living in a city like Paris with a lot of historical background) while welcoming developers from all over Europe.
Devoxx, in Paris, Anvers (Belgium), and London are also great scenes to meet with the European developer communities.
Tech communities are all very different, especially in the ways people interact and in their diverse identities. However, you will always find the exact same passion for technology and the same drive to share it.
How are things working for you? Is your city seeing a boost in developer communities? Let me know! I would be more than pleased to learn and discuss them with you!
Resources
Worldwide
- Meetup, your best option when it comes to discovering local communities (not only tech-oriented),
- Lanyrd and The Fetch and Mashable are great sources to discover events in cities across the globe.
- Much like Meetup, Eventbrite is an excellent resource for finding events near you, just search tech or dev events.
- Creative Mornings has events across the globe for anyone interested in tech, design, or any creative topic — from minimalism to risk to heritage.
- For those focused on startups, Startup Digest has an enormous listing of events across the globe.
- General Assembly has event listings for cities across the U.S, as well as in Melbourne and Hong Kong.
Paris
- SaaS Is Beautiful, a meetup we created for people working in the Software as a Service area to share their experiences. Talks about tech, business and design, on a monthly basis, with few attendees to have tons of interactions.
- Paris Machine Learning Applications Group is the largest meetup in Paris I’ve been to so far. If you’re interested by ML (a very large field), be sure to not miss the next one.
- The Paris Android User Group (PAUG) is another active community here in Paris. Monthly meetups about a lot of Android related topics.
- Docker Paris, a young but very active community.
- dotConferences, a series of tech conferences in Paris, gathering the European community and bringing amazing speakers. Large range of subjects, from scalability to UX/UI through Javascript and Go.
SF
- NoiseBridge, founded by Mitch Altman (I actually had the chance to met him while there) is a hackerspace for technical-creative projects. Tons of energy and passionate people. Mitch is also very active worldwide, organizing workshops.
- TechCentral SF has very interesting event listings.
- Airbnb has “Tech Talks” that look really interesting.
NYC
- NYC HTML5 meetup organized by John K. Paul, great community talking about the latest innovations in web development.
- NYC Machine Learning is another active community (ML is trendy!). Last time I was lucky enough to attend a meetup featuring Dr. Rong Yan, Chief Data Scientist at Square and ex-Facebook. It was a unique and wonderful occasion for me to be able to talk with him.
- Gary’s Guide is a fantastic resource for all tech and startup events, big and small.
- AlleyNYC and LaunchLM (for lower Manhattan) also share a great number of events in their email newsletters and on social.
- NYC Tech Meetup has become huge and is led by a kick-ass woman, Jessica Lawrence, which is really cool.
- For those in Brooklyn, Digital Dumbo has several events throughout the year.
- Brooklyn Tech Meetup and NY MusicTech Meetup are great groups to get involved in as resources.
