Plated + Code in NYC: A jam-packed year in review 🗓 🗽 🎉

Plated Engineering loves being part of the NYC tech community. Wait, Plated has an engineering team? 🤔 Yeah, we do, and we had a lot of fun participating in local hackathons and meetups— and even hosting some too! Most people don’t think about Plated related to tech at all— and to be honest, I don’t think our company has done a good enough job contributing to the NYC tech community until more recently.

I wanted to share some events that Plated has supported its engineers to participate in and help organize.

We attended and helped out at “Stuyhacks”, a student-run hackathon organized annually at Stuyvesant High School.

We know how powerful community and meetups can be in bringing developers and people just interested in tech together to learn code, share knowledge and make friends too! Last year, some of us helped out with a student-run hackathon at Stuyvesant High School (for NYC readers, I went to Brooklyn Tech 😏).

Ryan helping students at StuyHacks build their first JavaScript application.

We also got a chance to help students with a bit more experience in programming. Shortly after the StuyHacks meetup, me and Catherine, a Operations Tools engineer at Plated, attended ‘DivHacks’, another student-run hackathon, this time at Barnard College. DivHacks aims to inspire and empower diversity within tech, a mission our engineering guild at Plated resonates with.

Since many of the attendees were rising seniors in college and focused on their first jobs, best believe me and Catherine had some handy Plated swag ready to give out 😅. (Plug: we also run a summer engineering internship program for students!)

Catherine dropping swag and mentoring at the same time.

More recently, we hosted the ‘New York Android Developers’ meetup, where Adam McNeilly & Josh Williams talked about better testing with Espresso and initial learnings working with ARCore. We’ve also hosted other developer groups just out of interest, such as the fast-growing Rust meetup here in NYC.

Josh Williams inserting 3D robots in an augmented reality app using Android’s ARCore framework.

Hopefully, I can be a part of more tech meetups and events this coming year. At Plated, we’re brainstorming the idea of hosting our own meetup with themed tech talks, and of course, delicious food and drinks for attendees. If you’d like to stay in the know, follow our blog where we’ll post announcements and more content about engineering at Plated.