My First-time Experience as A Volunteer in PyConMY 2019
and what I have learnt through the conference
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this blog post are solely by myself.These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of PyConMY 2019 committees/volunteers/participants.
One day, I came across a post from Women Who Code, where PyConMY 2019 committee were searching for volunteers. As a first-year AI student whose first language was Java, besides realizing the fact that Python was relatively important as well, I registered for that without any hesitation, since attending the conference might be a motivation for me to dive into Python prior to the conference.
Some courses I picked up for Python:
- Python as a Second Language — Software Carpentry
- Machine Learning A-Z™: Hands-On Python & R In Data Science — Udemy
As the committee of Marketing & Publicity, most of the time I was doing the designing part. As a novice designer who worships Canva all the time when it comes to design(😂), this is my first time getting my hands dirty with Adobe Illustrator within limited amount of time. I also learnt a lot of managing the graphics when it comes to printing in a larger scale (ex. banner, nametag). I was really fortunate to have our event lead, who always replied me promptly, and give me a helping hand whenever I need it.
During the day, I volunteered myself as part of the (Audio/Video) AV team. This was my first time handling the devices that requires extra handle with care for most of them were expensive. And I had my first recorded video, taught and mentored by my AV lead. The AV team consisted of four, and I learned a lot from each of them, not only the video recording skills, but also numerous knowledge and information within the field.
Some important quotes from the two-day conference:
Conference and meetups are not mainly for learning purposes, but networking. You are here to meet people, and you can learn at anytime. Everyone has their own stories to share. Listen to their stories.
Meeting new people are always part of the reason why I like to join tech-related meetups and conference. Yet, sometimes I am too shy to reach out people and talk to them unless they approached me. Still remember the first time where I attended the Google Cloud Next Extended 2018 where I barely managed to talk with someone at the sponsor booth. As time goes on, and I joined more and more events, I am getting more used to it, at least I am comfortable talking to new people. I was so glad that I met a lot of great people through PyConMY this year, whom I learnt a lot from through listening to their stories.
The problem is that currently Malaysia is still lack of the right talent. Malaysia should invest in producing more talent in this field. (here refers to AI)
Here is the research conducted by Khazanah Research Institute on the readiness of Malaysian in the era of rapid technological growth.
I felt myself very fortunate as University of Malaya(UM) offered AI-related courses during my year of enrollment, and the number of student kept growing as year goes on, as I heard from the seniors where there were around 10–20 students a few years ago. This year, UM is offering a new course, which is Bachelor of Data Science, where I am really keen to observe its growth.
Nevertheless, the right talent is emphasized here. We might have quite a number of CS graduates, but graduates with good quality are normally the top 20% in the faculty or their own major. It is sad to see that there are actually quite a number of students who refused to work in tech (for instance developer, data scientist, software engineer etc.)
Be open to feedback. (this refers to the projects that are open sourced)
(6 Steps to Your First Commit to an Open Source Project)
There is always room for improvement for our own project. As the speaker said, “ We can always be better.”
For the beginners, it is important to learn to use GitHub (I am learning as well) so as to built yourself a good portfolio. Portfolio indeed is really important as it says a lot what you can do as a developer.
Here is some good resources to learn Git and GitHub, at least you have to know commands like push, pull, merge, commit and rebase.
Until you get your hands dirty with the code, you are not learning it.
For all the beginners out there, this is the golden rule to improve your programming skills, and as always, practice makes perfect. There is no shortcut to success. As a beginner, I used to think that I am not good enough, and there were times where I doubted myself whether am I right choosing this path. However, we have to keep in mind that, the peers surrounding us who were much more expert, they actually have gone through the same path as us, it is just a matter of time where they started early. Do not give up, and one day you will get through this. Learning is always an uphill project.
Keep growing. Growth mindset.
Yup, I know this is really a common one. However still, this quote is still vital one no matter in which field you are at, and shall be deep-rooted in our mindset. During the talk, the speaker mentioned about the question that almost everyone asking,
Will AI take over my job in 10 years time?
In order to survive, we shall not be conservative, yet embrace the changes. The best initiative to overcome the fear is to understand your fear(by learning them) and know how does the thing work, instead of wasting time clinging on the fact without moving forward. Get yourselves out of your comfort zone.
Join as a volunteer to observe how a tech meetup is handled. Try to help whenever you can, no matter whether the tasks offered is within your own department or not.
A quote by one of the AV member, who always involved in tech-related meetups actively.
There’s an interesting scenario I observed whenever I attend any tech-related meetups or conference, which is that the volunteers, committees are almost the same for all the events. I see some familiar faces when there is next event, which means that they actually need more people (or volunteers) involving themselves in the field. In order to attract more people, every meetup, bootcamp, conference etc. have to be held smoothly and letting the attendees satisfied, so that they will return for the upcoming events. Being a first timer in planning the whole event, I let myself to be involved in different kind of task, crossed-departmental, in order to understand how does an event work smoothly.
Extra: Food are always the best when it comes to tech conference and meetups 😋
Technical wise, I gained numerous input from various speakers in the conference, either is through communicating verbally or listening to their talk. I would like to share some really nice websites here to let yourselves discover.
Open source and code commit:
Some good notebooks out there:
An interesting project about computer-aided musicolohy:
Good resource for Deep Learning:
Here I show some pictures of what have I done before and during PyConMY2019.
