As Damien Cavaillès’s developer team focuses primarily on mobile apps, building a website was a little out of their comfort zone. They brought in a 17-year-old web developer who immediately threw everything that they worked on into the trash. Virtually starting over, Damien and his team came together to learn new libraries and techniques to build a site that help developers in their job search.

A few years ago, Alex Cherednichenko was a team leader on a tech startup. He received a notification from AWS that they were burning $40,000 per day in server power! It turned out their AWS keys got into hands of some crafty crypto miners. Unsure of what to do, Alex and the team started mitigation and investigation which led to a designer on their very first day who happened to know the exact solution to their problem. Hear what happened next in this very special Session.

Is automation technology a way for small businesses owned by Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) to survive COVID-19’s economic downturn? Will they also reverse centuries of discrimination and finally level the playing field, or could they make matters even worse? Entrepreneur and No Blueprint Podcast host Domonique Meeks will share his thoughts on the subject, focusing on the city of Seattle.

Scott McAllister and his co-worker decided to drive 90 minutes to check out a ColdFusion user group at Salt Lake City. When asked if anyone’s still coding in the Homesite text editor tool, they found out that they were the only ones. Scott realized that there’s much more you can learn by taking the leap into an unknown community, and since then his passion for cultivating developer communities was born.

Josh Lucas has worn many hats in service of his community: high school teacher, tech entrepreneur, startup incubator, business co-operative. His latest initiative - the Academy Pittsburgh (@academypgh) - is a developer bootcamp with a with a unique set of challenges. Learn more about Josh’s journey and lessons learned while providing a place for aspiring developers in his community.

After earning her PhD, Crystal Humphries decided to pursue a career in data science instead. Despite her education, her early attempts to land a job fell short. There was still much for her to learn before she lands that dream job. Learn more about Crystal’s trial-by-fire journey from academia to data science in this Educative Session.

When Greg Bulmash launched Seattle CoderDojo, a nonprofit that teaches code to kids, he described it to his manager at Microsoft as ”a startup that sells free awesome.” The first six months after launch were chaotic by normal standards: finding a kid-friendly location, managing a parent’s wrath after one volunteer made a kid cry, and even trusting a volunteer to run the group after his wife needed to go to the hospital. Join us as Greg shares the humble beginnings of one of the most beloved community organizations in Puget Sound.

Allie Zhang shares about her experiences upon entering the crypto industry in 2017 and how she’s grown along with the industry. She will talk about her lessons learned, tips to stay safe, and why despite these risks, the crypto community is one of the most collaborative in finance and tech.

Timirah James was in for a surprise while presenting a talk at a well-know tech conference. What began as random commentary turned into heckling and eventually to an unexpected question that leads to a hilariously wild sequence of events. Join us as Timirah shares this story and all the details at this Session.

Jacob Knopf’s first app was a CLI (command line interface) built with Ruby for a pizza restaurant. An embarrassing app written in under 100 lines of code and rife with functional challenges, this app meant so much to him once he finished it. Hear the story of how Jacob fell in love with coding through this app and helped him realize that for the first time that he could actually be a developer.