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In a world of remote work, I’m often asked why I’m so active in my local developer community.
See, I’m based out of Sacramento, a city two hours outside the Bay Area. Despite its proximity to silicon valley and the millions that live in Sacramento (approximately 2.5 million that live in the broader area at the time of writing), it has a distinct identity to the tech hub of the bay. When I began attending local events, tech conferences weren’t a thing in the region. The largest meetups were medium-sized on a good month: fifteen to twenty people would attend, and you’d quickly get to know them.
2020’s pandemic killed any forward momentum these user groups had.
What emerged afterward were stuarts from the previous community that wanted to help rekindle what inter…
Post contents
In a world of remote work, I’m often asked why I’m so active in my local developer community.
See, I’m based out of Sacramento, a city two hours outside the Bay Area. Despite its proximity to silicon valley and the millions that live in Sacramento (approximately 2.5 million that live in the broader area at the time of writing), it has a distinct identity to the tech hub of the bay. When I began attending local events, tech conferences weren’t a thing in the region. The largest meetups were medium-sized on a good month: fifteen to twenty people would attend, and you’d quickly get to know them.
2020’s pandemic killed any forward momentum these user groups had.
What emerged afterward were stuarts from the previous community that wanted to help rekindle what interest was left for a local tech scene. I was one such stuart; I’ve picked up the organization of meetups, administrate our cities’ largest developer Slack, and regularly attend as many events as my calendar allows.
We have since grown our community to exceed pre-pandemic attendance of many events. The group who’ve managed this are tight-knit and have been known to hang out individually outside of tech events.
I’ve gone on this elongated introduction of Sacramento’s tech community to help establish the relative mundanity of what would introduce me to my first VP role.
One of the few who revitalized our local tech scene is named “Obi” and, in addition to helping me run one of the meetups here, has become a friend of mine. It was during a loose setup of one of our meetups where Obi was showing our other co-organizer, Mark, his new work project. They were working on getting a 3D environment visualized entirely within the browser. It was a neat demo, but had a lot of screen tearing and camera glitches.
“What are you using for the 3D?”
“We’re using Unreal.”
Having only caught the tail end of this conversation, the idea of using Unreal in the browser struck me. I had been working on a small-scale prototype of a Unity game and had done my research into web 3D myself; Unreal didn’t run in the browser officially.
Maybe that could explain some glitches? Maybe they’re running an unofficial plugin to Unreal so that they can add web functionality that wasn’t working quite right?
Without too much thought behind it, I posed a question: “Why not use Unity? It runs in the browser officially and might help resolve some of those camera issues.”
This simple question led to a conversation around their team’s pipelines, the challenges they were facing, and that — while they were not using Unreal on the web — they were investigating using Unity for their web needs.
The next thing I knew, Obi had sent an email introducing me and their CTO to kickoff conversations. Those conversations would ultimately yield me being hired as VP of their org.
There are a number of learnings we can take away from this interaction:
It pays to have others to lean on.
It’s impossible for any one person to know everything. After reading this draft, Obi shared with me that he often relies on the collective knowledge of our community to solve complex problems and make informed decisions. This collective intelligence is a powerful resource that can help individuals and organizations navigate challenges more effectively. 1.
Local communities enable natural relationships.
If it weren’t for the consistent meeting spot, I would not have been privy to this conversation. Obi likely would not have realized that I had any experience in 3D and the CTO chat would not have occurred. 1.
Natural relationships === natural connections.
Even if I had overheard this conversation naturally, my ability to interject my own thoughts into it would be drastically diminished had I not had a preexisting relationship with Obi. Obi at this point knew I had extensive domain experience in various other forms of development and decided to trust that experience with me enough to carry the loose suggestion into his workplace.