As a person of color who has been a part of the software industry for over 15 years, I want to emphasize the importance of lifelong learning, volunteering, and mentorship at all levels. No matter where you are in life, you can always learn something from someone else and you can always further your growth by sharing what you know with others. When you share your experiences, you build connections. When you take the time to teach, you strengthen your own understanding, especially when you need to relate information to your audience in new ways that make sense to them.

Over the last 6 years I have spent my free time maintaining open source libraries and tools on github to simplify and enhance the developer experience. During that time I’ve also been trying to pique the interest of elementary and middle school students in open source ideas as a volunteer teacher. I think the most important aspect of my volunteering is being genuine with the kids and taking an interest in them as individuals. It can be impactful for them to see someone that looks like them, doing things with technology, being generous with materials, and being a positive role model. Patience and humility are key when working with students that are largely disengaged from school.

In my career so far, I’ve always received the most satisfaction when things I create make the jobs of my coworkers suck less. For personal projects, that satisfaction comes from knowing I added something “commit worthy” to one of my public git repos that I can reference and use forever.

Moving forward

As I’ve been thinking about what I want to do with the rest of my life, I felt it would make sense to state my intentions publicly.

My mission is to help developers and engineers early in their careers gain success, find fulfillment, and establish a solid knowledge base that they can build on by sharing informative video tutorials and reflections on how to learn from mistakes I’ve made over the years to shorten the learning curve. I especially want to help those that have already had their first couple roles and are plotting their next move.

I want to help individuals tailor their own self-directed learning journeys, whether they have recently decided to get into tech, have just started reading their first books on programming, have been watching YouTube videos to learn and practice, are taking online courses, have invested time and money in an intensive bootcamp, or spent even more time and money for university training. At each stage, I want to help current and prospective engineers discover and engage.

I want to revive an understanding and appreciation of the interesting parts of tech history. From research and development in computing at Bell Labs in the 1970s that brought C and UNIX, the free and open-source movement of the 1980s and 1990s that influenced collaboration, through the popular languages, frameworks, libraries, and tools in use today that power tech companies of all sizes.

I want to host discussions between people of a variety of backgrounds and experience levels. I want experts sharing their passions, their favorite tools, their most effective processes for creating, maintaining, and releasing software, their journey to where they are now in tech, how they collaborate, advice for others coming up (or to their younger selves), and what they want to learn next. I want newbies to talk about what got them interested in tech, what they are currently learning, what challenges they are facing, what their aspirations are, and what they are most excited about. I want to match potential mentors and mentees within my network and beyond.

I want to start promoting my open source tools and put out video tutorials on why they are useful and what people can do with them. These are things that have made me a better engineer and have allowed me to more easily build useful command-line tools for work and personal projects.

I want to help kids discover, build, and retain a passion for learning for learning’s sake. I want to expand my volunteer efforts of the last six years and establish a shareable blueprint for other volunteers. I want to share my processes for learning and practicing new things. I want to share how I capture random ideas, brainstorm, and decide what to act on.

Last, I want to help professionals figure out their priorities in life, make time for what matters, and avoid burnout.