I am currently an organizer for PyCascades 2024 - specifically I’m the Diversity Chair.

What does this mean?

Our team is responsible for making sure attendees have a safe and inclusive environment for attendees. This is an extremely important role and I was thinking of how I got here from being somebody so far away from conferences. More on the role and the conference in another post, but for now…

Story time!

Spring of 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I was in grad school and had picked a software engineering course. Our professor invited us to join the Agile Ventures slack workspace. I had no idea what Slack was (this was my first workspace) - also no idea what else was happening within this community called Agile Ventures.

But here we were, and it was a good course that gave me a lot of hands on knowledge. After the course ended, the pandemic hit with full force and I had the right amount of curiosity and passion to explore within the Agile Ventures slack space.

Soon enough, my curiosity got me and I joined a channel #shf-project, Sveriges Hundföretagare a nation-wide organization in Sweden for ethical dog-associates. I got introduced to the team lead and the team and before I could think and let insecurities get to me, I was attending team standup calls with a team that was located at different parts of the world.

This experience taught me a lot about working with others, taking feedback, asking questions when I get stuck, pairing and also introduced me to a community called Women Who Code (WWCode) - all during the pandemic in 2020.

I will keep it short - but I volunteered at WWCode from 2020 and grew into a track lead for the Python chapter. There I met incredible leadership fellows and community members who introduced me to a lot of new opportunities. One of the those opportunities came from Eliza Sarobhasa (the 2023 Python Leadership Fellow) who introduced me to PyCascades, a regional conference for Python. I was given an opportunity to be Sprints Chair for PyCascades 2023 ie to recruit open source projects for the conference and to conduct sprints on the last day of the conference. Additionally, make sure attendees feel welcomed and encouraged to contribute to open source. We had many first-timers make open source contributions (around ~10 out of 60 attendees for sprints)

All this began with me joining a software engineering course and more importantly, taking opportunities as they come and follow up on them.

Just a really wholesome moment as I sit here and rethink :)

Until next time…