K. Sabbak

I'm an introvert. This is hardly a surprising statement, but like everyone else who has tried dipping their toes into the waters of tech, I've learned that this is not the world of quiet nerds who keep to themselves like the media has portrayed it. I mean, sure we're nerds, but the level of community that surrounds software is truly astounding.

Along with meet-ups and slack channels, one of main ways the tech community seems to manifest is through conferences. And to an introvert like me, it's scary enough going to a meet-up for a few hours where I may know no one in a room of 30 - a conference for a few days filled with hundreds or thousands of people is terrifying -- which is why I'm working hard to try to attend them.

I like starting with a plan of attack, so the first thing I did was attend a one-day one-room conference back in 2017 called AlterConf. That was a good intro. After having attended that, I was told that there was the opportunity to volunteer at CodeMash, a multi-day conference with a couple thousand attendees. I figured volunteering was the next best step.

CodeMash was last week. It was an incredible experience, and I'm here to bring you this: An Introvert's Guide to Volunteering at CodeMash (and Probably Other Conferences) from Someone Who's Done It Once

This week I was reading:

I always thought that the threshold for me to feel like a "real programmer" would be when I was able to use ternary statements confidently, and while that certainly helped, I feel like the real turning point for me was understanding truthy and falsy.

If you had asked me like three days ago, I would have been like "I don't know why I was so worried about TDD, it's great nothing goes wrong, it goes smoothly and logically!" and if you ask me right now, I'll swear I saw this coming.

Saw what coming? Well, all my tests pass. . .

Here's what I was reading last week: