This blog post has been written by Alexandra Radu, 21 who won a Stemettes competition in partnership with BeyondConf, the conference for junior developers in 2015. Alex is studying for a BA in Business Management and Publishing Media at University.
On 23rd November 2015, I was fortunate enough to attend BeyondConf, in London. BeyondConf is a one-day conference for people who code. More than 600 developers join each other for a day filled with interactive workshops and inspiring talks. The speakers and workshop leaders came from a variety of backgrounds and companies – from entrepreneurs to great minds from Google, General Assembly and GitHub.
The day kicked off with a series of insightful talks: ‘How to think holistically about performance‘, ‘How to prioritise optimisation work that your users will notice and appreciate‘ and ‘Getting involved in the open source community‘. Next on were two very inspiring tech ladies -Una Kravets of IBM and Alana Wood – who gave my favourite talks. I also attended General Assembly’s Samantha Hepburn’s workshop on ‘Hacks to Getting Hired‘.
The first talk was an amazing journey into Una’s use of GitHub to achieve her personal goals (things she wanted to learn and do), set up a weekly review system and organize her growth. This was a great session where I could see how having a public goal list can make you MUCH more productive and help you achieve your goals but also how to set up my personal goals system. Alana Wood is the studio design lead for Ustwo, a start-up that developed Moodnotes which is an app to improve thinking habits. Her talk focused on some of the highs and lows of the project’s story but also had very good insights into how agile app development works and how to focus on delivering the most value to users.
The session I enjoyed the most was Sam Hepburn’s ‘Hacks to getting hired‘ workshop. I have kept in touch with Sam after the session, which proved to be an amazing opportunity. The reason why this was the session I loved the most is that thanks to the tips and insights I got that day I secured my graduate job as a tech analyst. BeyondConf was an amazing day with chances to learn from great speakers and amazing attendees and am very thankful to the Stemettes for offering me the chance to attend.
