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Making Meetup

Moving Day

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White House LGBTQ Tech and Innovation Summit

I was fortunate enough to be invited to a gathering of LGBTQ tech leaders at the White House to discuss and help address how tech and innovation could help issues ranging from social justice, to climate change, to women in tech.

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Megan Smith was one of our event hosts, and I was so impressed with the way she approached the world’s issues with such a deep knowledge, optimism, and ambition for solving them.

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In the afternoon we broke out into unconference style working groups to start planning the TechUP Inclusion + Innovation Week in DC in November. I chose the Women & Girls group and it was there that I was able to listen and speak with others about how to create an event that tangibly helped increase the exposure and inclusion of women and girls in tech.

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It was a great event and I was overwhelmed with the concentration of brilliant, visionary, and humble tech leaders assembled in one place.  I learned a great deal just speaking with as many people as I could.

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Thanks so much to Leanne Pittsford and the Lesbians Who Tech community for inviting me and organizing such an impactful event.  It was one of the most inclusive and diverse tech events I’ve ever been to, so a huge props to Leanne and the crew for intentionally making that happen.

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More Than Binary: Inclusive Gender Collection and You

This year, I was fortunate enough to be accepted to speak at a few tech conferences about a side project I’ve been working on over the past year. My project Gender Amender (https://github.com/anne-decusatis/genderamender) exists to collect gender information in a way that’s meaningful for both machine learning algorithms and people of all genders.

I just returned from PyCon (https://us.pycon.org/2016/) less than two weeks ago, which was a wonderful conference. I found the emphasis on community there to be inspiring and refreshing.

I’ll also be speaking at Open Source Bridge next week (http://opensourcebridge.org/sessions/1779) - I’m really looking forward to it, and I’d love to see you there!

If you can’t make it to see me speak in person and want to look at my talk resources online, or if you want to see all the sources I used, then you can find all that information in one place at my personal blog: http://anne.loves.technology/blog/talks/2016/05/16/more-than-binary.html

I’d like to thank all of my coworkers at Meetup for helping make this possible and for listening to me practice this talk over and over again for weeks and weeks.

Anne DeCusatis is a Core Engineer on Meetup’s Retention team.

Scaladays NYC 2016

This year, Meetup had the honor of sponsoring Scaladays NYC as well as hosting the official conference afterparty. For those unfamiliar with Scaladays, it is one of the largest yearly Scala conferences, often held in multiple cities around the world. This year’s conference in New York City had over six hundred attendees and almost sixty talks spread across four tracks over the course of two and a half days. Needless to say, myself and four other Meetup engineers had blast attending the conf.

(Opening keynote by Martin Odersky)

Some of our favorite talks in no particular order include (but are not limited to):

  • Data Structures of the Dark Side by Shimi Bandiel (@shimib)

  • Roll Your Own Shapeless by Daniel Spiewak (@djspiewak)

  • Implicits Inspected and Explained by Tim Soethout (@TimSoethout)

  • DDD and Onion Architecture in Scala by Wade Waldron (@wdwaldron)

  • Scala Goes Native by Denys Shabalin (@den_sh)

Two personal favorites of mine were Domain Driven Design and Onion Architecture by Wade Waldron and Being Creative with Genetic Algorithms and Typeclasses by Noel Markham (@noelmarkham). In his DDD talk, Wade illustrated DDD concepts via ‘the domain of cooking an egg,’ and even shared some sample code (https://github.com/WadeWaldron/scaladays2016). Noel’s talk was more Scala-centric, and was focused on explaining typeclasses by implementing a fun genetic algorithm which attempted to recreate the Mona Lisa.

(Side note: If anyone is interested in genetic algorithms, there’s a fun race car simulation that can be found here: http://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/)

We also got to hear directly from some folks at Lightbend (formerly TypeSafe) and the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) who are helping push the boundaries of Scala development. I would highly recommend checking out EPFL’s Dotty project, which “is a platform to try out new language concepts and compiler technologies for Scala” (https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty). Other exciting projects that were presented at the conference included enhancements to Scala.js, a registry for Scala libraries, and also taking Scala native by providing memory management features to Scala developers (https://github.com/densh/scala-offheap). The EPFL also announced the launch of the Scala Center, a new initiative that will act as the open source foundation for Scala with representatives from both the community as well as industry.

And of course, no conference is complete without a popping afterparty, hosted at your’s truly: Meetup HQ. We were pleasantly surprised at the turnout and had a great time mingling and hearing about all the exciting things (Scala and non-Scala related) our peers in the tech community are pursuing.

(Yay party!)

We were even blessed by the attendance of Scala’s creator Martin Odersky, along with many other luminaries of the Scala community.

(Meetup + Martin Odersky + Friends)

If any of the above post was remotely interesting to you and you’d like to find out more about what we’re all about here at Meetup, check out these interviews with our engineers (http://making.meetup.com/tagged/hiring)!

Meetup Core Engineering Manager Jake Levine on Phone Interviews

Ever wonder what to expect during a phone screen? Core Engineering Manager Jake Levine provides some insight into our process at Meetup with an interview with our friends at Devpost. If you missed our last interview with Devpost on culture fit, check that out here.

If you want to learn more about our hiring process and read some 1-on-1′s with our engineering team, go to our Devpost team page.