2015 BarCamp Orlando

While not on the scale of a Silicon Valley or New York City, Orlando is working to gain traction to have a booming tech scene.

I think a lot of Orlando's tech scene is due to the team at CodeSchool and EnvyLabs. They use their space to host many of the local tech meet ups, curate monthly newsletters of tech events, and host various other events, such as BarCamp Orlando.

BarCamp Orlando is an annual community-building event which aims to bring people from different backgrounds together for cooperative learning. Technologies such as Ruby, PHP, Java and C could be presented alongside graphic design, music, photography, and other new media

BarCamp has all the great talks of a conference but, instead of having set speakers and topics, presenters come and sign up for speaking slots the morning of the event. This means you don't know what you will learn until you get to BarCamp and see the list of talks.

I discovered and attended my first BarCamp about a year after moving to Orlando, in the Fall of 2014. Having never had the opportunity to attend a technical conference I really enjoyed my first exposure to what has been referred to as an "unconference". It was great to see such a large turnout of developer, designers, and the like and have such a diverse schedule of topics. This is one of those events that you leave excited to be a part of the community you live in and the tech community as a whole.

Since I had such a great experience attending, when I saw BarCamp 2015 was coming up, I knew I wanted to speak. I hope to create a more thorough post discussing the motivations for my talk idea but the general idea is this - I found Couch to 5K to be a phenomenal program to follow to get into running and saw it as applicable to other aspects of my life and career. This application of Couch to 5K to my life is the driving force behind this blog and I wanted to share my idea and the effect it has had on me.

I titled my talk, Couch to 5K Your Career. I covered how goals you create for yourself should be achievable, incremental, and measurable and that when goals are created in such a way there is a higher chance of success and follow through. I also discussed how incremental goals could be treated in an "agile" way where they are re-assessed periodically to make sure they are being worked towards and to make sure they are still goals that you want to achieve.

You can view slides of my talk here and checkout any of my other talks here.

I would like to thank everyone that worked to make BarCamp Orlando a thing, everyone who showed up, and the wonderful people that gave talks. I left inspired and excited again this year.