This episode is a live recording from the Hacker House fireside chat on December 14th, 2024, in the Codédex community during the Mini Holiday Hackathon. ❄️
We invited Steve Chen, Founder and Executive Director at Code & Coffee, to share his non-traditional path to tech — from growing up as a restaurant kid in the DC metro area, dropping out of college, and working as a food delivery driver, to joining a coding bootcamp in Florida, becoming a Software Engineer at Grubhub through a cold email, Head of Software Quality Automation at Framebridge, and running the biggest coding meetup in the U.S. after the pandemic (367 total events in 2024). Steve and Sonny traded notes on their Asian American upbringing, hours logged in Team Fortress and Dota 2, lessons learned from scaling a tech community IRL, and more. Towards the end of the episode, we also had a Q&A with questions from the audience.
This episode is a must-listen if you’re trying to break into tech in 2025 as a bootcamp grad or self-taught developer.
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Show Notes:
(0:00) Intro
(1:21) Dropping out of college and coding bootcamp
(3:01) Meetups, pandemic, Code & Coffee
(8:32) Black sheep in the Asian household
(10:21) Gaming nostalgia: Team Fortress and Dota 2 stories
(15:34) Scaling a community, community rituals (Intro Circles)
(23:25) From startup to Grubhub to Framebridge
(28:17) Lessons learned from Code & Coffee
(33:51) Non-traditional path to tech
(41:10) Being someone that you want to work with and "How to Win Friends"
(43:35) @Valérie: What's one piece of advice for your younger self?
(47:13) @ValentineL: Are you expanding Code & Coffee to new countries?
(56:33) @Hlin245: Have you had any identity struggles in tech?
(60:05) @Milan: What are the requirements for QA testers?
(61:03) Outro
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