Self-association in tech activities carries more weight with top-tier employers and offers great opportunities to learn. In today's tech community, people find groups and projects aligned with their interests and gain targeted skills through active participation.
Some key approaches for self-association are:
- Meetups & user groups - Seattle has a very rich community for technical meetups. Groups typically focus on a topical area (e.g. mobile apps, UX design, cloud computing, data science) or specific technologies (e.g. Android, Java, NodeJS, Python, etc.). Some groups are well-funded and have recurring speaker events (e.g. New Tech Seattle, Appy-Hour, PuPPy, ), while others provide a venue for working on projects with like-minded people (e.g. Xcoders, PyLadies, Beer & Code). Students should browse widely and see which groups they find most appealing. Because there are so many groups on http://www.meetup.com/, students should probably start with specific searches and build up a list of favorite groups. Also, the GeekWire Calendar provides up-to-date event info.
- Open-source projects - Participation in OSS projects is free and can show hiring managers a number of desirable traits (e.g. technical competence, plays well with others, self motivation). The universe of OSS projects is very broad, but interested students can start with https://code.google.com/ or https://help.github.com/articles/where-can-i-find-open-source-projects-to-work-on/ for project ideas.
- Q&A sites - http://stackoverflow.com/ and https://www.quora.com/ serve different purposes, but each provides a platform for building one's reputation by answering questions.
