After two months of organizational work, yesterday I ran my company's second-ever day of talks (for employees, by employees.) Two long months of trying to get people to submit talks, getting buy-in from various dept heads (employees are basically not doing work for the 3.5 hours of talks), getting people to actually vote on talks, making sure the presenters were on-track, and more...
It finally paid off. Compared to the first event, we had 5 more talks (12 total), 1 more track (3 total), 3 more departments involved (sales, ops, analytics), and we live streamed to other offices for the first time (and backed them up, to boot.) Been told by multiple higher-ups in engineering how proud they are with how it turned out and how we definitely need to do another one in six months.
And the thing is, it was all me. I almost never prop myself up that much, but I brought up the idea to my manager in February. I settled on the dates. I sent the emails. I tracked people down. I moved the TVs and set up the laptops. I ran around yesterday from room to room constantly to make sure everything was running smoothly. This literally would not have happened without me and seeing it all come together so well has made me super fucking emotional. I almost can't even believe I pulled it off.
Not only do I have more clout now (pulling off talk day #3 should be so much easier), but I have WAY more confidence that this is the direction I want to move in my career. As an engineer, you either trend towards management or lead engineer (basically management.) But I don't like management. I realized in January that my way forward is becoming a developer evangelist-type. Less coding (still a good amount), but more open source work, more attending and organizing meetups, more blog posts, and basically more developer support. There's a stated need at our company right now to be more visible in the Boston tech community and I'm pretty much the only one who actually cares enough to see it happen. If I can pull it off, I'll advance my career without going into management and cement my place as being invaluable to the company.
Between this talks thing, the complete replacement of my entire wardrobe two weeks ago (90% of which was given as gifts by my family over the years), and my first boyfriend, it feels like I'm putting all the pieces in place for me to be successful and (hopefully) happy in my late-20s. Feels good man.
