COSCUP 2024

Lessons learned and some stories told from profiling hundreds of developers who have acquired deep mastery, contributed to open source software communities, and built robust networks.

The world has changed — everything is fast. You’re busy updating your technical skills, but are you leveraging the most efficient learning techniques? Are you building your network in a systematic way. Are you contributing to communities?

There are massive benefits to contributing to Open Source projects, especially Java as one of the more innovative and long lasting software development communities in the world. But remember that although communities are fun and valuable they can also be fragile and change radically. They need continual nurturing so they can support opportunities for contributors.

In this session, we’ll explore the skills necessary to learn new things deeply, contribute things of value to communities, and build our own innovative networks to leverage markets. The result is that we benefit, the community benefits, our friends benefit, and our employers benefit. These four levels represent reciprocal relationships that need careful consideration.

We'll talk about concepts from network science, neuroscience, education, and history, while also introducing practical simple tools like spaced repetition algorithms to help promote memory and learning. I’ll share some career success stories of my own and also some of my catastrophic failures. I’ve photographed thousands of developers and interviewed hundreds of them for videos, streams, and podcast, so we surely have many images to show and many lessons we can discuss to help us all thrive in this crazy fast world.