This past week I attended AfroTech Conference for the first time. I honestly did not know what to expect, and I wanted to experience something new and try a bit of professional networking.
Day 1
The first day was a long and draining, I decided to drive instead of taking Lyft or Uber so that I would be able to leave as I wanted. Badge pickup was super easy, but access to the parking garage was cut off due to events for people with more exclusive badges (I bought a general admission ticket).
I believe that there was around 3k people in attendance for the open ceremony, where we got to hear Morgan DeBaun speak. Honestly there wasn’t much to do for about 6 hours with my badge. People were able to promote their companies and themselves, which was also really cool.
Day 2
The second day had many more events available for me to attend, and most of which were cybersecurity related. I enjoyed learning about opportunities in that sector, but I was hoping to see more demos of these tools in action. The standout speaker for me was Nicole Dove because of the imminent growth of their global team, knowledge on the role of AI in cybersecurity, and approachable demeanor.
Now that I have had time to reflect, I would have wanted to attend more talks on VC funding for small(er) businesses and startups, as well as consulting and angel investment.
Day 3
The third day was my last day in attendance at AfroTech because I am taking classes on weekends. I spent this day in the Expo Hall. While I was not looking to interview, I was able to do a satisfying amount of networking and following up with a few of the speakers.
There were a handful of companies that stood out to me, or at least their recruitment staff stood out to me.
Expo Hall Highlights
Riot Games
Nicole Dove, the Director of Security Engineering at Riot Games, had a few speaking events that I sat in and had the strongest impact on me. She was on the Expo Hall floor engaging and connecting with people. Based on what I’ve seen, Riot Games has a lot of roles open on the West Coast and APAC.
If I had the game development experience, I would contribute to help expand their open source tooling in GitHub.
Supercell
One thing that first stood out to me about Supercell is that they are headquartered in Helsinki, Finland. Most of the companies on the Expo Hall floor were either based in the US or were primarily hiring in this region. I only managed to connect with one of the two ladies at the booth, Essi Jukkala, but they were both friendly and willing to share more information about Supercell’s expansion. There are upwards of 300 or so open roles currently to help them expand, and possibly create new games like their Clash of Clans and Hay Day.
I wasn’t able to find any managed open source repositories from Supercell.
Netflix
Netflix is a well know streaming platform that had a very large booth on the Expo Hall with long lines. I was very happy to be able to chat with a few recruiters that seemed to be in the same part of the tech industry as myself. I spent most of my time learning generally about their work with AWS. I was mostly curious to learn more about the analytics on their virtual servers and why they use the instance sizes they do.
American Express
While this is more of an established, well-known, financial institution they came to the conference highlighting the AMEX Ventures team and a few of the companies they have taken on in their portfolio. I thought that this program was a very good entry point for entreprenuers.
Other mentions
There are a few other companies I enteracted with simply for networking and swag (of course).