Sunshine, Disco Beats & Quackie Cake — Always a Maker Alumni Rooftop Party
Tags: London Startups, London, Codingbootcamp

Last year we brought our alumni community a summer party called Once A Maker, Always A Maker. This year we were back with another edition, on the Treehouse Rooftop at the Makers Apprenticeships office.

It was a chance for our alumni to reunite with old faces, meet the current and recent cohorts, and have a fun afternoon reconnecting with the Makers family. Below are a few words from Tommy’s speech on Saturday.

Our Quack Overflow (Quackie) cake

Hello Makers! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Tommy, I’m the Community Manager here at Makers with a focus on all of you, the amazing Makers Alumni.

Makers invests by far the most time and money into alumni than any other bootcamp — almost any other organisation I can think of. The Makers Alumni community is one of the most vibrant, diverse and fun to work with communities I know. We really value your continued engagement and support.

If I may, I’d like to quickly recap some of the fantastic alumni events that have happened in the past year:

Our series of Talks Nights that have gone from strength to strength;

that have gone from strength to strength; Makers Dinners from Dinerama to the private apartment in St. Pancras clock tower;

from Dinerama to the private apartment in St. Pancras clock tower; Our first-ever Makers Unconference — I found it to be one of the most special events I’ve ever been to;

— I found it to be one of the most special events I’ve ever been to; Code of Colour — our LGBTQ+ series of events

Our exclusive Alumni Slack community has continued to grow and hopefully become even more useful to you all, if you’re not logged in all the time at work you’re missing out — the Careers Channel alone had over 180 different companies with even more dev jobs posted in the past year.

We recently launched a new series called ‘Makers Upskilling’: a monthly meet-up exclusively for alumni bringing you tech and soft skills from machine learning to mental health. Our first two events are focused on machine learning with a guest coach from Google’s Machine Learning team.

Kim from Makers Admissions team sings in her band

There’s lots more planned, but enough of all this waffle! What have we got in store for us today?

Those of you here earlier will have heard Kim from Makers’ Admissions sing in her band.

We’ve also been hearing the disco funky beats from Oliver, Makers’ Finance Director (I’ve always thought you’re far too cool to be a finance director, Oliver).

We have a mingling magician, Jason. Maggie has been hula hooping and will be running a workshop in a few minutes. Also, we have Zoe, winner of UK Face Painter of the Year a few years ago downstairs!

We have coding cocktails over at the bar — I can now reveal all their names: Pina Code’lada, JavaSpritz and Makers Mule. There’s also subsidised pulled foods, retro games, karaoke, garden games… the list goes on.

Tommy & Haylee, the event co-organisers

A huge thanks to Haylee, co-organiser of this event and without her it wouldn’t be possible. I couldn’t wish for a better person to work with on these events.

Right, back to Oliver for some more funky beats, have fun and enjoy the sun!