What I did this year to advance my career — and why you should do these things, too
By: Daphna Regev
Tags: Careers, Self Improvement, Community, Programming, Tech

And Now For The Heavy Lifting

These activities demanded more time, but they also had a larger impact on my career this year.

Write technical articles/blog posts

Remember the story about saying yes? Starting to write was hard. What could I share that would help people? The workshop opened my eyes to the fact that you can write about anything. There is always someone out there that doesn’t know what you know and will be glad to learn, even if you’re a beginner. It’s also a great way to get yourself to learn a topic in depth.

My posts haven’t reached millions but I know for certain they’ve been useful to people and that’s what matters. Now that I’m on the right path, I keep having new ideas for more posts! You need to take the first step.

Take an online course

After going to meetups and talking to friends, I decided I wanted to learn more about data science. I took the Coursera course Machine Learning by Andrew Ng. Since this is a lot of work when you’re juggling full-time work, family, etc, I felt it was a big help to do the course during a local Baot program I participated in called 30 Hours (the course took me much more but who’s counting?) where each participant worked on a different side project and we met online for updates. It really helped to keep me focused and motivated.

Alternatively, you could find a friend and take the course at the same time! Here’s a short talk I gave on the experience of fitting a course into your busy life. Hint: make good use of that commute time…

But why should you take the time to do a course? It can help you delve deeper into the domain you already work with and become more of an expert. This can of course help at work. Alternatively, you can take a course as a way of trying out a new field or technology to see if it’s interesting enough for you to continue exploring. In my case, it helped me affirm that I really was interested in getting into machine learning. This gave me the confidence to push for a move to a team that deals with data science at work.

Attend hackathons

I’ve been curious about hackathons for a while but they’ve seemed too intense, too difficult to fit into my schedule. This year I’ve finally attended one — and then another.

The second was a hackathon named DataHack, my friends and I joined the learning track and won first place in it! It was great fun. For me, it was an opportunity to experience the whole pipeline of data science in action. After learning the more theoretical part in my Coursera course, it gave me the motivation to continue learning this at home.

It can also be an opportunity to meet new friends and make connections. What better way is there to become friends than being stuck together in a room for 24 hours with no sleep?

Organize a meetup in your community

In my case, I felt like getting together with other software developers who are also mothers. I wanted to talk about balancing the different parts of our lives and how each of us chooses to do this. So I did! I’ve organized 2 meeting so far and I’ll probably organize more soon. My meetup had several results. I discovered a lot of people with the same interests as I have. I heard interesting perspectives different than my own. I realized that organizing a meetup is not that hard!

Share knowledge at work

Don’t keep your new experiences to yourself! Wrote a blog post? Share it! Your colleagues might learn something new, but more importantly, they could be inspired to write as well. Attended a hackathon? Tell people! Maybe they’ll want to join next time.

And most importantly, find something you’re passionate about or want to learn and give a talk about it at work. I started with a talk on unit testing and Python mocks for my group, and recently gave a talk on git to all the developers. Not only does this push me to develop my public speaking skills but it also means that now people come to me with questions on these topics. I get to think about more complicated problems that they encounter.