Launchies - Building a Network  🚀
Tags: beginners, codenewbie, podcast, career
Published: 2022-03-03 00:45:41

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[Rynn Mancuso](https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherinemancuso/) is a Developer Community Manager. They began their career as an Accessibility Engineer working on [Women Who Code](https://www.womenwhocode.com/) and building a WordPress community locally at [Tech Liminal](https://techliminal.com/), and have built developer communities at [Mozilla](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/), [Wikimedia](https://www.wikimedia.org/), [Tidelift](https://tidelift.com/), and [New Relic](https://newrelic.com/).

## 8 am on a Monday
Lauren made sure to make my week start off right with a fun meeting all focused around the community. I was cranky and sleepy but Lauren, of course, brought me up and shared how as a junior she was so nervous about her “numbers” or “followers” when embarking on the tech journey. Plus we had a wonderful guest who is one of THEE experts on community at New Relic. This was a really fun episode and surprise surprise I learned a lot 🤓

## Online Community from Offline Community

Rynn began their journey in community with [Alternate Roots](https://alternateroots.org/) in Atlanta. They learned the power of community but also the power of technology to enable people to a larger audience. Rynn then broke down their story and casually threw in that they worked for Oprah! Huh?! You’ll have to listen to get to know more.

“I can tell stories on the power of community all day” - Rynn 😆

## Speed Dating

Finding your space or your people can be scary, nerve wracking, and all the above. Initially, like Lauren had mentioned, going from meetup to meetup in hopes to make a network and eat free pizza was how things were done “back-in-the-day”. Now, we find ourselves online so things have fortunately become more accessible for some. Rynn had great advice by saying “think of joining a community as showing up for work. You got to like your coworkers…you have to like the other community members.” 

As far as online communities go, Rynn had a lot of great suggestions. They suggested [Dev.to](https://dev.to/) being a great place to learn in public, and surprise x3 that's exactly where you are right now… I think. One of my favorite things to do was joining a slack group like [Techqueria](https://techqueria.org/our-communities/slack/) where I would throw my resume in their resume channel for feedback. It’s tough to know what or which communities to join - ultimately you need to take time to figure out what you want and what is best for you.

![Gif of sunshine baby](https://media.giphy.com/media/65S4BuWyk9h6tCdhHX/giphy.gif)
 

#### Call To Action 🤡
###### Write us on Twitter [New Relic](https://twitter.com/newrelic), [Lauren](https://twitter.com/lolocoding), and [Danny](https://twitter.com/muydanny)! 

###### You can leave a comment with your answers too or email-chain us hehe

- What are things you are looking for within a community you want to join?

#### More Stuff!

✨ Join the New Relic Community [Slack](bit.ly/NRslack)!

👉 Follow [Launchies](https://twitter.com/LaunchiesShow/), [Lauren](https://twitter.com/lolocoding), and [Danny](https://twitter.com/muydanny) on Twitter!

🚨 [FutureStack 2022 call for papers is now open!](https://www.cvent.com/c/abstracts/cc3cd8bb-b60c-43ec-91a9-82a78cb926ab?utm_source=launchies) 🚨