Skip the crowded job hunt: Find your tribe instead

Showing up at local meetups led to real experience, a portfolio, and my first job offer.

It’s 2019, and I’m about to graduate with a master’s in business. As a grad assistant with a computer science degree, I could tackle and simplify challenges in ways most of my peers couldn’t. For example, I could easily spin up landing pages for marketing campaigns using 11ty, WordPress, Hugo, Drupal, or my university’s Omni CMS. With graduation approaching, I had to choose: Search for a tech job, switch to a business role, or find some hybrid role in between.

The biggest challenge was that I liked the perks of working in tech, most notably, the casual dress code and the ability to work remotely. Either way, I wanted a promising job and was willing to try something different. After earning my undergraduate degree, I worked for a few years as a system administrator. While it had its ups and downs, that job didn’t feel like something I’d enjoy long-term—for a lot of reasons, but mostly management and pay.

Exploring different tribes

This time around, I decided to explore different open source communities. Hopefully, I could find my tribe, as described by Seth Godin in his book Tribes. So my journey began by checking out some opportunities in the Atlanta area. At the time, I lived about halfway between Chattanooga, TN and Atlanta, GA.

Luckily, a lot of tech communities had groups listed on Meetup.com, which made it easier to discover and attend a variety of events. Sometimes they were held at Mailchimp offices or at Google headquarters in Atlanta, which was always fun to explore.

Other times the meetups were at smaller, lesser-known businesses, but still a good chance to learn and network. When there were more than 20 people and free food, it often got harder to connect, since plenty came just for the meal and weren’t really interested in networking. I probably tried at least eight communities, going to each one a couple of times. I always learned something, but I can’t say I made much real progress with any of them, though that might’ve been partly on me.

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Finding my tribe in open source

Right before starting grad school, I turned my attention to Chattanooga, a smaller town compared to Atlanta, but it still had some meetups listed. That’s when I found the Chattanooga Drupal Users group. I’d heard of Drupal back in undergrad. I remember researching it and watching a few YouTube videos while trying to decide between WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal for a nonprofit site I was building. I chose Joomla back then because it seemed more flexible and let me get the job done quickly. Yet here I was, stumbling onto a Drupal meetup four years later.

I came in with an open mindset, ready to learn a new tool and see what the community was like. Pretty quickly, I realized there was a lot of tech jargon or what you might call “Drupalism” inside the community. After those first few meetups, I usually left with more questions than answers.

That wasn’t unique to Drupal. I’d seen it before at React, Ruby on Rails, and other meetups in Atlanta. But at those, there was usually a speaker, and people left right after, so I didn’t get a chance to ask questions or get feedback. Chattanooga was different. The Drupal group there had a loose, open format where anyone (beginner to pro) could bring up questions, challenges, or doubts. Most questions turned into discussions about different approaches to building sites.

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The shortcut I didn’t expect

After about six months, they invited me to the Chattanooga Drupal Camp scheduled for mid-July 2019. Camps are really just a smaller, one-day conference, with learning and networking opportunities. 

I thought to myself, a tech conference? On a weekend? I wasn’t sure it would offer much beyond the regular meetups. But I figured I could at least learn something, and maybe do a little networking. To my surprise, a VP of IT and a few developers from the University of Tennessee Chattanooga (UTC) were there, looking to hire a new Drupal developer.

By then, I had built a few Drupal sites from my graduate assistant work and others on my own. I had a mini portfolio ready to share. I knew of UTC, but I was finishing my degree at a different university.

After a few emails and sharing my portfolio, UTC reached out to schedule an interview. And from there, my open source developer journey began. I was lucky. Not everyone finds a tech tribe that welcomes you, gives feedback, and helps you grow into a new technology. I’m sure other open source communities offer something similar, but for me, Drupal and the Chattanooga Drupal User Group, made all the difference.

Conclusion

I didn’t start my journey looking for a Drupal developer role. I was just looking for my tribe at a nearby open source community where I could network and share knowledge. But sometimes, the best opportunities show up off the beaten path, in the technologies others overlook. For a while, I stood in the same line as most recent grads, but once I switched lines, it was shorter and far more rewarding.

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