06-27, 17:00–17:50 (America/Los_Angeles), Prime Dome
Open source has a lot to offer potential contributors! Contributing to a project is a great way to build a technical portfolio, learn industry tools/practices, and have real world impact. In turn, new contributors help sustain healthy technical communities and enable them to grow. Mentorship can be an especially powerful tool for cultivating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive tech pipeline. In this talk we discuss what mental barriers students face when it comes to coding and contributing to open source, how to craft mentorship resources, and what resources projects need to build lasting relationships with students.
Tyler Menezes is the Executive Director at CodeDay, where he works to provide welcoming and diverse opportunities for under-served students to explore a future in tech and beyond.
Born in Canada but raised in the Pacific Northwest, he briefly attended the University of Washington before dropping out to start a Y Combinator and venture-backed social video startup in 2011. This, combined with stints working in machine learning at Microsoft Research and as a programmer at several Seattle startups, led to his work finding data-driven solutions to increasing CS diversity and enrollment since 2014.