SDE Skills traces its genesis way back to early 2010. We saw motivated engineers, with multiple years of technical experience, struggle at technical interviews. The technical interview process was pioneered by Microsoft, and later picked up by almost all new-age technical companies. The premise was that technical knowledge, problem solving and creativity were better predictors of success as opposed to traditional interviewing that relied on probing goals and weaknesses interviews.
Our very first meetup was way back in late 2010, we used to regularly meet at a Starbucks near Barnes and Nobles in Bellevue. They had a tiny meeting room with a whiteboard. Worked perfectly for the small group of 4-5 folks. And before we knew it, we had grown dramatically.
Just by numbers, after 9+ years of serving the community, we have a strong following of
Our meetups are frequent and regular. We meet in-person, each week, and discuss various topics. The part that is impressive is that we are an entirely volunteer driven / volunteer led / volunteer supported group. We run an ultra lean operation, leveraging facilities and infrastructure provided by the county (thank you KCLS.org). Look at the list of our presenters
A quick glance at the meetup statistics, we have organized nearly 400 events. Our weekly meetups format has evolved over the years to the current form, where we ask our members to sign up to present any topic of their choosing. Our meetups are extremely inclusive and we actively encourage participation. We cover a broad range of topics from simple data structures to more advanced topics such as system design.
To support the needs of the broader world-wide community, we have a slack group with 3800+ members. I peeked at the Slack statistics, we have about 200-250 active members at any time, with about 3000+ messages being sent and 20-30 files being uploaded each month. Click here to get invited to the slack.
Look for our next post where we talk about our plans for 2020.