Leaving MDG to become a developer! (by Alice, Dir of Community)

Hi everyone,

Today is my last day as an employee of Meteor Development Group – I’m making a leap to programming! I want to thank everyone in the Meteor community for making my work such a joy for the last two-and-a-half years, and I expect you’ll continue seeing me around. :slight_smile: I will certainly be taking my own advice to budding web developers and using Meteor a lot. It’s been a major inspiration to see the projects we the community have built with Meteor, from major production apps to weekend hacks and everything in between.

For those of you who may not know me super well, I joined MDG in Feb 2013 as a junior-level community manager, doing things like running our monthly San Francisco Devshop event, helping captains start and maintain their own meetup groups all over the world, mailing swag and thank you notes to people, running our social media feeds, writing blog posts, and a bunch of other things. (There’s always lots to do in a 10-person startup!) Then I moved to doing content full-time and wrote lots and lots of blog posts and emails to the mailing list. And finally I became Director of Community last November and got to lead an awesome community team. The company has more than tripled in size since I joined, and the Meteor community has grown still more – it’s been amazing to be part of that, and I’m so excited for Meteor’s future.

I’ve been teaching myself JavaScript over the summer and plan to start self-studying full-time. I also plan to apply to a bootcamp on the way to a full-time coding job next year. @nickcoe will be your go-to community contact going forward; you can say hi to us by emailing us at community@meteor.com or by using the community/meetups contact form here. (They both go to the same place and are just as good as using our individual emails.)

Feel free to ask me anything here, and feel free to say hi through any of my personal channels. I usually go by the name “yaliceme” on the internet; my rudimentary personal website is yalice.me.

Thanks everyone for everything!

Alice Yu

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Congratulations, Alice! Thanks for all the cat herding you’ve done for the community. We’re going to miss you!

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I remember a discussion with friends here in Kraków, comparing Meteor with other web stacks and when we were already out of arguments, I mentioned that Meteor is better, because it’s got cute community leader. They were forced to admit defeat! But what will I tell them now?

Good luck with your Meteor projects! I hope to see an app from you soon, or even two. Take care and thank you for your hard work!

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Alice, you’ve been such a big part of my Meteor community experience. From seeing you on the blog to working with you as a meetup captain to working on your team at Meteor, it’s been a pleasure. You’ve seen over the growth of the community that was so inspiring that I joined the team. :smile: I’m very excited to see you take this step but sorry to lose you here at Meteor. I can’t wait to see where this next step leads you!

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Alice,

It’s been an absolute pleasure to be a part of your team, and I think the growth that the community has seen since you arrived is a testament to the awesome community vibe that you’ve played such a huge part in creating.

Best of luck in your next adventures, although I know we’ll be seeing plenty of you. :slight_smile:

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Good luck with your future plans & thanks for your efforts in the community! :smile:

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Good luck Alice. Hope to see you around the meteor forums :slight_smile:

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Sad to hear you’re leaving MDG. But, good luck in your next venture! Hopefully you find some interesting problems to solve as a developer. :smile:

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Good luck! Your hard work has definitely been appreciated, from your blog contributions to seeing how far the SF devshop has come!

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Congratulations, and good luck

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Waaaaaaaat!

Well, good luck and thanks, Alice! You’ve done a lot for the community, for sure! Hope I get to that tier someday!

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Good luck && have fun with coding! :smile:

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It would be great to share your resources what you used to self-study JavaScript. I am getting so many questions to suggest to people how to learn JavaScript as beginners but I do not have much to share because for me is a completely different learning experience. So consider sharing your experience. :slight_smile:

See you around!

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Great! Now we’ll get to ask you javascript questions as well :smile:

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Best of luck! Becoming a developer was one of the best things to happen to me, and I hope it will be a similar experience for you!

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It’s been great collaborating with you on the Meetup front Alice :). And thanks for being such an awesome host when I visited for Devshop.

I learned on my own and then attended a bootcamp, and I hope it will be a super exciting and awesome time for you! Good luck on your journey wherever you choose to explore!

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Good luck Alice, I appreciate your work at MDG for the community.
Let me know if I can help you in any way along your journey :wink:

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We are always planning for it-
yearning for it.
Saying things will be better-
in the future,
but what is the future, really?

The next day? The next moment?
The future is what we make of it.
Stop waiting for tomorrow-
for it may never come.
Live your life <3

by Caitlin Manderski

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Thanks for all your help over the past year or so, Alice! Best of luck :smile:

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I am glad I had the chance to meet you through your efforts while at MDG.Best of luck Alice!

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