Four Years of OTC

Date: 24^th January 2024

Dear members,

I am delighted to announce that Our Tech Community has completed four years since its inception! To commemorate this occasion, we held an in-person meetup, OTC MeetUp #4, where alongside technical lightning talks, I recapped some of OTC's activities throughout these four years, gave my thanks to our team and members, and talked about our future plans. I'll sum up OTC's four years here as well.

Our notable events in the last four years:

• OTC CatchUp
  • These are weekly informal online Tech discussions with project showcases and technical debates.
  • We've conducted 167 consecutive weekly sessions till date, which translates to conducting these sessions weekly for over 3.2 years without a break!
  • We've had over 800 hours of learning and fun till date!
  • We also diligently maintained summaries for each session.
  • Attend a session!

  
• OTC MeetUp
  • These are in-person Tech meetups to learn through technical talks and conversations.
  • We've conducted four official in-person meetups till date, with over 70 attendees each!
  • We would like to thank Preet Parekh and the Devfolio team for their support for all the meetups.
  • Slide decks, pictures and more details

  
• OTC Talks
  • These are online technical talks held before OTC CatchUp.
  • The aim is to encourage people to give 15 to 60 minute talks on technical topics. It also provides a good starting point for the OTC CatchUp discussion to start.
  • We've held five such talks till date.
  • Going forward, we want to conduct these talks once a month and have deeper technical content.
  • Feel free to fill the CFP to give a talk and do share it with people who you think might be interested!

  
• Unofficial meetups
  • Throughout the years, we've learnt from a lot of people and have had great relationships with them, so when they're in town, we try to get a few of our regular members together to meet them in-person!
  • Some of the people we've stepped out to meet include Aditya Oberai, Anil Harwani, Ayush Bhosle, Deepankar Bhade, Ishan Sharma, Omkar Khair and Preet Parekh.
  • We would love to have more of these fun hangouts! Let us know if you're in town!

  
• Collaborations
  • We also had a lot of collaborations with other technical communities throughout the years.
  • Some of our notable collaborations:
    • DevFest Mumbai 2022 and 2023 with GDG MAD was a great learning experience for the OTC team.
    • We helped organise Women's Day Mumbai 2023 with over 20 technical communities in Mumbai.
    • We conducted multiple online Hacktoberfest 2021 workshops with GDSC TSEC and TSEC CodeCell.
  • We're always open for collaborations, so feel free to reach out to us!
• More details regarding our events can be found at events.ourtech.community.

All in all, I think we have done amazing work in these last four years, put in a lot of effort and have shown consistency and dedication towards conducting hundreds of events and keeping them as organic and Tech-focused as we can. We have been able to conduct these events, learn from them and build friendships, mainly because of two sets of people. One set is the people who attend our events and the other set is the OTC team. I briefly want to express my gratitude to all these inspiring people.

Our attendees and members:

Thank you so much for attending our events, and for giving your time, knowledge, experience, advice and energy to everyone at our events. We all have built genuine bonds with each other and have learnt a lot from each other. We have all collectively helped each other be better and that makes me immensely proud. I feel so grateful to realise that we have an atmosphere in OTC where we all want each other to progress and have each other's backs when things aren't going well. That, I believe, is the strength of Our Tech Community and what indeed makes it our tech community.

The OTC Team:

There are six people who help OTC run smoothly. I cannot thank the team enough for putting in so much effort towards the community and for inspiring me to be better. The community wouldn't exist without their hard work. A lot of their principles have shaped the community and how we decide to go about doing things, which I have learnt from and am immensely proud of. We know each other well and have learnt to complement each other and work together. I am incredibly thankful and grateful to have these people in my life as friends and as OTC's team members.

• Darshan Rander
  Darshan is an Organiser at OTC alongside me. He has put in immense efforts into OTC right since it started. He takes a lot of initiative to do things and shows a lot of enthusiasm. He finds things to be done to achieve something and keeps at it till there is some resolution. When I had to move to the USA for the foreseeable future, I did not have to think for more than a minute to find someone who could handle things in India and take initiative on their own. Apart from admiring Darshan for his work with OTC, I have noticed that he is a good coder and also writes great poems!
• Dheeraj Lalwani
  Dheeraj is an Admin with OTC and has again been there since the start of OTC. He has been a regular at OTC CatchUp and has contributed to OTC in multiple ways, be it writing summaries, handling social media, helping with planning and organisation, and more.
• Kartik Soneji
  Kartik is an Admin at OTC and is a class apart in terms of his technical skills and principles. He has been there with us since OTC started and has imparted a lot of his principles and experience to help everyone around him be better.
• Pranav Dani
  Pranav is an Admin at OTC and has been a regular at OTC CatchUp since the initial sessions. He mainly helps us with summaries and social media apart from other things. He has good knowledge of hardware, which we have benefitted and learnt from.
• Tushar Nankani
  Tushar is an Admin at OTC and has worn multiple hats. He is great at communication, planning and organisation. He again has good principles and has handled a lot of difficult situations with maturity. He oversees OTC Talks sessions and is also responsible for most of our designing work, amongst other things.
• More information about the OTC team

We have conducted a lot of events, we have a great set of people attending our events, a great team working tirelessly behind the scenes and a supportive environment to grow. We're all extremely grateful to have all this. Thank you! Let us now look at our plans for OTC going ahead.

Our future plans:

• At OTC, we have always kept a focus on Technical content. From now on, we will try to present deeper technical content and we plan to do that through OTC Talks.
• OTC Talks will be an area of focus. We will try to conduct one session per month and bring in speakers to talk deeply about a particular topic. If you know anyone, please get in touch with us!
• With OTC CatchUp, we will try to automate our summary writing process using some AI tool to generate a summary on the fly that we can edit after the session.
• I wanted to get more people from the USA involved with OTC. We don't have a specific plan for this yet, but if anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears!

Our ask:

Our events are open to all and aim to teach, help and foster genuine connections between people. We have mainly been focused on learning and thus rely mainly on our attendees to ask their friends and acquaintances to attend our events. Word-of-mouth publicity is the way a lot of people join us and we believe that although slow, this is a more organic way to have people attend our events and leads to better bonds between all of us as well. So, if you like any of our events and learn something from them, we request you to ask your friends to join us for some of our events, hang around for a bit and talk to people! We're sure they will enjoy and learn a lot with OTC!

We also wanted to remind everyone that we are on the lookout for people who are willing to give 15 to 60 minute-long deeper technical talks, so if anyone knows someone who might be interested, please reach out to us and fill the CFP! It would be of great help!

In conclusion, I want to thank our attandees and members, and the OTC team. I am proud of everything we all have done together. We will try our best to do even better moving forward and I hope you join us for the journey!

Thank you!

Regards,
Harsh Kapadia
Organiser, OTC