Date: 24th January 2023
Dear members,
I am happy and proud to announce that today marks three years since Our Tech Community's inception! What a journey it has been!
Some of the events we conducted in our third year:
- OTC CatchUp: We continued our weekly OTC CatchUp sessions and have conducted 115 consecutive weekly sessions at this point, which means that we have conducted over 800 hours of CatchUp sessions! We have maintained summaries of the sessions as well! This has been a mammoth effort and all the credits go to the OTC team. These informal technical discussion and project showcase sessions have fostered a lot of learning and friendships, which is what we have always desired to achieve.
- OTC MeetUp: As per what we promised last year, we started with in-person OTC MeetUp events and have conducted two offline events with ~65 people each at this point. The entire team worked tirelessly to plan and manage the events. We would like to thank Preet Parekh for his help. We had a lot of good technical talks, technical panel discussions, one-on-one conversations and fun!
- GDG DevFest Mumbai 2022: We were approached to be a Community Partner for one of Mumbai's biggest in-person Technical community events with ~800 attendees, the GDG DevFest Mumbai! We were grateful to be able to help the Organisers and learn more about organising events on such a huge scale.
- In-person meets: We had a lot of other informal in-person meets to learn from and have fun with Aditya Oberai, Anil Harwani, Ayush Bhosle, Deepankar Bhade, Ishan Sharma, Omkar Khair, Preet Parekh and other regular OTC CatchUp attendees, when they came to Mumbai.
This year, our team underwent changes. Darshan became an Organiser, and Pranav and Tushar joined us as Admins! A few months in 2022 were particularly challenging for me and I was hardly able to contribute to OTC. The reason that OTC ran smoothly despite that is because of the efforts of the entire team comprising of my friends Darshan, Dheeraj, Kartik, Pranav and Tushar, who went over and above their responsibilities to keep the community going. I will always be very grateful for them and their love for OTC. I am so proud of all of them. They have inspired and taught me so much!
Obviously, none of this would have even been possible without our 450+ members and the people who have attended and continue to attend our sessions. The entire team feels thankful, humbled and grateful for all the support that we have received. It gives us the motivation to keep improving and being better than ourselves. We have all grown, found good connections and have had really good laughs as well.
We had a brief period of reflecting on the future of OTC this year, and Aditya Oberai helped us by giving us pointers to have an honest conversation. Some of the topics were along the lines of looking at the future of OTC, Growth and Scaling, being aware of agendas, setting agendas and Communication. The conclusion for most of them was to keep things as natural, organic and genuine as possible, as we have always aimed to. This conversation helped us look at things clearly, be on the same page, accept each other's differences and reinforce our principles.
Our goals are to foster genuine connections between people and to keep our sessions Technology-focused. This is what we have been doing and will continue to do. We are trying to keep things as natural, genuine, inclusive and organic as we can.
On the technical management side of things, we have been
actively improving and maintaining our web sites, web apps and
projects, especially
the catchup project. We have had community members chip in to help us out as well,
which is highly appreciated. We are always open to
contributions!
Check us out on GitHub.
Moving forward, our plans are to continue OTC CatchUp, hold regular OTC Talks sessions and conduct more in-person OTC MeetUp events. We are open to feedback and suggestions. I hope you all will be a part of OTC and its upcoming activities!
Thank you.
Regards,
Harsh Kapadia
Organiser, OTC