Sam Hepburn is a prominent figure in London's developer community, having dedicated the past decade to building some of the largest tech communities in the world. Her passion lies in fostering welcoming environments where individuals thrive and communities flourish.
Currently, Sam assumes a pivotal role as one of the co-organizers of the virtual Java User Group, boasting a membership of over 17,000 individuals across the globe. Prior to this, she held the position of community lead at Snyk.io, leading initiatives to seamlessly integrate security into developers' workflows. Additionally, she served as the head of the DevSecCon community and is the producer of The Secure Developer Podcast.
In her free time, Sam sits on the steering committee for Devoxx UK, a JVM-focused developer conference, and serves as an advisor for OpenUK, the UK organization for the business of Open Technology. Through her involvement with OpenUK, Sam is dedicated to promoting and supporting the growth of the open technology community in the UK and beyond.
Her contributions to the developer community have earned her recognition, including the prestigious CMX 2023 Developer Relations Community Professional and overall Community Professional of the Year Award.
Do you feel it’s no longer enough to just be a great developer? Does advancing your career mean you have to be blogging, speaking at conferences, engaging on social media, committing to open source and other things distracting you from actually building software?
You’ll do well to ensure that the people making decisions about your career are hearing and seeing your name and associating it with progress and other cool and positive things (and truth, they probably aren’t looking at your code).
In this session we’ll explore some of the best practices that assist in not having to do it all from scratch. Knowing what you are doing can give you an easier path to visible contributions to the community.
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