Linking Locals: Fostering Tech Networks in Non-Tech Hubs- ep.155

Join us on this exciting journey in the latest episode of The Jali Podcast where we sit down with Nic Raboy, an influential technologist and community builder in Tracy, California. Discover Nic’s compelling story from a computer science graduate struggling to find local work, to a leader fostering a vibrant tech community outside the traditional hubs. In this discussion, Nic shares his experiences of founding a meetup group aimed at uniting Central Valley tech professionals and enthusiasts to learn, share, and grow together.

Dive into the insights on overcoming geographical barriers in the tech industry, fostering local talent, and the power of community-driven tech education. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in how tech communities can drive change and offer new opportunities far from Silicon Valley.

Melyssa Barrett:  Welcome to the Jali Podcast. I’m your host, Melyssa Barrett. This podcast is for those who are interested in the conversation around equity, diversity, and inclusion. Each week I’ll be interviewing a guest who has something special to share or is actively part of building solutions in the space. Let’s get started. Welcome to the Jali Podcast. Today we’re diving into the modern tech development and a touch of nostalgia with a very special guest. Joining us is Nic Raboy, a passionate advocate for modern web and mobile development technologies. He has expertise in all sorts of frameworks and programming languages, and he is all about making development easier to understand and more accessible for everyone. Not only does Nic share his technical adventures and tips on his popular blog, the Polyglot developer, but he’s also a driving force in my local community as the organizer of the Tracy Developer Meetup in Tracy, California.

His mission to bring technical opportunities beyond the Bay Area and empower people of all ages to thrive in the world of technology. But Nic’s story doesn’t end with tech when he is not coding or mentoring. He’s indulging in his love for gaming and all things Pokemon through his brand Poke trainer, Nic. Nic streams and publishes content about the Pokemon Trading card game video games and merchandise often with his family by his side. So whether you’re a developer, a Pokemon fan, or simply someone who loves inspiring stories, this episode has something for you. Let’s dive in and learn more about boy, his journey and the Tracy Debs this week. Exciting for me. I get to talk to Nic Raboy, and I’m excited to talk to you because doing all sorts of creative and wonderful things in my city of Tracy, California, which isn’t the big city in the Bay Area, but definitely need some love. So I wanted to start out just by talking a little bit about maybe asking you a little bit about your background and how you even started such a group of professionals and why you wanted to get into this.

Nic Raboy:  Yeah, definitely. So I’ll give a little bit of my background and I’ll ease into how this started, but I graduated from uc, Merced with a computer science degree, and I think people are more familiar with uc, Merced, if they’re in the Central Valley, but it’s in central California. So graduating from uc, Merced, and this was 15 or so years ago, I had a heck of a time trying to find work out Bay Area work because people wanted workers that were in the Bay Area. So I felt a lot of my applications were going straight to the trash bin, things like that. Fast forward a little bit, I did make it into the tech world outside of the Central Valley, but that tech world was very expensive living in the Bay Area, so I actually had to move to the Bay Area. I lived in Dublin for a little bit, Dublin, California, not Dublin, Ireland, but it was very expensive. So we ended up moving back into the Central Valley area. Well, still a little, I don’t know if people consider Tracy to be Central Valley or Bay Area or both hybrid.

Melyssa Barrett:  Yeah, we’re a little bit right on the

Nic Raboy:  Edge. Yeah. I moved back and this was me at that point in time, I was working remote so I didn’t have to commute into the office, but there just is not a lot of tech opportunities in the Central Valley. I’ve heard people share my similar experience. They graduated from CSU Stanislau or uc, Merced or Fresno State, and they have a heck of a time trying to break into the tech scene, not because they’re not qualified or talented, just because they’re not really in a geographic region that’s familiar with tech. The tech companies of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, they don’t see these locations as top tier, and that’s kind of how I broke into the meetup scene. I thought, well, what if I can gather all of these people that I know are in the Central Valley that have technical experience and build this technical community so that way we can inspire and get people hired outside of the Bay Area basically.

Melyssa Barrett:  Yeah, for sure.

Nic Raboy:  People shouldn’t have to commute three hours from Tracy to get to Cupertino or something. That would’ve been me. It’s rough. Yeah,

Melyssa Barrett:  No doubt.

Nic Raboy:  Yeah, so this was about six years ago. The remote work was kind of still up and coming. I know it’s a lot easier to find a remote gig nowadays than it once was, but the whole idea was to try to get people interested in the Central Valley.

Melyssa Barrett:  That’s awesome. Well, and I think it translates, I think for lots of people around the country, even the world that are looking for positions and struggling to find them. So I love the idea of creating a meetup because I think it’s a lot easier when you’re not by yourself. So then how did this idea come about when you just were sitting there and said, Hey, I am going to create this meetup and start meeting with people or

Nic Raboy:  So professionally I do this kind of stuff for work, not really the meetup thing, but just events in general. My professional life, I am in what’s called developer relations part of the tech world. So we do a lot of conferences, meetups, events kind of stuff. It wasn’t a foreign subject to me, but it still required some upkeep. So I was familiar with creating a group. That’s what I did in Tracy. I just went on meetup.com at the time started the group. That’s all it takes. It’s like creating a Facebook group or a LinkedIn group. Nothing too complicated about it, but that’s the easy part. The hard part is actually getting people to come out.

Melyssa Barrett:  Absolutely.

Nic Raboy:  So growing the network, getting people excited that involve some local ads. So I placed ads for the Tracy Press. I reached out personally to people that I’ve once worked with that I know that are in the Central Valley for word of mouth, and eventually we started getting a crew, which then led us to, well, we needed guest presenters, so that’s where the fund started. Finding all these guest presenters in the Bay Area or the Central Valley, doesn’t really matter. People from out of state, whoever wants to come and join our meetup and educate us on something. Amazing.

Melyssa Barrett:  Well, and I think that’s so interesting to me because I know you have had lots of different topics. You really have some amazing people that come and share really hands-on information as well, so it’s not like one of those fluffy panel talks. You know what I mean? You guys get into some real detail about modeling and artificial intelligence and all sorts of things. So you, I acquire some of these folks and dig into detail. I think the last meeting you even had a recruiter on, which was awesome.

Nic Raboy:  Yeah, so first off, we try to avoid the panels and stuff because this is people coming to these meetups. They’re doing it because they want to be there and they want to learn something actually useful. They’re not being sent here by their employer. It’s a Friday night that we host these on. They’re dedicating their own time,

So we have to make it worth it. So we are a pretty close group. We take feedback, we take ideas. People make suggestions on what they’d like to see at the group. Sometimes they come up with speakers because they have their networks as well. Sometimes I have to go do the outreach in my network that I’ve accumulated, and we do have a variety of topics. AI is very hot right now, so we have a lot of AI type sessions, and these are in the weed sessions of people actually showing you how to develop with ai, not just how to use chat GPT or anything. It’s actually how to do it from a professional level. And like you said, we had a recruiter last time. I know that a lot of people in the area were hit hard by layoffs. People are doing a lot of career pivots right now. They’re graduating from local bootcamps and they’re struggling to have their resumes seen even before actually starting the interview process. So that’s why we had the recruiter to educate us on the process so that way we can boost our chances of success.

Melyssa Barrett:  Yeah, let’s pause for a moment. We’ll be right back. I think it’s so awesome to me. I mean, there’s such a wide range of topics, whether you’re talking about cybersecurity or ai, I mean, there’s the detail that you all present and provide literally is stuff people can take away today and use. And I know there’s a lot of folks being hit with AI kind of taking over their job. In some cases it’s like, okay, well let AI do the coding or whatever. But I think there’s lots of hope out there because I think there’s so much upskilling that’s going to be involved. And so I love the fact that you are focused on this and where do you see this going in the future? How do you, and please tell people how to participate and where you are and all of that.

Nic Raboy:  Yeah, for sure. Where the meetup group is going in the future, well, we’re just going to continue to follow the hot, hot software development trends. Could be AI today, could be something else tomorrow. We’re here to learn and better ourselves so that way we can be more successful at our current jobs or give us ideas for maybe jobs that we didn’t know existed, and then we can do outreach there. Something before I go into how do you get involved, I do want to touch on something that we didn’t touch on yet. The group isn’t just for learning purposes, so meetup groups in general, whether that be the Tracy Developer meetup or some other meetup group, it’s a networking opportunity. Networking opportunity is better than anything else you can do for yourself because when it comes to landing the next job, you can either put your resume in a pool of 10,000 other resumes or you can talk to the person who actually knows somebody that can get you to the front of the, so it’s a good thing.

Melyssa Barrett:  Yeah, no, definitely. And especially, I mean, I think I find outside of the Bay Area, they have all of these groups, but once you start getting outside of some huge city, it becomes a little harder to connect people together, and I think a lot of cities are trying to figure out how do we make sure that we have the great places that people live, work, and play. Let’s make sure that we have jobs here that people can actually use and innovate with.

Nic Raboy:  Absolutely. Yeah. We actually, we have people from all over California coming to this group to participate. We have frequents from the Merced area, the Sacramento area. We even have people from the Bay area coming down to visit us now. That’s

Melyssa Barrett:  Awesome.

Nic Raboy:  So it’s a good thing as far as getting involved though. So right now there is a Tracy devs.com website, which is always up to date with the upcoming events. Also our LinkedIn page. So we have a LinkedIn Tracy Devs page where you can go an RSVP to the events and they’re always free. We never charge, so we want it to be accessible for everyone.

Melyssa Barrett:  That’s awesome. I know at one point you were doing these on Zoom and then you were doing them in person and you still are, and then now you’re also kind of offering some other after the fact options, maybe if they missed it.

Nic Raboy:  Yeah, so we started the group before covid and we were in person that was the best. Then we had to pivot and we had to do the remote meetups for a couple years. They weren’t great. If you have ’em online, it is not as motivating to either have your camera on or sometimes you forget because you’re sitting at home and other things come up. The experience wasn’t that great. We went back to in person as soon as we could. There are exceptions though. So usually the end of the year meetups we do online. So the last one, which was our November meetup with the recruiter we did online just because people are less, the weather changes, it’s raining, it’s dark, people don’t want to come out, and then there’s holidays. But other than that, I mean throughout the rest of the year we try to meet in person.

Melyssa Barrett:  Awesome. So do you have something planned for the next one you want to tease us with, or are you still planning

Nic Raboy:  Right now? I’m planning for 2025. We’re not going to do one in December. The December ones never work out. Great. So I’m trying to line some people up for January. Yeah.

Melyssa Barrett:  Okay. And when do they take place?

Nic Raboy:  As of right now, they always take place on a Friday at 6:00 PM which Friday it happens to be. It’s up to whoever our guest speaker is because we want to be flexible. We’ve explored doing it on other days of the week. The group tends to prefer Fridays. That’s what they’ve all said. I think it’s because maybe they don’t have to wake up for work the next day in the morning. They can just start their Saturday.

Melyssa Barrett:  Yeah, no doubt for sure. Especially out here in this bedroom community, especially if you’re commuting or any of that. So that’s nice. It’s a good Friday night for sure. And then you are, I know you said there’s a Tracy developer website, but does it also then give you all the information in terms of where you’re located and all of that?

Nic Raboy:  Yeah, it has addresses. So as of right now, we always have our meetups at Work Vine 2 0 9 here in Tracy. It’s easily accessible from the highway. And most of Tracy,

Melyssa Barrett:  Yes, and shout out to Eric and Linda Hawkins. Appreciate them so much Work. Vine 2 0 9, that’s the place.

Nic Raboy:  Yep, absolutely. It’s coworking space.

Melyssa Barrett:  Yes. So awesome. So then anything else you want to leave us with?

Nic Raboy:  No, I mean, if you’re in the area, if you’re within a reasonable distance to Tracy, sign up, participate. This is a all ages family friendly group. Don’t worry about having to find a babysitter for your kids. Bring ’em along. I bring my kids occasionally as well. And if you’re not in the area, consider going to a meetup group that’s local to you. They’re very beneficial.

Melyssa Barrett:  Yeah, no doubt. And let me just say I went and the information is just so amazing. I think it’s awesome. I’ve tried to get there as often as I can, so I love the fact if you happen to put it online and I miss one, I get to actually catch up. So I just am really trying to help promote this particular meetup because not only do I think it’s such a great space, but the diversity of the group and being able to pull in people that are really just interested, whether they’re kids in high school or whether they’re coming from whatever walk of life, I am just so grateful, Nick, that you’re so open to just whoever wants to come in, let’s teach people, let’s educate, let’s network. And so it’s an awesome space, especially when you talk about STEM and all the tech that’s going on in the world.

Nic Raboy:  Yeah, it’s never too early to start breaking an attack. I mean, hackathons are kind of fun with the family. Meetups are a good way to ease into that. And it’s good stuff for your college application as well.

Melyssa Barrett:  Definitely. Definitely. And Nic is a great person to, so if you want to get out there, check him out. Well, thank you so much, Nic. I know this is a short one, but I figured it would be awesome if we could just get you on, talk a little bit about what you’re doing and then hopefully we can build some additional support going forward. Maybe we’ll have to branch out and have multiple chapters or something.

Nic Raboy:  Yeah, maybe. We’ll see.

Melyssa Barrett:  But anyway, feel free. Check him out. I will make sure that we put all the information in the podcast description so that you can reach out, whether it be through the website or to Nick directly. I think it’s just awesome. So whoever you know that may have an affinity for tech and they live in the area, definitely reach out and plug in. It makes a lot of sense. Whether you’re interested in cybersecurity or AI or whatever type of tech, there’s so much.

Nic Raboy:  Yeah, we do diverse topics.

Melyssa Barrett:  Yeah, for sure. So thank you so much, Nick, for joining me.

Nic Raboy:  Thanks for having me.

Melyssa Barrett:  Yeah, I look forward on the Jali podcast to filling up the rooms that you’re going to create in the space. I have big vision for you, so

Nic Raboy:  Thank you

Melyssa Barrett:  Go. Thanks again. Thank you. Thanks for joining me on the Jali Podcast. Please subscribe so you won’t miss an episode. See you next week.