Introduction

If you don’t know what Our Tech Community (OTC) is, here is a TL;DR for you: It is an open-for-all, fun-loving tech community founded by Harsh Kapadia. You can look at all the links and join our Telegram group and catch up with us every Saturday OTC catchup call at 10:30 PM IST.

How do I join in?

A lot of you might not know that OTC was an invite-only community in its initial days and I was invited by Harsh.

It was my first year getting an invitation from a senior for such Elite Club and I was so happy because of this message. I still remember that I was boasting about it in front of all my friends.

It was my first community and for a long time, I didn’t know what it meant. But later I got to know about meet-ups and other communities from Harsh.

How it has impacted me?

OTC has become a very important piece of my life. It is an amazing journey and I’m happy that I enjoyed it to the fullest. From making memes to learning things we have completed 2 years of consecutive CatchUps (1st CatchUp was on the 13th of November, 2020).

The lockdown time (How CatchUp started)

Like some other amazing things in this world CatchUp started with the small idea of having something to vent out after a busy day and just relax.

It started when we were in a meeting with a small group of friends and someone said “Why not do it more often?” and Harsh went like why not 🤷‍♂️

And kids “That’s how CatchUps were started”

It was that time when I, Dheeraj and Kartik started helping Harsh and eventually became Admins at OTC.

Cannot find 1st CatchUp image 😅 (probably it never existed) and Yes we used Jitsi 🙃

Whenever I talk about CatchUp I can never thank Sreekaran less for bringing in a lot of great people to CatchUp.

Friends for life ❤️

Friends are one of the most important things in my life, and yes, I’m a bit possessive about them. CatchUp gave me a lot of friends like Himanshu Sharma, Ishan Sharma, Jai Dewani, Aditya Oberai, Sreekaran, Ayush Pal, Preet Parekh, Rishit Dagli and many more (Sorry I’m too lazy to type out all names, but you know you are in my ❤️)

These folks not only taught me but we did a lot of fun things together (like roasting Harsh) and meeting them IRL was so much more fun!

For career

It helped me with dealing with all my dilemmas like ‘What should I do if I don’t want to continue to code in the future?’ or ‘Which companies should I join?’ and god knows what other things.

Also, I almost learned web dev because of CatchUps. Hopefully will also learn AI/ML someday @Rishit👀

The good things

The best part of being part of a community is that you get to meet a lot of people. I like to talk to new people and connect with them, so naturally, meetups and catchups were my favorite part.

MeetUps

In June, we had our 1st MeetUp (I know very thoughtful naming scheme😅) It was our first meetup so we tried our best and learned a lot in the process.

And we celebrated 100 CatchUps with OTC MeetUp #2. This time we faced new challenges as we all were very busy with life and harsh was also not there to help us😢

These MeetUps are fun but at the same time, they are very hectic for us. But it’s all worth it when we see people learning and enjoying.

CatchUps

How can we forget the amazing art made by Ishan Sharma? It was such an amazing CatchUp

I’m not going to tell the context here 🙃

It always feels great to listen to all the happy/sad stories from others. If you ever joined CatchUp after 3 AM you know what I’m talking about.

CatchUps after 3 AM are the wild west. You will never know what comes next. At one moment you are helping someone next moment is roasting someone and at another, you are measuring pizza sizes.

Let’s agree that we all love to bash and when it comes to bashing Anil is best at it. But being honest he is the one who will give you opinions that you have never thought of and has good reasoning behind them.

From the 1st to the 100th CatchUp we have changed a lot. All the ups and downs have taught us a lot. Be it through our own experience or others, there is always something to take away.

When I look back I will never regret any time spent on CatchUp ❤️

Some serious things

As we all know everything is not sunshine and rainbows. Recently a lot of things came by and we need to focus on a few things as a team and make some important decisions.

Also, I became Organizer, after becoming Organizer I got to know a lot of things which never thought of earlier. Now, whenever I represent OTC I have to be extra cautious which is not something I usually do.

Everyone who has worked in teams might know how difficult it is to take the whole team together and move forward. But when it comes to OTC Team we have a lot of great minds together which makes it more difficult.

Everyone has a different point of view, beliefs and opinions. Which sure does make us slow to do things but we are sure that we have thought this through and tried to look at it from every point of view.

Another recent problem that we are facing is that there was no accountability for work. We are trying to solve it by giving responsibility to everyone. So what we have done is everyone in the team is responsible for something and for whatever reason they are not able to do it, it’s their responsibility to ask someone else to do it for them. What I have learned is to never divide the tasks into micro-tasks, divide them in flows.

For example, if you want to get fruits and vegetables, and the shops are beside each other then you might think that it’s quicker to have two people, one for fruits and the other for vegetables. But sometimes it’s less reliable, by having two people for a task which can be done by one with not much effort just add unnecessary reliance on an extra person and we all might have our fair share of experiences how reliable people are.

Keeping calendar reminders and updating tasks in our group has also helped a bit. As these are some new changes that we have implemented we are yet to see the outcome of these changes, but hoping that it works.

Outro

Thanks a lot, everyone for being there and supporting us. Thanks, Harsh for starting this amazing community!

Hasta La Vista, take care and be happy🙂!