Tech Career Events for Software Engineers

Also happy to share honest thoughts and feedback on well-known accelerators: Y Combinator, PearX, TechStars

What you get:

• Hear ideas from other ambitious engineers to make your own idea/pitch better.
• Taro (this platform!) is a YC-funded startup from S22. Rahul can share thoughts about how Taro got in and what he learned.
• Rahul has personally reviewed and recommended 10+ companies that have gotten funding and launched their product.

Relevant resources:

• How To Approach "Doing Your Own Thing" -- Startup Discussion And Feedback
• [Taro Top 10] Entrepreneurship And Tech Startups
• "How did you decide to quit your job and make a startup?" (by Alex)
• How To Prepare To Leave Big Tech For A Startup
• Taro at YC's Demo Day (Summer 2022)

This session will not be recorded. Group Office Hours are a communal way to get the personalized career advice you need.

To learn how to do a mock interview, check out some recorded mocks: https://start.interviewing.io/showcase

We know that a lot of folks want a mock interview but are unsure/not confident to give one themselves, so we highly recommend using the additional resources here to really learn how to give mock interviews:

• [Masterclass] How To Be An Amazing Interviewer In Tech
• Meta Software Engineer Interview Question Breakdown: Finding Unique Integers
• Meta Software Engineer Onsite Interview Question Breakdown: K-Closest Points

Honestly, a lot of the value for giving a mock interviewer is just being a responsive human on the other side. No need to be a super DSA genius to give a proper mock interview!

Please come prepared to give a Medium LeetCode question if you plan to exchange mocks. If you need help choosing a question, I recommend sorting the LeetCode questions by interview frequency and picking a medium level question.

If there are volunteers, there will be a mock interview that others can spectate.

Your mock interview journey doesn't have to end here - Use this platform to find other folks to mock interview with in the future: https://www.jointaro.com/networking/

• [Course] Ace Your Tech Interview And Get A Job As A Software Engineer
• [Course] Get More Interviews: Write A Stellar Resume As A Software Engineer
• [Course] Master The Behavioral Interview As A Software Engineer

Don't miss this opportunity to deepen your understanding of how geometrical insights can drive improvements in AI reasoning. Whether you're an AI researcher, practitioner, or enthusiast, this talk promises to offer valuable perspectives and groundbreaking ideas.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02678
(Accompanying paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.01648)

https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol17/p3731-schulze.pdf

This paper presents an overview of ClickHouse, a popular opensource OLAP database designed for high-performance analytics over petabyte-scale data sets with high ingestion rates. Its storage layer combines a data format based on traditional log-structured merge (LSM) trees with novel techniques for continuous transformation (e.g. aggregation, archiving) of historical data in the background. Queries are written in a convenient SQL dialect and processed by a state-of-the-art vectorized query execution engine with optional code compilation. ClickHouse makes aggressive use of pruning techniques to avoid evaluating irrelevant data in queries. Other data management systems can be integrated at the table function, table engine, or database engine level. Real-world benchmarks demonstrate that ClickHouse is amongst the fastest analytical databases on the market.

We will go into the details of why and how Clickhouse is one of the fastest OLAP database, its underlying storage engine, and the overall philosophy for performance.

In this #taro-bookclub discussion, we'll go over Chapter 3 of "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hund & David Thomas

Here's the agenda:

• Power of Plain Text
• Shell Games
• Power Editing
• Version Control
• Debugging
• Text Manipulation
• Engineering Daybooks

Please send your questions ahead of time to Bikram Kashyap in the Taro Premium Slack, so that they can be included in the discussion. If you don't have the book or want more details on how this all works, check out the #taro-bookclub channel in the Taro Premium Slack as well!

Get ready for another engaging and informative session!

For up to date information about this event please tune into the #g-la-socal-meetup channel on the Taro Premium Slack server. :)

There is free lot parking on the south-east corner of Serrano and 6th (don't worry about the signs for other businesses; they are closed on Sunday)

WHERE TO FIND US: We meet in the patio in the rear of the cafe.

SAVE YOUR RECEIPT: This way I can reimburse your drink.

See you there!

By the way: +1s are welcome!

• [Course] Master The Behavioral Interview As A Software Engineer
• https://www.youtube.com/@DanCroitor

Some ideas for behavioral interview questions to ask: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/437082/Amazon-Behavioral-questions-or-Leadership-Principles-or-LP

If there are volunteers, there will be a mock interview that others can spectate.

Please come prepared to give ask behavioral questions if you plan to exchange mocks.

Can't make the event? No worries, just ask your question anonymously in the Taro forum: https://www.jointaro.com/questions/create/

This session is to discuss your progress on the above issues, as discussed in the Senior to Staff course. Come with your questions and discussions. If you'd like to share a story or experience, please message Rahul in the Taro Premium Slack.

Some topics we'll discuss:

• How to know where you stand on the path to promotion.
• How to get (or create) scope on a team with many talented engineers.
• How managers and directors perceive very senior IC roles.

Taro resources:

• Grow From Senior To Staff Engineer: L5 To L6
• Nail Your Promotion As A Software Engineer
• What makes a staff engineer from a technical perspective?
• What's the Difference Between A Senior And Staff Engineer?

In this #taro-bookclub discussion, we'll go over "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hund & David Thomas

Here's the agenda:

• Decoupling
• Juggling the Real World
• Transforming Programming
• Inheritance Tax
• Configuration

Please send your questions ahead of time to Bikram Kashyap in the Taro Premium Slack, so that they can be included in the discussion. If you don't have the book or want more details on how this all works, check out the #taro-bookclub channel in the Taro Premium Slack as well!

Get ready for another engaging and informative session!

To stay up-to-date on logistics (especially on the day-of), make sure you're a part of the #g-sf-bayarea-meetup channel in the Taro Premium Slack.

We're excited to meet you!

• [Masterclass] How To Ace Your Big Tech Interview - System Design
• https://start.interviewing.io/showcase
• https://bytebytego.com/
• The book "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann

Each week we pick one system design mock to discuss as a group. You should watch this mock interview before joining the meeting.

Mock interview to study: TBD

Apply at: https://timetobuild.dev (NOTE: the timing of this event is the deadline to apply, there is no actual event or talk happening at that time.)

The goal of this side project accelerator is to help ~10 individuals or small teams turn a side project into a real product in 6 weeks, from October 14th to November 22nd.

My hope is that >50% of those teams end up working on their projects full time, through either funding or bootstrapping.

There will be a big focus on AI. Every project should be incorporating AI into the product and development process. We will spend a lot time talking about this.

The group will be remote. We will meet twice a week (probably Mondays and Thursdays) and have a busy slack channel. We will have our own little demo day at the end of the process and help each other launch.

I will try to help every team in some way. Depending on what your biggest blocker is, I can help with product decisions, figuring out a business model, understanding your users, engineering challenges, and sales/marketing.

But the most value I add will come from bringing a sense of urgency and accountability.

This is a free thing I’m doing for fun. If you are selected to join you are expected to commit to the full 6 weeks and take it seriously.

Who am I?

Hi, I’m Daniel O’Shea. I’m a Director of Engineering at X. Previously founder/CTO at Laskie (acquired by Twitter/X) and Interviewed (YC S15, acquired by Indeed).

I’ve worked as both an engineer and product manager, and as a founder I’ve done a bit of design, sales, marketing, account management, and a variety of other jobs.

Most importantly, I really love building products and helping other people build products.

Who should apply?

Apply if you meet most of the criteria below:

• You have a side project that you want to turn into a real product.
• The project is ambitious and you want it to eventually become your full-time thing.
• You have experience building stuff OR you are a domain expert who recently learned to build stuff with AI dev tools.
• You are very interested in building with AI.
• You are willing to commit at least 20 hours a week to your side project for 6 straight weeks. If you can work full time some of the weeks, even better. No weeks off.
• You are willing to join calls that are in the late afternoon/early evening Pacific time.

Logistics

• I may have follow up questions or ask you to jump on a 15 min call to help me make a decision.
• I will notify everyone that's been selected before October 2nd.

APPLY: https://timetobuild.dev

The Segment Anything paper introduced the Segment Anything Model (SAM), a novel, general-purpose image segmentation model designed to handle a wide variety of tasks with minimal user input.

Join this event to deep dive into this paper, explore its innovative approach to promptable segmentation and uncover the wide-ranging applications of SAM across various domains.

As a follow-up, our next session will cover the recently released Segment Anything 2 paper, building on the concepts discussed in this event.

Your Host:

Ujjwal is a Software Engineer on Meta’s Generative AI team, working on safety of Large Language Models. He is a core contributor to Llama 3 and worked on open-sourcing Llama Guard 2.

Can't make the event? No worries, just ask your question anonymously in the Taro forum: https://www.jointaro.com/questions/create/

https://db.in.tum.de/\~leis/papers/ART.pdf

This paper reading session, we will deep dive into a in-memory optimized index structure, that leverages modern CPU caches to make IOPS faster, also allowing range queries.

Abstract—Main memory capacities have grown up to a point where most databases fit into RAM. For main-memory database systems, index structure performance is a critical bottleneck. Traditional in-memory data structures like balanced binary search trees are not efficient on modern hardware, because they do not optimally utilize on-CPU caches. Hash tables, also often used for main-memory indexes, are fast but only support point queries.

In this #taro-bookclub discussion, we'll go over "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hund & David Thomas

Here's the agenda:

• Design by Contract
• Dead Programs Tell No Lies
• Assertive Programming
• How to Balance Resources
• Don't Outrun Your Headlights

Please send your questions ahead of time to Bikram Kashyap in the Taro Premium Slack, so that they can be included in the discussion. If you don't have the book or want more details on how this all works, check out the #taro-bookclub channel in the Taro Premium Slack as well!

Get ready for another engaging and informative session!