Steve Works
Hi! I'm Steve!
Steve Chen brand with reach across platforms like Meetup, Discord, Linkedin, and X.
Let's chat - send me an email at stevechenweb@gmail.com
Shoutouts & Mentions
Table of Contents
Communities
Communities I've built and participate in-person, primarily.
A. Code & Coffee Collective 501c3
Rebooted the Code & Coffee meetups during a pandemic by kicking off NYC Code & Coffee in September 2021.
More details at https://www.codeandcoffee.org
Case Study: Empowering Developers at NYC Code & Coffee
Background
Code & Coffee (www.codeandcoffee.org) is a community that provides a space for developers to meet, work on projects, and learn from each other. The community hosts regular meetups where members can collaborate, share their knowledge, and connect on software topics of their own choosing.
Challenge
NYC Code & Coffee faced the challenge of maintaining a supportive environment and ensuring members continued learning and growing.
Solution
To address these challenges, the following initiatives were undertaken:
Organizing regular coding workshops and presentations to help members expand their skills and stay current with industry trends.
Create highly-engaging monthly (festival-style) LineUp posters and bi-weekly post-event content drops on Social Media.
Encouraging members to volunteer and get involved through a speakers program.
Key Results and Outcomes
These initiatives led to increased engagement and member satisfaction.
5 out of 5-star ratings in over 272 reviews on Meetup from attendees.
An average of 2 talks per event in 2023 from organizations like Apple, General Assembly, Swimm, startups, and 15 individual community members.
A 90% satisfaction rate among members, with most reporting a positive learning experience and feeling more connected to the community.
B. Product & Pastries
I founded and actively facilitated the only community-led product management and product design meetup.
Like Code & Coffee, we're community-led!
Case Study: Boosting Inclusion and Collaboration at DC Design + Donuts
Background
DC Design + Donuts (www.meetup.com/dc-design-donuts) is a community that brings together design enthusiasts in the Washington, D.C., area. The community hosts monthly meetups where members can network, learn about design topics, and share their experiences in a casual environment.
Challenge
DC Design + Donuts faced the challenge of expanding its membership and re-engagement with members as the end of the pandemic drew upon us.
Solution
To address these challenges, the following initiatives were implemented:
Promoting the meetups on channels and local event listings to increase awareness and attract new members.
Rebrand group to "Product & Pastries" to produce a more inclusive and accessible space for product design AND product Management professionals ensuring diverse and relevant content to a larger untapped pool of members.
Encouraging members to share their projects and ideas during the meetups, fostering collaboration and community involvement.
Key Results and Outcomes
The initiatives led to significant growth and engagement in the community.
A 29% increase in membership within four months.
Improved event attendance, with an average of 50% attendance.
Self-sustaining community-led group of volunteers that run and operate the community without any intervention. Check them out in #product-and-pastries-volunteers-and-organizers on DCTech.chat!
C. FuzhouAmerica 501c3
Served as volunteer Community Manager for the DC/MD/VA region at a non-technical 501c3 centralized non-profit.
Fuzhou, America is the first 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization designed to empower Fuzhounese-Americans through entrepreneurship, mentorship, and community.
D. Portfolio of Tech Meetups (in-person and online)
With a combined reach of 20,000+ developers on Meetup.com and 30+ tech organizations. We strive for consistent high-quality events every two weeks or month. I run the most prominent non-company attached developer reach on the meetup.com platform, with over 50+ volunteer community managers who operate the community accross 25 cities in the United States.
We're trusted by organizations like Couchbase, Swimm, FormLabs, General Assembly, BrainStation, The Loading Dock, Computer Museum of America, Viget, TechArtista, Computer Museum of America, and many more.
Founded and collaboratively operate
Format: (CITY) Code & Coffees - Member count
The Code and Coffee Collective (est. Sep 2021) - 35,000 developers
NYC Code and Coffee - 8k (growing at 300-500/mo)
DC Product and Pastries(formerly Design and Donuts) - 1k+
DC Code and Coffee - 3.1k+
ReactDC (inactive) - 2.1k
Community-led Code & Coffee groups
Austin - 3xx
Atlanta - 1xx
Baltimore - 1,xxx
Boston - 4xx
Chicago - 5xx
Cincinnati - 2xx
Dulles - 6xx
Frederick - 91
Houston - 64
Milwaukee - 1xx
NoVA - 4.2k+
San Francisco - 2.1k+
St. Louis - 4xx
Triangle - 5xx
Ventura - 89
Whidbey Island - 56
*These numbers are not updated.
Community - Online
E. Discord
4,000 developers and growing!
Personally founded, design, and architected alongside community feedback.
Currently, 51 community organizers interact through internal channels.
Thousands of developers, all from in-person event referrals
Members and visitors gain value from our community through #jobs, #career-help, #code-help, and the 25 local community channels.
Content
A. Graphic Design
0 to 1 on social media developer brand awareness projects, from vision to execution and sustained iterative excellence. I build the symbiotic relationship between my brand and the Code & Coffee brand involving high-engagement, consistent, and quality content that promote events.
#SteveSpeaks - Personal Brand (October 2023 - November 2023)
A 2 month campaign to build personal brand as a community development leader and promote collaborative events. See Speaking section below!
Monthly Global Promotional Poster Campaign (Feb 2023 - June 2023)
Posters that promote the first event in each city and builds the C&C brand as THE community-run meetup community that's bringing back in-person meetups. Built end-to-end.
The Inaugural
NYC Wrap up posters
Collages that show off the diversity of our members in the most diverse cities in the world, NYC. This inspires 20 other chapters to work toward a feature-fledged local community ecosystem similar to NYC Code & Coffee.
May 2023
April 2023
April 2023
March 2023
March 2023
Feburary 2023
Logo (NYC and global)
B. Social Media Campaigns
- Linkedin & Twitter - Brand - Monthly Line-up & Bi-weekly Recaps (Feb 2023 - June 2023)
B2B digital brand Awareness strategy involving using routine unique bi-weekly and monthly graphic content to produce leads and increase community brand value.
- Twitter - Growth - 100chats with #100devs in 100days (Mar 2022 - Jul 2022)
In early 2022, I had the idea of doing 100 30-minute to 1hr long phone calls with aspiring software developers sourced from Twitter. It also unintentionally inspired 109+ developers to get into tech, with over 20+ asking to volunteer for C&C. Outcome: Increased Twitter following, improved phone communication skills, and improved storytelling ability.
3. Maintaining LinkedIn Social Selling Index - Personal (Current)
The LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) is a tool developed by LinkedIn to measure a user's effectiveness in establishing their professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships on LinkedIn.
Get more details here.
4. LinkedIn User-generated Content for Code & Coffee (Current)
C&C attendees and volunteers organically create User Generated Content (tagging @Code & Coffee) weekly with self-taken pictures or shoutouts from the weekend events.
The C&C community generates a consistent stream of high-value User Generated content, growing at 200+ followers per month and creating compounding exponential growth network effects.
C. Speaking **RECENT**
- Host of FrontRunners Javascript Conference 2023 and 2024
2. Techwalk Community: Community Leader Panel - November 2023
Serve on a LIVE virtual panel about leveraging your community memberships and navigating the community world. Audio coming soon.
3. AWS Community Day DC/MD/VA: The Art of Community talk - October 2023
Keynote as the Community speaker for Amazon Web Services Community Day DC/MD/VA 2023.
Talk on The Art of Community: Building Thriving Meetups at HQ2 being the only talk about community.
4. DC Startup Week: Product Panel - October 2023
Be a panelist at DC Startup Week 2023 for the Product & Pastries Meetup's Product Management panel.
5. Tech Talk: Getting your first tech job as a college dropout - May 2019
Matz (the creator of Ruby) and I!
I gave a talk to over 30 attendees, and 19/20 retained at a community-led ad-hoc affair afterward!
D. Video
Short-form (Instagram)
4.8% of all impressions engaged with the video. I likely won't use my personal Instagram for any prioritized technical content in 2023; instead, it will foster closer connections with existing brand and developer relationships.
Our largest meetup (ever) for Fuzhou America DC/MD/VA region!
Youtube Brand Storytelling
Produce videos about the stories behind Code & Coffee.
The origin story of New York Code & Coffee
Meetup Feature spotlight by emmy-award winning Thomas C Knox
Event Promo
NYC Code & Coffee video at General Assembly Venue
NYC Code & Coffee video at BrainStation Venue
E. Podcast
Guest on Chat With Hackers
Coming 2024: The Code & Coffee Podcast
Name pending. A podcast hosted by me with guest co-host Casey Watts, a former lead dev at Heroku and SrPM at USCIS, and author of Debugging Your Brain. Confirmed for a 4-episode series on community-led community building.
F. Written
Code & Coffee Monthly Update - Discord (June 2023 - Current)
I post monthly updates featuring a chapter monthly and keeping the community updated of what's happening across the 30 Code & Coffee chapters! Check it out now -> CodeAndCoffee.chat
Openbase Newsletter (July - August 2022)
At Openbase, one of my core responsibilities was solo-writing a weekly newsletter for 55,000 developers with a unique 65% open rate and a <1% unsub. With my product-minded thinking, the content and newsletter product got better and overall metrics improved to over 80% open rates.
Click on the images for the full article; if you need a copy of the original email, please email me at stevechenweb@gmail.com, and I'll happily forward them!
Code
A. Open Source Projects
I play around with code occasionally, fiddling with our C&C websites. The projects below are projects that I empowered other developers to make open-source and personally advocate on their behalf.
Code Contributions
Default Code & Coffee localized website template - Led and Maintained by me.
Clean Slate DC - Website for making legal forms for expungement easier to file. Built during HackForGood DC hackathon.
Ruby For Good - 4-day un-hackathon at the GMU Smithsonian Conservatory focused on improving the world, somewhat hackathon.
Product Management
Code & Coffee Speakers Program - Led and Operated by Dana Lee
Code & Coffee Barista Bot - Led and Maintained by Abe Hanoka
Code & Coffee Serverless Layer - Led and Maintained by Brian Towne
B. Web Design and development
Software Engineering (2016 - 2022)
I was an early employee at a unicorn called Arcadia, a startup acquired by Grubhub, had a company acquired by PE at Framebridge, and worked with the non-profit, KaBOOM! Additionally, I was the Head of Developer Relations at a seed-stage startup.
You can find those details on those on my LinkedIn.
Below are individual projects that I'm proud of.
KaBOOM! Map of Play (2016)
KaBOOM! Map of Play v2
KaBOOM's Map of Play is the largest playground locator in the world with 50,000+ unique visitors monthly, a RESTful API and mobile apps that use it. KaBOOM! a national non-profit that builds playgrounds for kids and promote plays in low-income adverse communities.
My role in this project was to spearhead the rewrite of the backend implementing new features, testing, database design, integration with multiple libraries and gems. The entire goal of this project was to move away from their unopen legacy app riddled with incompatible technologies, unsolvable bugs, lack of tests, and general code smell due to 3rd party developers. All work was done during my Software Engineering internship at KaBOOM! within an agile team with daily pair programming and code reviews with the software engineering manager to ensure ideal specs were met. Key skills used included Test driven development, Continuous integration, Job processing, and git workflow.
SteamFriend.me (2016)
Steamfriend.me is a gaming social networking service that allows gamers to be matched up with other gamers based on games they own on their Steam account with the ability to rate matches.
In this project I learned how to build a full Web Application within a 3-person team, increase productivity through the implementation of Agile, and pitch it to 150+ South Florida Tech community members. Built with Ruby on Rails as the backend, PostgreSQL to manage database, Heroku for deployment, Github for Version control, CSS, HTML, and various libraries/gems such as animate.css for animations, omniauth-steam gem for authentication of users, in-conjunction with data parsed from the Steam API.
Web Design (2015)
Koi Asian Cuisine
Implemented design of an Asian fusion cuisine restaurant built with Adobe Muse. Learned how to communicate effectively with clients and propose on-the-fly website designs to successfully capture the feel and decor of the business within a set deadline.
Blue Star Veterans Network
Learned modern web design practices alongside editing web content to create the design of a Veterans tech startup eCommerce website visually appealing to retired United States veterans and their families.
More details on my Linkedin and Resume.