Growth is the part of every human being. We only grow when we start doing things that we did not do before. But, with time we develop a tendency to stay in doing what we are used to. The tendency is called being in comfort zone and we all know nothing grows in comfort zone. This is a journey of me and how dev community helped me to do new things.

At the beginning of my career, in the end of 2012, most of my time was spent with college and office tasks and did not have time to do anything except that. After some time in mid of 2013, I came to know about the developer communities and the meetups that are happening around. So I used to take out time and attend the events. With all the new faces and different kind of people, it was me just going to the event listening to the talk and coming back. But later I realize that Networking is also a great part of the meetup. Started from interacting in the group to later knowing some of them and sharing knowledge was helping me connect with people who worked in similar sectors.

In the year 2014, I gathered all the courage and decided to be a speaker in WordCamp Nepal. It was a huge step for me to go talk in an event that is one of the biggest by a community. Luckily, I was selected as a speaker and had a chance to speak. They helped me to improve my delivery skills and provided with different resources to help my presentation be better. After being a speaker, attending events was more fun because there were more people who I got connected with.

There came a time where the number of meetups in Developers Community dropped in Nepal. My college was over and I had some free time now. So, In June 2017, me and my friend Sujan, decided to organize PHP meetup. We both have never organized a meetup and it was totally new for us. This led us to interact with the previous meetup organizers. Some of them whom we have known before but not interacted much and some new people. Now, with the very supportive suggestions and rough planning, we were all set to organize the meetup. It was hard in the beginning to call for paper, finding a venue, getting the sponsor and managing the event. But it all went good and with the help of other community members the meetup successfully. after that, we organized 3 more meetups in a span of a year but we could not continue to do it due to many circumstances.

If you want to do something in your community than you should plan to do it because there is a whole lot of people in the community that are ready to help. The developer community is a place where it grooms and supports you to do things out of your comfort zone. So being part of it not only helps you to know new people or things but also to do new things and get out of your cocoon.