WeAreDevelopers, Day One. This is the first in a series of notes from my experience at WeAreDevelopers as a nontechnical founder walking into tech from the outside.
First things first: the actual event
Day One: 7/10.
And I should probably establish that before I spend the next several thousand words emotionally processing my experience inside the technology industry. 😂
I am judging this from two probably relevant perspectives:
- I am not a developer.
- I have never been to a conference before in my life.
So maybe some of what follows is completely normal and everyone reading this who goes to conferences regularly is going to be like, Yes, Kassandra. That is how conferences work.
Fine.
But overall, WeAreDevelopers was fucking cool.
Great speakers. A really good showroom. A beautiful location. A packed schedule with genuinely interesting things happening all day. There were people building things everywhere, companies I had only ever seen on a screen suddenly existing in physical space, and approximately fourteen conversations happening around me at all times that I only understood sixty percent of.
I loved it.
Please let me come back. 😂
But.
THE LINES.
Jesus Christ, you guys.
I waited almost an hour for lunch.
And I was definitely not the only person getting increasingly pissed about it.
So, completely unsolicited feedback from the woman who has never organized a technology conference in her life:
More lunch stations.
More coffee stations.
Like, a lot more.
And maybe this is just me being thirty-eight and spending too much of my life staring at screens now, but I also desperately wanted some gigantic, stupidly obvious physical signs.
HALL 1 + HALL 2 → UPSTAIRS AND LEFT
MAIN STAGE → THIS WAY
BATHROOMS → HERE
And maybe a giant board somewhere that just says what is happening next.
I know there is an app.
I build apps.
Building apps is also slowly destroying my eyesight, so sometimes I do not want to look at another tiny fucking screen.
Posters still work.
And if the app is going to be the source of truth, fine. Put the QR code everywhere.
Pillars. Tables. Entrances. Coffee stations. Bathroom mirrors. Tattoo it onto a volunteer. Whatever.
Again, maybe I was the only idiot wandering around thinking, Where the fuck is Hall Two?
Entirely possible.
But none of that changes my actual opinion of the event.
The event was good. I am glad I went. I want to go again.
What follows is not really a review of WeAreDevelopers.
It is what happened when someone who is not a developer, has never been to a tech conference, and has spent the last few months building software from completely outside this industry walked into one of its rooms for the first time.
And apparently had some feelings about it.
“It’s a big fucking club, and you ain’t in it.”
Maybe I’m wrong.
I want to start there because I am still new to this world.
Maybe I’m impatient. Maybe I haven’t given it enough time. Maybe these kinds of relationships simply take longer to build than I understand. Maybe there are people I haven’t met yet who will completely change my mind about everything I’m about to say.
I genuinely hope so.
But right now?
I feel invisible.
And I don’t think it is because I’m sitting at home waiting for someone to discover me.
I reach out to people. I introduce myself. I send the email. I send the message. I show people what I’m building. I ask questions. I go to events.
I have walked into rooms where I very obviously do not come from the same world as almost anybody else in them because I am curious enough to go anyway.
I went to WeAreDevelopers.
I am not a developer.
I did not go to computer science school. I did not work at Google or Stripe or Meta. I do not have some impressive engineering résumé to casually mention while holding a coffee between talks.
I am a mother of four who started building software because I kept looking at ordinary life and thinking, why does this still work like this?
And to be clear, people were kind to me.
That matters.
Nobody laughed at me. Nobody treated me like I was stupid. People answered my questions. Some gave genuinely thoughtful advice. Some seemed sincerely interested.
But then everyone went home.
And nothing really changed.
That is the part I am trying to understand.
Because I keep hearing the technology industry talk about access. Accessibility. Democratization. Mentorship. Opening doors. Bringing more people into technology.
And I keep wondering:
Who exactly are we talking about?
Because I am standing here waving.
Hi.
Normal person.
Right here.
I am trying.
Maybe it’s me
Maybe it is because I am a woman.
Maybe race matters sometimes.
Maybe appearance matters.
Maybe none of those things matter in my particular case.
I cannot know what is happening inside another person’s head, and I don’t want to invent an explanation just because rejection or indifference hurts.
But I increasingly suspect the simplest explanation is also the most powerful one:
I do not have the credentials that let people quickly categorize me as someone worth paying attention to.
I did not go to the school.
I did not work at the company.
I do not know the person who knows the person.
There is no familiar logo beside my name giving someone permission to take me seriously.
And lately I have caught myself thinking something I am embarrassed to admit.
What if I just lied?
What if I put some prestigious school on my résumé?
What if I invented the right previous company?
Would the exact same ideas suddenly sound smarter?
Would the exact same work look more legitimate?
Would people return the email?
I’m not going to do that.
But the fact that I have even found myself wondering about it bothers me.
Because I have experienced a version of this before.
Years ago, I applied for a social work position transporting foster children to safe placements, sometimes locally and sometimes across the country to family.
I wanted that job badly.
I had spent years working with families. I understood complicated households. I loved children. I knew how to make a scared kid feel like there was an adult in the room who saw them and wasn’t going anywhere.
I interviewed.
They hired me.
And then came the credential check.
The job required sixty college units.
Not sixty units in social work. Not sixty units in child development. Not sixty units connected to the actual work.
Sixty units.
They could have been history. Art. Cooking. Anything.
I had years of relevant experience, but I did not have the arbitrary number on the transcript.
So I couldn’t have the job.
And I remember thinking afterward: I should have just fucking lied.
Not because lying is the answer.
It isn’t.
But because there is something profoundly frustrating about being told you are qualified by the human beings who met you, interviewed you and decided they wanted you, and then being disqualified by a proxy that has almost nothing to do with whether you can actually do the work.
I think about that experience now.
Because technology loves to say credentials are becoming less important.
AI is democratizing expertise.
Anyone can build. Anyone can learn. Anyone can participate.
Great.
Then prove it.
Availability is not access
Everyone says they want to make technology accessible.
Democratize AI. Democratize software. Give everyone the tools. Lower the barriers. Let anybody build.
And technically, I guess that’s true.
You can sign up. You can get some free credits. You can open the documentation. You can watch a forty-five-minute developer talk explaining how to build an agent.
The door is unlocked.
But that is not the same thing as being invited inside.
Availability is not access.
If we are actually serious about making this technology accessible to ordinary people, I have a question:
Where are you?
Why aren’t there workshops for teenagers across San Francisco three nights a week?
Why aren’t engineers teaching at libraries?
Why aren’t AI companies setting up tables at community colleges, public high schools, neighborhood centers, trade schools, union halls, parenting groups?
Why aren’t there beginner build nights where someone can walk in having never written a line of code and leave understanding that they can make something?
Why is so much of the education happening on LinkedIn, inside developer conferences, behind documentation written for people who already understand the vocabulary?
Do we really think everyone lives on LinkedIn?
Do we think a cashier working eight hours, a mechanic coming home exhausted, a mother trying to get four kids fed, or a seventeen-year-old who has never met a software engineer is going to stumble across your forty-five-minute technical talk and suddenly realize this entire world is available to them?
That isn’t access.
That is availability.
There is a difference.
The knowledge that doesn’t fit on a résumé
There is knowledge you get from a great university.
There is knowledge you get from working at a great technology company.
And then there is knowledge you get from spending your life interacting with ordinary people.
Working a register. Making sandwiches. Stocking milk. Helping someone find a pair of shoes. Going into the stockroom because a customer needs another size. Changing somebody’s oil.
Answering the same question thirty times without making the thirtieth person feel stupid for asking it.
Talking to the old man who comes in every Tuesday.
Listening to the mother whose card just declined.
Helping someone fill out a form they don’t understand.
Learning how to explain something without making another human being feel small.
Customer service teaches you something profound about people.
So does public service. So does raising children. So does working with your hands. So does being broke. So does standing on the other side of a counter.
You learn that people are messy and funny and distracted and embarrassed and busy and tired.
You learn that they do not speak in product language.
They do not organize their lives into clean workflows.
They forget passwords. They misunderstand instructions. They click the wrong button. They are interrupted. Their kid starts screaming. Their lunch break ends. Their phone is at three percent.
They have ten minutes.
They need the thing to fucking work.
That is expertise too.
And I think technology desperately needs more of it.
Because increasingly, the people designing the systems that organize ordinary life have lived lives that are anything but ordinary.
That does not make them bad people.
It creates a blind spot.
If everyone around the table went to similar schools, followed similar professional paths, works in the same industry, earns similar incomes, uses the same products, attends the same conferences and talks mostly to other people doing the same thing, eventually the world starts looking a lot smaller than it actually is.
And then we wonder why products supposedly built “for everyone” sometimes feel like they were designed for the people who made them.
I genuinely hope you win
I keep thinking about one interaction at WeAreDevelopers.
I was talking to a man about what he was building.
I was genuinely interested.
“Oh. Okay. B2B. So you’re not building something for individual people like me. You’re going after huge enterprise contracts.”
Yes.
Million-dollar contracts.
And I remember immediately telling him something like, “Man, I genuinely hope this takes off. You’re going to get those million-dollar contracts.”
And I meant it.
That is the part I keep coming back to.
Why the fuck wouldn’t I want him to win?
Why wouldn’t I want everybody in that room to win?
We were at a conference full of people building things.
How fucking cool is that?
Everybody has an idea. Everybody is trying to solve something. Everybody knows something I don’t know.
Somebody is building infrastructure. Somebody is building security. Somebody is building some enterprise thing that I barely understand. Somebody else is making an app for regular people.
I find that exciting.
I want to gas people up.
Tell me what you’re making. Show me the weird thing. Tell me why you think it matters.
I genuinely hope you get the giant contract.
I hope the thing works.
I hope somebody notices you.
I hope you fucking win.
Maybe that is naive too.
Maybe everybody else is tired.
Maybe they have been doing this for fifteen years and the novelty wore off a long time ago.
Maybe AI has made some people nervous about what their expertise is worth.
Maybe none of that is true.
Because ironically, a lot of the engineers I hear talking about AI don’t sound particularly threatened by it.
Quite the opposite.
I hear versions of the same argument constantly:
AI generates generic code. AI reaches for the most common solution. AI can make something that looks convincing without actually understanding architecture. AI-written software becomes spaghetti. AI cannot replace real engineering judgment.
And every time I hear that, I go home slightly terrified.
Because I am building with AI.
So then I do what apparently constitutes my engineering education now.
I interrogate the fucking thing.
“Is my code generic?”
“Is this architecture actually good?”
“Are you just telling me what I want to hear?”
“Where is this fragile?”
“Where will this break?”
“What would an experienced engineer think was embarrassing?”
“What would they redesign?”
“Make it cleaner.”
“Make it simpler.”
“Make it more sophisticated.”
“Don’t add complexity just to look sophisticated.”
I want an engineer to eventually open one of my repositories and say:
Goddamn.
Not because there are a million clever abstractions.
Not because the code is showing off.
Because it is clean. Because the decisions make sense. Because something complicated has been made understandable.
Because I fucking designed it that way.
I have thirty-one repositories with zero circular dependencies.
Do I fully understand what that means?
Kind of.
I understand enough to know that circular dependencies can become a sign of systems tangled around themselves, and that avoiding them across a growing collection of applications is probably a good thing.
Is that proof that my architecture is brilliant?
Absolutely fucking not.
Maybe a senior engineer opens the whole thing tomorrow and finds twenty things I have completely misunderstood.
I genuinely don’t know.
That is exactly the problem.
I still haven’t had an experienced engineer sit down, really look at the work, and tell me.
Not glance at a homepage.
Not give me general startup advice.
Look at the system.
Look at the architecture.
Look at how the pieces connect.
Tell me where I am right. Tell me where I am wrong. Tell me where the AI produced something generic and where we actually built something thoughtful.
I want that desperately.
And yes, I understand the other side of this.
Expertise costs money.
An engineer spent years becoming an engineer. Their time has value.
It would be ridiculous for me to expect strangers to perform hours of free technical consulting because I walked into a conference with enthusiasm and an iPhone.
I understand that.
But there is a pretty enormous distance between hours of unpaid consulting and:
“Hey, that’s interesting.”
“Send me the repo.”
“I know somebody you should talk to.”
“Here’s one thing I’d watch out for.”
Or even:
“I’ve got fifteen minutes. Show me the weird part.”
That is the distance I keep trying to understand.
Then I showed him mine
Somewhere in the conversation, he made a comparison between what he was building and what I was doing.
I don’t remember his exact words, so I won’t pretend that I do, but it gave me the impression that his thing was serious enterprise software and mine was little consumer stuff.
In my head I thought, Okay, lightweight asshole. Million-dollar contracts for a corporation. I’m trying to build for millions of people. We matter too. Just smile, Kassandra.
Then I asked if I could see his product.
Not really.
So I said, “Can I show you mine?”
Sure.
I pulled out my website.
He looked at it.
Then he looked at me.
Yes.
I made this.
Then I pulled up a demo of one of my apps.
Nothing magical. Just enough that you can scroll through it and understand what the product looks like and what it might feel like in your hand.
And the insane part is, it has been ready for beta.
I apparently cannot build a traditional minimum viable product. In my head, MVP means meaningful viable product.
The people I am building for do not have time to spend weeks telling me what obvious thing is missing. They have a hundred other things going on already.
Maybe they can tell me what is too much.
What they never use. What gets in the way. What can disappear.
I would rather hand them something complete enough to actually live with and let them help me make it simpler from there.
And he went quiet.
Completely fucking quiet.
Not ten seconds.
Minutes.
I am not going to tell you what was happening inside that man’s head because I don’t know.
Maybe he hated it. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he was thinking about lunch. Maybe I have built an entire psychological drama around a completely ordinary awkward conversation.
Entirely possible.
But I have spent a lot of my life talking to people.
Customers. Families. Coworkers. Strangers. People who are confused, embarrassed, angry, scared, bored, excited.
You learn something about shifts in energy when your work requires you to sit across from human beings all day.
Something shifted.
I wanted him to say something.
Anything.
Tell me it sucks. Tell me the navigation is wrong. Tell me the architecture is probably a disaster. Tell me you love the typography. Ask me how I made it. Ask me why.
Nothing.
At some point the silence became so uncomfortable that I decided I wasn’t going to save us from it.
Fine.
Let’s sit here.
Eventually I told him something true.
Showing people my work scares me because I am so proud of it.
I think it is beautiful.
And I am afraid that one day somebody who really understands this industry is going to look at the thing I have poured myself into and tell me I don’t understand what I’m doing.
He shook his head.
Then more silence.
Eventually he asked me something about lunch.
And that was the conversation.
I left thinking:
What the fuck just happened?
Maybe nothing.
Maybe I am onto something.
Maybe people simply don’t know what to do yet with someone who arrived through a door that barely existed a few years ago.
A nontechnical person who can suddenly make software.
Not just describe an idea.
Not just make a pitch deck.
Actually make the thing.
Because technology has spent years saying it wants to democratize creation.
Well.
Here we are.
Some of us actually showed up.
Maybe the tools are escaping the club
This is why I have become more convinced, not less, that people from outside traditional technology need to start building.
Mothers. Teachers. Mechanics. Nurses. Cashiers. Social workers. Electricians. Barbers. Restaurant workers. Caregivers. Teenagers.
People who have spent their lives close to the problems technology claims it wants to solve.
AI has changed something fundamental.
For the first time, a person can have deep domain knowledge, curiosity, taste and lived experience without also needing ten years of software engineering experience before they are allowed to make an idea real.
That is extraordinary.
But if the industry actually believes this technology belongs to everyone, then access cannot stop at giving people an account.
Go find them.
Teach a sixteen-year-old in the Excelsior how to build something.
Sit with a fifty-year-old small-business owner who has never heard the word API.
Show a mechanic how automation works.
Teach a mother how to prototype the tool she wishes existed.
Hold workshops where nobody has to know what GitHub is before they walk through the door.
Explain things without making people feel stupid.
And maybe, occasionally, mentor someone whose résumé makes absolutely no sense to you.
Because the next great idea might not come from someone who spent the last decade learning how software companies work.
It might come from someone who spent the last decade learning how people work.
Tell me I’m wrong
And yes, George Carlin was right.
It is a big fucking club.
And you probably ain’t in it.
But I hope I’m wrong.
Seriously.
Maybe six months from now I will read this and cringe.
Maybe I am just ridiculously late to the party, standing outside after five minutes going, Why the fuck hasn’t anybody noticed me yet?
That is entirely possible.
I have only been doing this for a short time.
Maybe I am impatient.
Maybe these kinds of relationships take longer to build than I understand.
Maybe I am completely misreading the room.
Maybe I am a little fucking unhinged for thinking I can walk into an industry I have no traditional background in, start building things, and then wonder why everyone hasn’t immediately stopped what they are doing to ask me about them.
Fair enough.
But I also don’t know what else I am supposed to do.
I am putting myself in the rooms. I am going to the conferences. I am introducing myself. I am sending the emails. I am reaching out to people I admire. I am asking questions. I am building. I am writing. I am sharing what I am learning while I learn it.
I am doing everything I know how to do to get my voice out there.
And apparently I am getting “impressions” on LinkedIn.
I still barely know what the fuck an impression is.
Apparently thousands of people can see something you wrote without a single one of them saying anything.
It feels like those Instagram accounts with no profile picture, no posts and 600 people they follow.
Just lurking.
Watching.
Hello?
I know you’re there.
Have some balls.
Say hi.
Tell me I’m wrong.
Seriously.
If you disagree with this entire essay, leave a comment and tell me why.
If you work in technology and think I have completely misunderstood how this world works, explain it to me.
If you think the club does not exist, prove it.
Invite somebody in.
Answer an email from somebody whose résumé does not immediately impress you.
Offer thirty minutes to someone trying to learn.
Introduce a person with an unconventional background to somebody who could help them.
Go teach teenagers how to build something.
Hold a workshop somewhere people who don’t already work in technology might actually find it.
And if something in this essay made you think, fuck, she has a point, do one incredibly small thing for me.
Like it.
Comment on it.
Share it.
Send it to somebody.
Not because I think everybody needs to agree with me.
I don’t.
Share it with the sentence: “I think she’s completely wrong.”
Fine.
At least we are having the conversation.
Because I am realizing that getting outside the club might require making enough noise that somebody eventually has to open the fucking door.
And maybe that is what I am doing right now.
Knocking.
Probably too loudly.
Probably saying fuck too much.
Still knocking.
Use me. Pick me.
If you are someone with that kind of power, access, money, influence, technical skill, curiosity, whatever, I am happy to talk to you.
Maybe this essay is a huge turnoff.
Fine.
Tell me.
Maybe you do not care enough to comment or share it.
Also fine.
Hit follow.
Maybe you are just early to the show, and one day you get to say, “Holy shit. I used to read her unhinged LinkedIn posts and Substack essays before she actually made it.”
I would genuinely love that.
And maybe I do not need a VC.
Maybe I need to learn how to use TikTok and Instagram properly. Maybe I need to reach the people I am building for directly and leave the people with money out of it entirely.
Maybe if the people sitting in the towers would rather keep investing in people who already look familiar to them, the answer is not to spend the rest of my life asking them to see me.
Maybe the answer is to build around them.
To make products people actually want. To let those people decide what deserves to exist. To create enough momentum that eventually the old gatekeepers are not the gate anymore.
Because underneath all of the frustration in this essay, I am actually incredibly hopeful.
Something really has changed.
The tools are escaping the club.
People who were never supposed to be builders are building.
People who were never supposed to be founders are founding.
People with no traditional technical pedigree can take something that exists only in their head and start turning it into something another human being can actually use.
That is fucking extraordinary.
And maybe the institutions just haven’t caught up yet.
Maybe the culture hasn’t caught up yet.
Maybe I haven’t caught up yet.
I can live with that.
I’ll keep learning.
I’ll keep showing up.
I’ll keep building.
And I’ll keep saying hi first.
Because at the end of the day, there is one group of people whose permission matters more to me than any investor, engineer, accelerator, prestigious university, conference or insider.
The people I am building for.
They don’t care where I went to school.
They don’t care what company used to be next to my name.
They care whether I understand their lives.
They care whether I made something useful.
And they care whether the thing fucking works.
So maybe George Carlin was right.
Maybe it is a big fucking club.
But for the first time, I’m not sure we actually need to wait for somebody to let us in.
Okay.
I needed to get that off my chest.
And again, I hope I’m wrong.
Maybe I’m just angry and probably PMSing.
One thing I miss dearly about pregnancy and nursing: not having to deal with periods.
I know. TMI.
ANYWAYS.
There is still Day Two tomorrow.