Women of Software Host GoPro s First San Diego Meet Up Event

events Mar 16, 2016

The women hosted it, but GoPro San Diego's first-ever meet up event was by no means a female-only affair. More than 125 members of the local tech community gathered at GoPro's Carlsbad office Tuesday for a night full of firsts - a first-look at the new office space, a chance to meet GoPro athlete Melissa Marquardt and a special look into the latest from GoPro's software team.

In addition to all this excitement, GoPro's recruiting team was onsite looking to collect resumes for tech-oriented applicants to join the Carlsbad office workforce. Event organizer and GoPro software and services coordinator Ashley Solmose explains that this is all part of a recent push to welcome a new, diverse wave of applicants to the local software and services team, especially in mobile app development.

Although there are people down here in San Diego that are part of those worlds, they might be working at startups and not know about [GoPro's software and services team], Ashley says. What we're trying to do its let people know that we are here and show them what we do here for those teams.

Melissa Marquardt shows off her ollie skills to demonstrate the power of GoPro App features on an Apple Watch.

The evening kicked off professional wake boarder Melissa sharing her favorite GoPro features, which proved to be a combination of shooting in burst mode at 30 fps and using the GoPro App. Melissa then teamed up with two lead engineers to demo the feature in real time.

The new features, and subsequent curiosity about them, segued perfectly into a Q&A hosted by several team members, ranging from iOS developers, QA testers, UX designers and project managers. The panel fielded questions on everything from community involvement to hardware-specific questions to the much-appreciated question of why a local engineer would choose to work at GoPro. This was met with stories of Hackathons, GoPro-specific workplace activities and perks, and most importantly, a collaborative environment filled with insanely talented individuals.

While the goal was to showcase all the awesomeness these individuals have been working hard on, it also welcomed a diverse new crowd to explore working at GoPro, and all was inspired by a simple push from the outnumbered, but certainly not underappreciated, women in software.

Just having the presence of women at the event is already a big step because it is like we're sharing the GoPro culture, says senior UX/UI designer Ha Phan. I think people are drawn to that, and they can see themselves working here.

That's right #GoProGirls of software - you rock!

If you missed this meet up, keep an eye in the next few months for our next gathering - we hope to host three more events this year.

LINK:	http://gopro.com/news/women-of-software-host-gopros-first-san-diego-me...
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