Lola Egherman is Vice President of Product and Operations at CodeDay, a non-profit helping students use technology and creativity to work on meaningful problems. Lola's excitement for CS started from a young age, in part due to attending CodeDay's K12 events when she was in middle school. Lola is a strong advocate for Open Source software and the transformative power being an open source contributor can have.

Presentations

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No Internship, No Problem: Using Open Source as Your First Real-World Job

For a lot of students and early-career developers, the hardest part of “breaking into tech” isn’t learning syntax or picking up new tools, it’s answering one paradoxical question: “How do I get experience when every job already expects experience?” Open source already solves this, but most newcomers enter projects feeling overwhelmed, unsure where to contribute, and worried about bothering maintainers. The truth is that open source can function as a student's first real engineering job when they know how to approach it, and when mentors and maintainers create environments where newcomers can succeed.

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