Breaking Into Tech and Startup Resources
Check out our Startup and PM resources, Book and Blog recommendations, and what to do if Coronavirus impacts your summer internship.
Hi! Welcome to CoStart. This is a newsletter bringing to you tech news and trends, PM & SWE resources, jobs, and blogs to help you break into the tech industry. This week, we are introducing STARTUP RESOURCES.
Blog Post 📕
This week, we’re all about debunking the typical stereotype of a person working in tech.
Someone wearing a hoodie and coding twelve hours a day in the basement of a house, sipping Red Bull and eating pizza for lunch and dinner.
Read our article: BREAKING INTO THE TECH INDUSTRY to learn about the reality of tech: that it’s diverse and exciting. The article is filled with tech books to read, blogs to follow and some of tech’s biggest events that you can attend.
Want to break into the software engineering side of tech but not sure what to do, read this article on How I went from newbie to Software Engineer in 9 months while working full time.
Podcast 🎙
UNCONVENTIONALLY BREAKING INTO TECH
Mika Reyes talks about how she went from studying economics and psychology in college to becoming a product manager at a robotics company and LinkedIn through fellowships such as Kleiner Perkins Product fellowship and the Horizon School. Mika also goes into all her side hustles and her big dreams for expanding tech into Southeast Asia!
STARTUP Resources ✨
For those of you looking to work on your startup idea this upcoming summer. Apply to Contrary Capital’s Summer Accelerator here! The program runs from June 15th through September and Contrary invests up to 500k depending on your company’s needs.
Contrary is a university-focused venture fund that invests in a dozen promising teams from universities across the country each year. Backed by the founders of Facebook, Tesla, Reddit, and many more, you can spend three months this summer building alongside the founders and getting access to the world’s best entrepreneurs and investors.
Jobs 💸
IF CORONA VIRUS CANCELS YOUR INTERNSHIP: WHAT TO DO.
Forbes has written an article on what to do and how to deal with the COVID-19 situation. Some of the things that stood out to us were:
Start your own project! There is nothing more valuable than teaching yourself a design tool or a programming language or building your own product. (We recommend doing this on the side even if you have a summer internship that will not be canceled.)
Start a company of your own! Here is an article on steps to launch your own tech company.
READ a LOT. Listen to tech podcasts. Here is a list of some dope books and podcasts.
Find ways to work remotely with the company or the startup. Remote work in tech is becoming very popular and many tools and startups have arisen to support this remote working economy.
INTERNSHIPS
For those still looking for positions, here are some software engineering companies still hiring in SF:
ServiceNow Software Engineering Intern
Collab Software Engineering Intern: Splunk
Intel: Software Engineer Co-op 6 month Internship
Castlight Health: Software Engineering Intern - Full Stack
Zynga Software Engineering Intern
Front Software Engineering Intern
Blend Labs Software Engineer - Intern
Some PM Roles:
WePay Associate Product Manager Internship
Rally Health 2020 Summer Product Management Internship
Product Management 💥
Meet the first Simulator of a Product Manager's job!
Simulator is a unique online tool for product managers that helps you learn how to use data to build and grow products. The course is built like a simulator of a product manager job at a software startup. Students get hands-on experience working on an ambitious product and making decisions based on real data in actual analytics systems.
Study at your own pace and get a digital certificate once finished.
Register at https://gopractice.io/ to get a free trial.
Tech talks 💻
Source: https://xkcd.com/1481/
You probably have heard the buzzword “API”. What are API’s? How are they used?
Application Programming Interface AKA “API” refers to the use of data from third-party web services such as Reddit or Twitter, typically over HTTP, as part of new application development. Using an API is a fantastic way to save time and money, you do not need to build everything from scratch. Read this article to learn more about APIs.
Check out these cool APIs for beginners and videos on how to use public APIs for your projects.