¿Qué es Bogotá TechTalks?

With the Bogotá Tech Talks Meetups being very popular in our office in Colombia, we decided to delve in a bit more to better understand what makes Bogota tick:

We spoke with Henry Canastero, a Twilio technical program manager, in Bogotá. Henry is a leading voice in the developer community there, and we caught him before the upcoming November Bogotá Tech Talk Meetup.

AUTHY: Colombia isn’t historically known as a high-tech hub. But today, it’s one of South America’s strongest startup regions. How did Authy come to have roots in Bogotá?

HC: Entrepreneur Daniel Palacio, who hails from Bogotá, started Authy in a very bootstrap sort of way. The company was soon a part of a new wave of Colombian startups offering new products and services and tapping into the talent pool here. There’s a lot engineering talent in Colombia which makes it a compelling launchpad for a new startup.

It’s said that 63% of Colombians will be connected to broadband by 2018. That makes urban areas like Bogotá prime for growth. Being the 3rd largest Spanish-speaking population in the world, are language barriers a challenge for international organizations?

Language barriers should obviously be of concern when setting up a foreign office. Bogotá ranks as the 4th most attractive destination in Latin America for Foreign Direct Investment based on a variety of criterion, including human capital. English is widely taught in schools here and since Authy’s product and sales teams are based in San Francisco, the engineers in Bogotá get plenty of opportunities to practice their language skills. We also offer a free English language course open to all Bogotá employees. What is quite special at Authy is how the team wholeheartedly embraces Twilio’s Nine Values, thus considerably smoothing out any cultural differences. Authy truly feels like a little Californian island located high in the Andes.

The Bogotá Tech Talks Meetup, hosted by Twilio, is already over 400 members strong That’s indicative of a vibrant developer and software community who are thirsty for learning and sharing.

You’re right; Bogotá has a very active developer community. Every week you can find specialized meetups in different technologies, programming languages, and entrepreneurship hosted in private companies, coworking spaces, or universities. Even so, these tech talks have generated high interest because we’re covering topics that might be missed by other events, such as security. These meetups allow us to share with our community the knowledge we’ve acquired in the process of building Authy as part of a big company like Twilio. But it’s also an open space for all the people who want to share their experiences solving software engineering problems for their employers or projects.

In Bogotá Tech Talks we have planned a cycle of talks about “Go,” the programming language, having already had a couple of them. We want to cover topics in areas such as development, DevOps, cybersecurity, and even management.  

The next Bogotá Tech Talks, to be held on November 16th,  will have two talks:

• The first looks at recipes to minimize software vulnerabilities by Santiago Kantorowitcz; a talk about building software that takes the best security practices into account. 
• We’ll also have Julian Espinel demonstrating how to use Python & Docker to deploy and monitor applications in AWS.

RSVP for the November 16th, Bogota Tech Talks Meetup.