The sticker on the top-left corner of my laptop is from a tiny indie game dev meetup in a co-working space that no longer exists, hosted by a person I now consider one of my closest friends. At the time, it was just a Tuesday evening and a room full of strangers who all loved the same weird hobby. That sticker is worth more to me than most business cards I've ever collected.
I started keeping them all somewhere around 2020, when I realized that the conferences I was attending weren't just events — they were landmarks. Each one marked a version of me: the Sandra who was just starting to find her voice as a speaker, the Sandra who had a title she barely understood yet, the Sandra who finally started saying yes to things that scared her a little.
Stickers, it turns out, are a surprisingly honest record of community. You only stick things on your laptop that mean something. Nobody puts up a sticker from an event they didn't feel. It's like a commitment — a small, adhesive-backed declaration that this thing was real, this community mattered, I was here.
I've started asking people about their stickers at events and it's one of my favorite conversations. Every sticker has a story. Every story has a person behind it. And the people — the founders, the engineers, the educators, the speakers who drove three hours on a Tuesday to share something they cared about — that's the community. The sticker is just the receipt.
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I write about play, leadership, Women in Tech, and building things that matter. More posts below — or reach out if you want to talk.