The technology industry has been an important and profitable trade in recent years, resulting in numerous opportunities for individuals looking to get involved with coding and tech. As a result, one industry professional is making his voice heard by advocating for more inclusion in the industry.
For over five years, Lawrence Lockart, a current developer advocate at Vaadin, has been committed to his tech career after a shift from the hospitality industry. Through advocacy and the telling of his personal story, Lockhart aims to help increase representation in one of America’s largest industries.
Early Career and Family Life
Before Lockhart began professional work in any field, he started to pursue an educational undergraduate degree at Mississippi State University in 1993.
However, Lockhart said this educational period was not the right moment for him because his “head wasn’t in the game.” He added that this experience led him to venture towards work in the hospitality industry beginning in the mid-1990s.
“When you don’t have marketable skills or a college degree that leads to a definitive role, you’re going to be doing retail, hospitality, warehouse [or] customer service,” Lockhart said. “So, I ended up doing hospitality and restaurant business.”
For 17 years, Lockhart stayed with the restaurant business after his initial educational experience did not pan out the way he had hoped. He ended up growing a family and becoming a father during this time, which he said inspired him to pursue education again at Mississippi State.
“At or around 2015, I re-enrolled in one of their extension programs, which was online, and I managed to graduate in 2017 with my bachelor’s in general business or interdisciplinary studies,” Lockhart said. “That was important just for the sake of completing what you finish, and also for the part of me being consistent with my work.”
Transition into the Tech Industry
Lockhart’s journey in the food industry eventually led him to work with Aramark at the University of Mississippi beginning in 2008. In January 2014, he became a general manager with Aramark.
Lockhart said that after getting fired from this position in 2015, he connected with a career counseling service that gave him insight into his future career prospects.
“After we went through a bunch of those career tests you do with the assessments, one of the things that came out of it was that I still had aptitude for technical disciplines like software developer or web developer,” Lockhart said.
The results propelled Lockhart to learn how to code from free, online coding options like freeCodeCamp and one teaching the Ruby language of coding. Lockhart shared the difficulties that arose once he embarked on this journey.
“Bear in mind, I’m a husband, dad, family person. So, I didn’t quit and started learning to code, I had to still get another job in another restaurant and [spend] 50 to 60 hours as just a manager…and at the same time, teaching myself to code,” Lockhart said.
Lockhart said the time management aspect of learning to code while in a transitional period of his career was one of his biggest challenges. He also said that while transitioning one has two paths, one that leverages existing skills and one that learns new skills to benefit the transition.
“You’re going to have some moment where you need to do something a little different from the normal plan in order to make that transition and make yourself marketable enough to be hired,” Lockhart said.
Lockhart shared that developing a brand was another difficulty during the gap between career fields.
“Learning to code doesn’t get you hired, it absolutely does not. You have to have an entire brand, an entire profile that impresses the recruiter or hiring manager enough to say ‘this person is the best fit for the role,’” Lockhart said.
Building a Network and Landing a Tech Job
Alongside Lockhart’s development of coding knowledge, he also began to recognize the power of community and connections within an industry like technology. After learning how to code in one of the programs, Lockhart began attending a tech meetup in Memphis, Tennessee called Code Connector. There he met industry professionals and leaders like Ted Patterson, George Spake and James Quick who connected him with Slack channels to grow his connections in the industry.
Within a work subchannel in the Slack group, Lockhart found a post listing an open position for a part-time web content developer with Fred’s, Inc. in Memphis. Lockhart said he was working as a manager at Cookout in Oxford, Mississippi, preparing to find another part-time job once he relocated to Memphis when he got a call from Fred’s corporate office.
“I got a call from the guy that hired me…and he was like ‘hey, can we meet again? We need to talk about another interview,’” Lockhart said. “We did some additional tests…We get through all that, and he’s like ‘alright, so everything’s cool. I want you to know that I don’t really have a part time job available anymore.’ He said ‘however, I do have approval to hire you on full time starting on XYZ date with full benefits if you’re interested.’”
Taking the opportunity, Lockhart officially began his tech career as a web developer at Fred’s in May 2018. He stayed with the company for one year, before it went bankrupt, and attended a coding boot camp in 2019.
At this boot camp, Lockhart learned how to use tech stacks that included Java, Spring Boot and the structured query language that prepared him for a job with FedEx Enterprises in June 2019.
While working at FedEx, Lockhart said he wanted to start “giving back to people who have given so much to” him. He decided to start producing YouTube and TikTok content catered to helping beginners break into the tech industry by giving them useful tips and tricks.
“As of right now, we have 13.7 thousand followers [on TikTok]…So, that’s been really cool,” Lockhart said.
Lockhart also added that these videos also assist other tech professionals through solutions to issues and representing the large development community to various companies.
In addition to his video content, Lockhart also founded a company called Top Southern Coders to build websites for freelance clients as experience for his LinkedIn profile. Lockhart said the opportunity arose due to a need for more experience.
“One of the things I tell people about the four steps you need in hiring as a self-taught developer — one is education [and the] second is experience. I try to help people understand that experience doesn’t always mean work experience, experience means you’ve done the thing,” Lockhart said.
Lockhart’s continued career in the tech industry has applied to his main two points, through his self-developed company and earning various coding certificates through Udacity and LaunchCode.
Now a developer advocate for Vaadin, an open-source web application development platform, Lockhart is committed to helping advocate for the software’s use at various conferences.
Advocacy, Diversity, and Inclusion in Tech
Like his work, Lockhart is equally committed to increasing diversity and inclusion within the tech industry through his outlets of interaction with the tech community. Lockhart said the passion for this arose from his parents, primarily his father who he said was in a “realm of thought” similar to the Black Panthers.
“[My father said] the blackest thing you could ever do is become the best you can be in life — take care of yourself, take care of the black family. You start with that, that’s your core. You establish that, then you see who else you can help in the family. You’ve done that, you see who you can help in the extended family. So, it’s like circles,” Lockhart said.
Lockhart said he utilized this mindset throughout his career and in recent years, he became more capable of providing help to those outside of his inner circle now that he is in a better place.
One of the ways Lockhart is hoping to increase inclusion within the industry is by increasing the number of African-Americans in top-tier tech talents. He shared there are at or around 3% of African-American engineers in these positions. He added that despite the efforts to improve those numbers in recent years, the statistic has been relatively the same for “probably a decade.”
Lockhart reiterated that his goal is to “bump up” these numbers through the content he produces.
“For example, touching other people, doing interviews like this, doing podcasts [and] getting the message out there because we always say representation matters. But there’s a deeper understanding behind that,” Lockhart said. “It is very hard for the mind to conceive what the heart doesn’t believe.”
Lockhart said he hopes his stories and content can reach a broader range of individuals, who are interested in tech and working in other industries, to relate to his stories and face.
In terms of long-term goals, Lockhart said he is interested in engaging with more Black professionals at various “nodes” of the tech industry. He mentioned that professionals advocating for more Black recruitment at major tech companies represent one node of the “pipeline.”
“Those complaints are valid. I think there are enough voices in the ecosystem on that level to do what it needs to do,” Lockhart said. “What I want to add to that conversation is the idea that tech company recruitment represents one node…there’s two nodes after that and there’s probably five or six nodes before that.”
Lockhart shared an analogy relating these nodes to cars on a train. He said while recruitment represents one train car, other cars like the inclusion car or the advancement car need equal voices supporting them as well.
“These are cars in succession [and] each car pulls the next,” Lockhart said. “That’s three nodes or three cars that need to be addressed. Before we get to the first car, we have to look at us.”
Lockhart said he hopes to increase the communication between these various nodes of the tech industry by bringing people together.
“I want to try my best to find people who are speaking to each one of those different nodes…and link them up,” Lockhart said. “I don’t care where they are…We got to connect our work together.”
Lockhart said he hopes these connections lead to getting more Black students interested in math and science classes at a young age for them to become future STEM majors in college.
Apart from this, Lockhart also shared that he hopes to work with Vaadin for a long time. He said the company’s work environment is beneficial because of how invested people are in their work and growth at the company.
“I’m trying to ride this pony for a long time career wise, [whether] it’s senior developer advocate or whatever it’s called later,” Lockhart said. “I like this realm.”
