I found out on a Monday evening in July, riding the subway home from work. I opened Gmail on my phone somewhere under Manhattan and saw I'd won the Jamf diversity scholarship, and I couldn't stop smiling the rest of the ride. I texted my partner right away. I'd applied because my department couldn't afford to send anyone, and JNUC had always lived in my head as this glowing space from the way senior engineers at old jobs talked about it.
JNUC was in Nashville that year. I'd been to the city before for work, but never really gotten to enjoy it. Walking into the venue I just thought, wow, this is huge. I loved the vendor floor, finally putting faces to the account people I'd only ever emailed, and I got to meet up with an old coworker from a previous job, which made the whole thing feel less like a solo trip.
One moment I keep coming back to: I was heading up the escalator and a woman struck up a conversation with me. Turned out she was also from NYC, and we ended up talking tech and Jamf and the weird smallness of our world. As crazy as it sounds, I didn't really have an IT network in New York at that point, so that moment landed.
From a technical point of view, I was punching above my weight, but I never once felt out of place. The people I gravitated toward, most of them folks of color, were warm and open, and the scholarship cohort especially made me feel like Jamf had my back. I went home and immediately started using DDM commands for software updates, and later gave a small presentation at work on using Network Relay to offset our VPN costs.
JNUC made me feel empowered in a way I hadn't before. I came back with real confidence, partly because I now had a network to back it up. If I hit a weird problem, I knew people I could ask: open source contributors, Apple engineers, Jamf folks I'd actually shaken hands with. One of those people was Juan, who I met through the scholarship cohort and who'd go on to become a close friend. He pulled me into the Mac Admins Slack and the broader NYC JUG scene, and suddenly I felt like part of the Jamf community, but more importantly, part of the broader Mac Admins community, which I honestly didn't know existed at that scale before.
I also took the Jamf 200 Level-Up while I was there, a one-day speedrun to renew my cert. Back at the office, I went from being "the Jamf guy" to the point of contact for all things MDM, and I could actually speak to what I'd learned in the sessions.
There wasn't one big mindset shift, more a quiet one. Before JNUC, I felt like I was doing this job on my own. After, I knew I wasn't.
The idea for the LATAM User Group came up at my second or third NYC JUG meetup. Joanna Buchmeyer from Jamf showed up and gave a presentation on the state of user groups worldwide, and one thing hit me immediately: there wasn't a single JUG in all of Latin America. Not one. I personally knew Mac admins in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, so it didn't make sense. After the event, Juan and I got together with a few other Latin-identifying folks, and we agreed in real time that this had to change.
The gap was obvious once you started looking. Most Mac admin resources live in English, a little in Spanish, almost nothing in Portuguese. Someone posts a question in a forum and it sits for weeks. Apple hardware is already a budget stretch for a lot of LATAM companies, and having no community support on top of that was going to hurt adoption. But more than anything, neither Juan nor I had mentors who looked like us coming up. We wanted to build the space we didn't have.
This part is personal for me. I'm the son of Dominican immigrants, my parents worked blue collar jobs, and I was the first in my family to finish high school and then college. Paving the way is what I do. If I can lower the ladder for the people coming after me, I will.
Our first meetup went better than I expected for something this grassroots. Solid turnout, a good topic (the MacBook Neo in a LATAM context), and real conversations where people voiced issues they'd had with both Apple and Jamf. Some got addressed on the spot, others got followed up on in a reasonable time frame. It just feels good to have a direct line to Jamf and Apple.
If you're on the fence, don't be. Everyone in this space started where you are, and I promise most of them are a lot nicer than your grumpy old IT boss. People are here to grow, and you'll find your people. Applying is free, and the worst they can say is no. Opportunities don't usually arrive on a silver platter. Mine kind of did, thanks to Jamf, and I don't take that lightly. When yours shows up, grab it with both hands. Then turn around and pay it forward.
Applications close May 1, 2026. Apply here!