I didn’t have a home office or anything at the time, so I did a lot of my work in coffee shops, cafe’s, pubs etc. Going to coffee and code nights on top of all that meant I was drinking a lot of coffee (too much, probably) and had my laptop out in public eyes most of the time. Sometimes you get lucky and the stickers end up being a conversation starter for someone looking to hire or who needed help with a project. More reasonably, popping open that bad boy and flashing the stickers during an interview was always a good strategy. Some people would recognize the conferences I went to via stickers, and others took note of the languages and frameworks stickers and were pleased with that. More than a few times they would just skip over most of the interview and I’d get the job