Monthly Challenge for November 2021: Let's write 50k words together!

This month we're working together to blog 50,000 words! Based off the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) Challenge, we'll be doing the tech take on writing and working together towards the goal while posting on our own blogs.

Get those blog posts up!

Current status:

• 50,000 goal completed!!!
• 100,000 goal completed!!!
• 125,000 goal completed!!!

Our Posts:

• Accessibility Auditing My Portfolio Site - Part 4(1,015 words)
• Accessibility Auditing My Portfolio Site - Part 1(1,885 words)
• How I Structure My Writing(1,023 words)
• An Accessible Dark Mode Toggle in React - Part 3(2,011 words)
• Blog Page Accessibility Deep Dive - Part 5(5,009 words)
• Accessibility Auditing My Portfolio Site - Part 2(1,314 words)
• Accessibility Auditing My Portfolio Site - Part 6(2,327 words)

• Fall in Love with Open Source 🍁 (437 words)

• Be a Happy Coder(556 words)

• Chill & Learn: How To Begin Thinking Like A Programmer(1,401 words)
• What I Learned From Hacktoberfest 2021(1,024 words)
• What I Learned From Project Collaboration With The Collab Lab(1,724 words)
• Emmet Abbreviation for JSX in VSCode is unstable(146 words)
• My Impression of Polywork As A Web Developer And A Technical Blogger(870 words)

• Add some spice to your HTML file fields with an image preview pane(530 words)
• Ethically gauging user engagement on your newsletter(510 words)
• Sending emails from your web app using your customers' email addresses(798 words)

• TensorFlow.js 101(773 words)
• Hot Take: Saying 'In the Spirit of Hacktoberfest' is Gatekeepy(911 words)
• A Note to Devs Looking for Their First Job(518 words)
• Hello, Tensor!(828 words)
• Moms, you're carrying a lot of plates(498 words)
• 5 Questions to Ask When You're Interviewing for a Remote Job(632 words)
• Dear Senior Devs, Use your privilege(591 words)
• You're Toxic: Using the Toxicity Model with TensorFlow.js(923 words)
• What the heck does it mean to make an image a tensor?(663 words)

• Settings Expectations With the Cone of Uncertainty(652 words)
• Lessons Learned With Stripe Subscriptions(1,518 words)

• TDev Confernce (357 words)
• It's Advent time(570 words)
• Using JavaScript's Slice Method to Carve a Turducken(563 words)
• HacktoberFest Review(545 words)
• Black Friday sales for Developers(760 words)
• Play Games to Improve your Developer Skills(716 words)

• Deep Work and Willpower(1,006 words)
• Advice for Learners(823 words)

• Bad Teacher, Good Student(331 words)
• The 12th of November(135 words)
• git stores history as a graph(885 words)
• series: git fundamentals(491 words)

• Basic Accessibility Features you should ALWAYS Implement(992 words)
• Building an Accessible Modal in Vue(3,122 words)

• My Love for the Neo-Western(739 words)
• Short Story: An Innocent Man(1,120 words)
• 10 Unconventional Opinions After Reviewing 100 Resumes(824 words)

• What I Learned During My Job Search(1,110 words)
• Named versus Default exports(633 words)
• What is Semantic HTML(809 words)
• How I built my digital garden(2,658 words)
• Seek a community not a mentor(379 words)

• How to Create a Website Free of Cost – Website Builder Platform Guide(736 words)
• How to Run the freeCodeCamp Backend Challenges Locally(458 words)
• How to build a Weather Converter with HTML, CSS and Vanilla JavaScript (Part 3-Adding CSS)(631 words)
• How to use CodeSandbox - A Beginner's Guide(791 words)
• 3 Reasons Why you need to join a tech community(827 words)
• Stress and Mental Health in Tech – What I learned from Dr. Jennifer Akullian's freeCodeCamp Tech Talk(1,006 words)
• SQL LIKE Statement – How to Query SQL with Wildcard(939 words)
• Why I turned down a music job at Disney to pursue a software career(945 words)
• 5 things I love about Tech Twitter(774 words)
• JavaScript String Contains – How to use JS .includes()(524 words)
• What I learned from Virtual Coffee's Tech blogging challenge(794 words)
• How to build a Weather Converter with HTML, CSS and Vanilla JavaScript (Part 4-Deployment)(709 words)
• How to build a Weather Converter with HTML, CSS and Vanilla JavaScript (Part 2-Adding JavaScript)(1,212 words)
• Lessons I learned during my first year of programming(975 words)
• How to build a Weather Converter with HTML, CSS and Vanilla JavaScript (Part 1 - Basic setup)(1,391 words)
• How to Use Replit – A Beginner's Guide(1,808 words)
• Mailto Link – How to Make an HTML Email Link [Example Code](526 words)
• How to Use CodePen – A Beginner's Guide(1,231 words)
• Git Rename Branch – How to Change a Local Branch Name(370 words)
• The Design Thinking Process Explained(926 words)
• What is Create React App? Part 2 (package.json,README & node_modules)(1,468 words)
• How I overcame my fear of technical writing and landed a job at freeCodeCamp(1,156 words)
• How I got over my fear of asking questions as a new junior developer(1,182 words)
• What is Create React App? Part 1 (Installation)(1,433 words)
• How to create a Node bot that sends happy emails throughout the year(2,700 words)
• 3 Reasons why I hate the "learn to code quickly" narrative(567 words)

• How I built my Blog(1,547 words)
• Advice through the years(558 words)

• America's Veteran Suicide Crisis(2,936 words)

• Job Hunt 2021(668 words)

• A Most Magic TicTacToe solution with React and TS(2,000 words)
• Semantics Not Syntax(2,764 words)
• Talking Technique: Recognizing Context for Cleaner Design(1,974 words)

• 4 ways to find your next open source project (319 words)

• Hacktoberfest and Hello(742 words)

• What I learned from building REST APIs in 3 different languages(494 words)
• Lighthouse Accessibility Update(131 words)
• Make a Custom Portfolio Site Generator with StepZen's Developer Publishing Pack(917 words)
• Announcing the Advent of GraphQL Challenge(259 words)
• Translate JSON to GraphQL SDL in a Few Clicks(446 words)
• Writing A Caesar Shift De-Cipher Function with JavaScript: Part 2(547 words)
• How to use git cherry-pick(315 words)
• Writing A Caesar Shift Cipher Function with JavaScript(770 words)
• How to ask your team for help(274 words)

• Simplicity as a Feature(1,079 words)

• sifting thru the types(750 words)
• Implementing Dark Mode (Part 1)(402 words)
• because copy & paste is tough(405 words)

• Developer Networking Tools : A Brief IRL Edition(720 words)

• Had another fun stream with Matt Foley today(60 words)
• November 4th, 2021: What did you learn this week?(83 words)
• November 18th, 2021: What did you learn this week?(54 words)
• November 28th: VS Code Tip of the Week(89 words)
• November 5th: VS Code Tip of the Week(44 words)
• Polywork update: I kickstarted my own stream again...(139 words)
• Building out a GitHub action with Matt Foley Part 4(127 words)
• November 25th, 2021: What did you learn this week?(65 words)
• Building out a GitHub action with Matt Foley Part 3(92 words)
• November 12th, 2021: What did you learn this week?(58 words)

• Going Full time Web3(703 words)
• Token Gated Event Platform(729 words)
• A review of web3 learning tools for devs(1,008 words)
• Momentum and Burnout(944 words)
• Dealing with Shiny Object Syndrome as a Dev(753 words)
• Wandering thoughts(919 words)
• NFT’s, Web3 and Mental Health(603 words)
• Web3 Music Project Brain-dump(666 words)

• Go Smaller(1,109 words)
• The Fifth Source of Capital(1,038 words)
• The Evolving No-Code Mental Model(1,466 words)
• Your Customer's Goal(1,313 words)

• Failure at 80% (808 words)

• My First Hackathon: Day 7 - extension days(1,001 words)
• My First Hackathon: Days 4-6(655 words)
• My first Hackathon: Days 1-2(589 words)
• My First Hackathon: Day 3(590 words)

• Migrating away from Google Analytics(932 words)
• TypeScript: Type Alias versus Interface(835 words)
• Who's your BFF? Rough notes on the popular BFF architecture pattern(1,036 words)

• Introduction to Redux Toolkit for Beginners(1,622 words)
• A Look At React Hooks: useSWR for Data Fetching in React(1,038 words)
• Fetch Data from GraphQL APIs with Apollo Client(828 words)

• Typing away my thoughts about my journey into tech(1,033 words)

• How I contributed to a Flutter application without knowing Dart.(1,528 words)
• Building An Address Book dApp. (Part 1)(2,408 words)
• Letter to a Code Newbie.(676 words)

Totals:

How to Participate

Once you've written and published your content, sign in to the VC Members section and follow links to the November Monthly Challenge!

What kind of content counts towards the challenge?

Any tech-related blog posts or articles published in the month of November! Feel free to include code samples in your word count totals (if it's a word and you wrote it, we'll count it 😊).

While we love good documentation here at Virtual Coffee, README docs or anything else you would normally consider documentation don't count for this challenge.

What if I don't know what to write about?

We've got you covered. We hope to continually update this discussion throughout the month, but here are some suggestions to get you started:

• Hot takes! What gets you passionate? Start there and see what happens.
• What did you learn this week? One of the best ways to teach is by writing about something you just learned!
• Best Practices. What are some guidelines you've learned that can help developers create best practices?
• Compare and Contast. Have you learned a new language or new approach? How does that differ from what you've done in the past?
How to deal with imposter syndrome as a developer?
• How deal with burnout when applying for your first developer job?
• What did you learn through your first developer interview? What did you wish you knew before starting your first developer job?
• What was your experience like during the first few months of your junior developer job?
• How did you overcome the fear of building in public? What tips do you have for developers who want to start building in public?
• How to push through with learning how to code when learning was difficult at times?
• How to start a freelancing career?
• Write about a function or a method: What it does, when you should use it, and why
• A time you successfully troubleshot an error: This can be super helpful for those who copy/paste an error message
• A simple script in your terminal
• A customization that saves you time/frustration in your daily workflow
• Keep a journal of your coding journey and then pull topics from it.
• Keep a brag board of your successes, or a Time I learned log. Then write about one of your favorites.
• A meta post like how did you chose where you blog, other options your were considering before where you're currently set up. Why are you blogging? How was the set up process? Features/topics/platforms you're thinking to incorporate in the future.

A very special thanks goes out toDaniel Anderson, Meg Gutshall, Jessica Wilkins, Chris Jarvis, and Sadie Jay for helping to compose this list!

And remember, we're always here to help ❤️

Resources

• How to Grow Your Tech Career Through Writing
• Amanda Natividad's Twitter thread: 11 prompts so you'll never run out of content ideas
• 100 Blog Topic Ideas for your Next Article