Hey friends!
We had an AMAZING November and we're set to end the year in the spirit of support and celebration of our full selves.
💞 Community Kindness
Spotlighting some of the kindness happening in our community.
"I'm grateful for all the advice I get from VC members. I have a standing meeting that conflicts with my normal Thursday meeting so I can't attend as much, but the community is always available and has helped me so much this year as I figured out what I wanted to do next in my career."
"(Grateful for) All of you! I took a couple of days off this week for my birthday and b/c elementary schools were closed for parent/teacher conferences, and it made me feel so good to see all the birthday wishes when I logged on this morning! So many friends!"
"I'm grateful for this community of wonderful people and your open hearts."
📆 What's happening at Virtual Coffee
November Recap
- Monthly challenge -> Month of Writing
Virtual Coffee took part in the NaNoWriMo (National November Writing Month) event and had a blast. Last year we tried for 50k words and got about 38k. This year we over 30 participants submit 136 articles and contributeover 125k words! See the full list of participants and articles here.
- New members: 38 new members
December Happenings
💡 Monthly Theme & Challenge: Creative community challenge!
Devs are more than just the code we write. This month is all about embracing self-expression. Give back to yourself by indulging in something just for fun. Share the art, music, poetry, sports, games, or any other hobbies that spark joy for you. We spend so much time grinding away on understanding things in the tech space. Let's make some space for the other parts of ourselves.
🎙️ Podcasts
Season 4 of the podcast is here!
- Suze Shardlow - Creating welcoming spaces in dev communities
- Bryan Healey - The Entrepreneurial Journey of a Startup Founder
- Jessica Wilkins - Growing your tech career through writing
- Maeling Murphy - Transitioning to tech, and taking notes along the way
🥪 Member Events
These are members-only events that last for 45 - 90 minutes.
- Dec 10, 12:00pm EST: Lunch & Learn: How To Optimize Your Resume For Both A Hiring Manager And An ATS w/ Abbey Perini and Jennifer Konikowski
- Dec 17, 12:00pm EST: Lunch & Learn: String Theory w/ Meg Gutshall
** Link for the Lunch & Learns can be found in slack about 15 minutes before the event and the descriptions can be found at virtualcoffee.io/events
Member Blogpost Highlights
Some of our member posts we loved in November. Honestly, there were so many great ones you should really check out the full list.
- Simplicity as a Feature - Matthew Dean
- How I got over my fear of asking questions as a new junior developer - Jessica Wilkins
- Hacktoberfest and Hello - Lewis Sparlin
- Be a Happy Coder - Aurelie Verrot
- America's Veteran Suicide Crisis - Justin Noel
- How I built my digital garden - Jen Kennedy
- Building An Address Book dApp. - Yusuf Taiwo
Member Wins
"I have a demo for the database project I've been working on since June. From knowing NOTHING other than primitive React ... I managed to put my friend's data into postgres on AWS, write a bunch of node/express endpoints, and call them from a React App Component."
"The recording of my public tech talk(been some time that I have presented), where I was a co-presenter, is up here."
"I've finally finished this simple blog-app after a long struggle with firebase v9 and redux. it's still a lot of stuff to add, especially the styling part, but the main functionality is there."
What our members are up to
- Shoutout to all our members starting new roles this month.
- Check out some of our resident streamers: Bekah, Nick, Jono, Arthur, and Ian
Open Source Projects
- VirtualCoffee.io, an 11ty Web App for our community created by Dan Ott
- Protege.dev, a React Web App to help junior devs find remote jobs by Drew Clements
- DRONE - a Continuous Delivery system built on container technology
- JESS CSS - a CSS pre-processor that compiles to Javascript!