What are monthly challenges?
These monthly challenges provide members the opportunity to learn, grow, and receive support and mentorship. There will be a theme for each month's challenge and weekly goals for the members to work on. Instructions, resources, and additional help for the challenges is provided in the #monthly-challenge channel in slack. Along with our Maintainers, our Challenge Team Leads plan, organize, and facilitate these challenges.
Who can participate?
These challenges are available to all Virtual Coffee members and the goal is to support developers of all stages in their coding journey. To become a member of Virtual Coffee, all you need to do is attend a Tuesday or Thursday Coffee and submit the form you'll receive at coffee. After you submit the form, you will receive an invitation to join the slack group where you can share your progress on the challenges and ask questions.
Our challenges:
- Current Challenge: Pairing
Pairing is more than just coding with someone else. Pairing is about communication, teaching, learning, positive reinforcements, and growing.
For this community challenge, we're trying to hit 30 pairing sessions by the end of the month. Some ways to get started pairing are by working on an open-source issue, a LeetCode problem, or a project you need help on. Check out The Power of Pair Programming: Benefits, Types, and Tips for more on why you should pair up with us this May!
This challenge is sponsored by Tuple, the remote pair programming app on macOS and Linux.
Current status: 32 out of 50 pairing sessions
Resources and results from past challenges:
- Month of Learning
Time to learn new things!
The goal this challenge is to learn something new, share what we have learned, and gather recommendations and resources to share with the community. During this challenge, we work on learning new dev-related things. You might deep-dive into one topic, start a small-group that focuses on community learning, focus on a new topic every week, or do a little bit of everything.
Resources and results from past challenges:
- Get job ready
Resumes, Cover Letters, and Elevator Pitch. There's never a bad time to update your job application materials.
The goal of this challenge is to work on creating, revising, or updating your job packet materials and that elevator pitch that might get you in the door. Your resume, cover letter, and elevator pitch should work together to tell your story and represent where you are on your career journey; each piece should complement the others. This challenge emphasizes taking time to make sure they work together or to get some extra feedback on what you've worked on.
Resources and results from past challenges:
- Creative Community Challenge
Let's make some space for the other parts of ourselves.
Devs are more than just the code we write. This challenge 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. In this challenge, we encourage folks to spend time working on things that aren't necessarily code specific, or using code to improve other hobbies and outlets.
Resources and results from past challenges:
- Blogging Challenge
A Community Challenge to hit a word count goal for all our tech blogs.
Based off the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) Challenge, this challenge is the tech take on writing and working together towards the goal while posting on our own blogs.
Resources and results from past challenges:
- Hacktoberfest
Participate in open source, learn, and have fun!
This challenge is always run during October and was our first ever monthly challenge. We have three tracks: maintainers will provide issues labeled for Hacktoberfest, contributors will solve issues, and mentors will help contributors and maintainers be successful.
Resources and results from past challenges:
- Preptember
Get your open source projects ready!
Maintainers will be reviewing their open source repos with our checklist to make sure their projects are ready for Hacktoberfest contributions, and our contributors will be looking at their favorite repos, evaluating them based on the guide, and writing good issues as needed to fulfill the criteria.
Resources and results from past challenges:
- Healthy Habits for Happy Devs
This month's challenge is all about nourishing our bodies, minds, and spirits so that we can become healthier developers.
The goal of this challenge is to build a new habit that will make you a healthier dev; this can be mind and body centered (drink, move, read, meditate, rearrange your work station) or code centered (review your ReadMe, clean your code, refresh your GitHub repo) or both. Set the goal for yourself this month and define what successfully completing the challenge looks like. For example, could be something like: review the README in 5 of your projects (one every week) or run 2k twice a week.
Resources and results from past challenges:
- Build in Public
Communicate what you're working on, show your development, and be confident and proud of any progress made.
In this challenge, we're working on creating a habit of talking about the things we're working on, a plan for continuing progress, and creating a demo for the Virtal Coffee community.
Resources and results from past challenges:
- Community Kindness
Celebrating our Community as we move into a new year of Virtual Coffee!
As we work hard to make sure this community continues to be the special and close-knit group, this challenge encourages our members to celebrate one of the things that continually makes this community so special: Kindness. Some of the ways we see this include: practicing gratitude, reaching out to support other members, mentoring, helping, giving honest and constructive feedback, and continuing to make Virtual Coffee a safe and supportive space.
Resources and results from past challenges:
- Creating Audio/Visual content
Create a community of knowledge sharing and access to learning with AV content.
For this challenge, members present their knowledge and showcase your understanding by exploring video and audio mediums for sharing knowledge, highlighting their achievements. They might do that by giving lunch-and-learns, youtube videos, podcasts, or some other form of audio or video content they created that explores a coding-related concept--there's no length requirement. We believe this provides value by solidifying ideas, creating a resource for others, inviting personal growth through conversations sparked by sharing, and demonstrating your ability to talk through a concept.
Resources and results from past challenges:
- Month of Feedback
Giving and accepting meaningful and empathetic feedback.
When we care about our community members, we can offer empathetic responses that are honest and allow them to grow and to fix a problem. Sometimes these conversations are hard. But sometimes we need hard conversations to help us grow. This challenge calls members to approach each other with kindness and honesty, and allow this kind of feedback to be a regular part of our process.
Resources and results from past challenges: