Monthly Challenge for November 2022: Let's write 100k words together!

This month we're working together to blog 100,000 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. And since we hit over 125,000 words last year, we're going to start this year's challenge big with a goal of 100k words.

Get those blog posts up!

Current status:

• 100k goal completed!!!

Our Posts:

• List of Job Boards I used when hunting for jobs + few more(61 words)
• 3 Small Moments That Defined My Hackathon Experience(1,351 words)

• Debugging as a Controlled Experiment(1,056 words)
• Debugging: Navigating Hunches and Assumptions(1,218 words)

• Writing a Technical Blog(499 words)
• Web Security 101 - Part 2: User Input(1,515 words)
• Web Security 101 - Part 1: Secrets(1,234 words)
• About My Digital Garden(514 words)
• #gitPanic - Tools(1,155 words)
• #gitPanic - Files(474 words)
• #gitPanic - Removing and Restoring Work(1,832 words)
• #gitPanic - Documentation and Profiles(946 words)
• #gitPanic - Stash(1,061 words)
• #gitPanic - Interactive Rebase(2,162 words)
• #gitPanic - HEAD(695 words)
• #gitPanic - Working in a Repo(1,992 words)
• #gitPanic - Merging and Rebasing(1,588 words)
• #gitPanic - Git 101(1,222 words)

• Without Us(1,513 words)

• 2022 Advent Code Challenges(879 words)
• What are your goals for the week of November 28?(230 words)
• 2022 Black Friday Sales for Developers(927 words)
• What are your goals for the week of November 21?(220 words)
• Mastodon Tips(367 words)
• What are your goals for the week of November 7?(174 words)
• What are your goals for the week?(185 words)
• My first HacktoberFest as a Maintainer(780 words)
• HacktoberFest Review(766 words)

• How I overcame the fear of learning something new and embraced the joy of learning(577 words)
• Common mistakes that developers make on resumes(1,068 words)
• Developer Health: Tips for dealing with workplace anxieties and imposter syndrome(555 words)
• Should developers study 20 hours a week after work?(614 words)
• How to get started with technical writing - An inside look into my writing process(1,597 words)
• Beginner JavaScript Project: How to reverse a sentence and display it on screen(2,029 words)
• Beginner JavaScript Tutorial: How to build your own Mad Libs game(3,478 words)
• 7 common mistakes new contributors make in Open Source Software(1,173 words)
• Learn CSS – Responsive Web Design Study Guide(4,000 words)
• What I Learned from Maintaining a Repo During Hacktoberfest and Merging 356 PRs(1,756 words)

• My Virtual Meeting Survival Strategies(838 words)

• What Makes You Stay In A Community?(673 words)
• 7 Supportive Tech Communities You Want To Be Part Of(1,125 words)
• Planning And Tracking Projects With GitHub's Projects Tool(1,357 words)
• Audio Media Accessibility: How To Improve Audio Media Transcriptions(1,191 words)
• I Learned About Audio Accessibility (And More!) From Improving Tech Podcast Transcriptions(1,182 words)
• Collective NaNoWriMo: Let's Write Together!(891 words)

• how to: set up unique ssh keys per client(495 words)
• I've Been Writing Code for 37 Years...(806 words)
• Why You Should Write Anyway(398 words)
• Publishing Old Drafts(47 words)

• Learning to Code Taught Me the Importance of Boundaries(602 words)

• A Chart-Topping Approach To Your Job Search(1,092 words)
• What Peloton Instructors Taught Me About Being a Dev(1,827 words)
• Why Do You Do It That Way? How To Share Your Technical Opinions So People Will Listen(1,626 words)
• I Want To Help You Write!(319 words)
• How Did You Build That? Tell A Great Technical Story(1,517 words)
• Developers Should Write Because...(960 words)
• Gratitude in Tough Times(613 words)
• A DIYer's Guide To API Tools(1,430 words)

• Learning to Code as a Form of Language Learning(1,457 words)

• My Experience with Chingu(1,303 words)

• Live Co-Working: Six Keys to Success(1,400 words)
• Lessons from Winning Five Hackathons(1,310 words)

• How to Migrate your React Project to TypeScript(1,151 words)
• We All Need Good Feedback(752 words)
• Career Goal Setting(1,707 words)
• Tips on Hosting a Twitter Space(805 words)
• Making Better Meetings(1,318 words)
• Writing Your First Conference Proposal(1,248 words)
• Speech Racer: My first hackathon project(1,105 words)
• This Week in DevRel: Planning and Progress(951 words)
• Reading List: The Community Builder Edition(705 words)
• 5 Reasons to Keep Contributing to Open Source Projects(640 words)
• This Week in DevRel: Life Moves Fast(793 words)
• Overcoming Imposter Syndrome(765 words)

• Now What : How To Keep Learning after Landing the 1st Tech job(1,050 words)

• #GettingBetter at Interviews: Important Q's to Ask During your Developer Job Interview(1,637 words)
• Getting Better at Recognizing your Accomplishments as Junior Developer (and Beyond)(1,482 words)
• Getting Better at PRs and Code Reviews as a Junior Developer(2,257 words)

• Implementing JWT Authentication with TRPC and Express(1,956 words)

• A Look at React Hooks: useRef vs useState(700 words)
• 3 Simple Ways to Make Your Blog More Readable(714 words)
• Introduction to Vite: The Next Generation Frontend Tooling(660 words)
• The Complete Guide to Integrate a Payment Processor in Mobile Apps(2,052 words)
• Import Maps 101(929 words)

• Aggregating Weekly Notes With Obsidian and Dataview(716 words)
• Stopping Docker Containers By Partial Name(226 words)

• Frontend Architecture and tooling that will lead to a more resilient codebase(1,962 words)
• Making Progress: How I've learned to move towards my goals(2,765 words)

• Questions are a Developer Superpower(425 words)

• Have you moved from Twitter to Mastodon for social media?(286 words)
• App to grab your Revue newsletters(215 words)
• Automate and Auto-Merge Pull Requests using GitHub Actions and the GitHub CLI(1,067 words)

• Scripting With VSCODE Tasks and Typescript(2,300 words)
• Revealing Compound Types in Typescript(1,000 words)

• Three Things I've Learned About Writing Abstracts(768 words)

• Effectively Asking for Help as a Software Developer(1,109 words)

• Typescript Notes(333 words)

• Virtual Coffee Hacktoberfest 2022 Roundup(507 words)

Totals:

How to Participate

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.

This year we're embracing an official topic as well as general topics. We recently added a Developer Health section to our site. We'd love to feature our members' blog posts on the topic.

What if I'm not confident about my writing?

We all start somewhere, and the more you practice, the better you'll get. We have volunteers who are willing to proofread and give you feedback on your writing. Just put a link to your blog post draft in the #monthly-challenge channel and ask for the help you need.

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

We've got you covered with extensive lists in this discussion and this discussion.

Developer Health Topic Suggestions

• Imposter Syndrome: What is it? What advice do you have for overcoming it?
• Burnout: We hear a lot about burnout in tech. Do you think this is industry-specific? What contributes to burnout? How do we navigate burnout? How can we reduce burnout in the industry?
• Physical Health: What equipment or practice has helped you to maintain physical health when you're at your computer all day?
• Psychological Safety: What does that mean? How do company culture, team dynamics, and good management impact it?

General Topic Suggestions

• What did your Virtual Coffee breakout room talk about recently? Can you compile a list of tips or takeaways from the conversation?
• 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?
• What are 10 HTML tags you've never heard of or used?
• What did you learn from building a project using X JavaScript library/framework?
• What did you learn from doing an accessibility audit of your website?
• Hacktoberfest 2022: takeaways, review, tips.
• How to write good headlines for technical blogs?
• Beginner guide to getting started with Git.
• What did you learn from teaching yourself how to code and landing a dev job
• What Is Apache Kafka?
• How To Start Connecting With a New Community
• What Learning a Second Programming Language Taught Me About JS

A very special thanks goes out to Jessica Wilkins and Lucia Cerchie 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