Hey friends!
March was a great month for our lightning talks, and now we're incredibly happy to be sharing what makes our community special as we move into the fourth year of Virtual Coffee.
💞 Kindness and Gratitude
Spotlighting some of the kindness happening in our community.
"Grateful for VC lightning talks especially applications with chat gpt as a developer with prompt engineering skills [from] Matt McInnis, feelings friday session, VC pomodoro flow club sessions to get me and keep me in the state of flow at work, and my vyvanse + caffeine pill to wake me up this morning."
"Grateful for all of you and your trust in me."
"Grateful for VC and for my wife and cats and all kinds of stuff, like the idea of pants."
"I’m grateful for finally feeling a bit better again, even though this overall health situation is still super annoying and energy-consuming. I’m also super happy that I’ve finally joined the VC volunteer team, as that was one of my goals for 2023."
📆 What's happening at Virtual Coffee
March Recap
Monthly challenge -> Public Speaking!
We were super excited to have so many great lightning talks last week. We had 11 members share topics from AI to career development and more. You can check out all of the talks on our YouTube playlist.
April Happenings
💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Month of Community Kindness!
As we work hard to make sure this community continues to be the special and close-knit group it has been, 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.
🎙️ Podcasts
We successfully finished season 7 of the podcast!
- Rebecca Key — From PhD to Frontend
- Arthur Doler — The Human Side of Tech
- Dominic Duffin — Finding value in challenging ourselves
- Ramón Huidobro — Thoughtful Learning
- Season Seven Finale — Live with Nick Taylor
☕🪑 Coffee Table Events
- Tech Interview Study Group (Mondays at 4:00 PM ET)
- Accountabilibuddies (Tuesdays at 7:00 PM ET, Thursdays at 9:00 AM ET, and every other Sundays at 1:00 PM ET)
- Indie-startup hackers (Every other Wednesday at 12:00 PM ET — see #indie-startup-hackers)
- Frontend Friday Folks fighting CSSBattle.dev (Fridays at 2:00 PM ET)
☕ Official Virtual Coffee Events
- Virtual Coffee (Tuesdays at 9:00 AM ET | Thursdays at 12:00 PM ET)
- TypeScript Tuesday (Tuesdays at 2:00 PM ET on Twitch)
- Async Twitter Chat (Friday, prompts tweeted out at 9:00 AM ET)
Note: These are the currently scheduled times for these events at the time of this publication. Please check the official VC #announcements Slack channel, or other noted channels, for any updates and links to event rooms. For the full list of events, check out our events page.
Volunteering at VC
We're very excited to continue open membership with the support of our active volunteers! All our active volunteers have an invite to send out to someone interested in joining Virtual Coffee. If you're interested in joining the volunteer team, check out some the roles here!
Member Blogpost Highlights
Some of our member posts we loved in March!
- Questions to ask in an interview — Bekah Hawrot Weigel
- Backbone for React Devs: The Song Remains the Same — Ryan Kahn
- Seven Reasons Why Conversational AI is Dangerous — Josh Goldberg
- Top Apache Kafka® Interview Questions for Juniors In 2023 — Lucia Cerchie
Member Wins
"I finally bought my ticket and hotel for Render ATL!"
"Just got selected to speak at THAT Conference in July."
"Joined the KnoCommerce team!!!"
"Got an offer letter!!!!"
What our members are up to
- Chris J. does a weekly post for goals of the week.
- Ayu shared her journey into tech and the Power of Communities on the Women Who Code podcast.
- Nick Taylor's newsletter keeps you up to date with the hot topics in tech.
- Newsletter alert! Code as Gardening: The Rise of AI — Vic Vijayakumar.
- Lucia Cerchie's newsletter is a breath of fresh air in the tech space.
- Dominic Duffin co-hosts ArtTechChat on Twitter every Sunday at 1:00 PM ET.
Open Source Projects
- VirtualCoffee.io — a Remix Web App for our community created by Dan Ott
- Regex Parser — a regular expression parser project by Amy Shackles
- DRONE — a Continuous Delivery system built on container technology
- JESS CSS — a CSS pre-processor that compiles to JavaScript!
- Postpartum Wellness App — a React Native App by Bekah HW