Hey budding writers!
October was Hacktoberfest and it was amazing, but now we're switching gears and putting our writer caps on! It's Nanowrimo!
💞 Kindness and Gratitude
Spotlighting some of the kindness happening in our community.
"Grateful for MagnoliaJS and meeting a bunch of VC people in person!"
"Had my first virtual coffee today and I’m grateful."
"Grateful for many learning opportunities I got this week around open source and I'm always, always grateful for being part of the VC family."
📆 What's happening at Virtual Coffee
October Recap
💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Hacktoberfest!
October was our annual Hacktoberfest and it was amazing! Shoutout to everyone who participated. Everyone was contributed, or mentored, or maintained or just tried to provide support. We're super proud of all of you.
A huge thank you to Clerk for sponsoring the Virtual Coffee Hacktoberfest Initiative this year!
Additional gratitude to LevelUp Financial Planning for their support as well!
November: Nanowrimo time!
💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Blogging Challenge!
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. We hit over 100k words last year, and we're going to start this year's challenge with a goal of 100k words. Get those blog posts up!
Bekah wrote an amazing blog post called Blogging 2023 Monthly Challenge to get us started! You can learn more about the challenge here!
🎙️Podcasts
Season 9 is out!
- Open Source Licenses with Matt McInnis, Tom Cudd, and Ray Deck
- Jessica Wilkins — Using Open Source to Create Connections
☕🪑 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 | Every other Sundays at 1:00 PM ET)
- The Pack Hunt (Tandem Job Hunting) (Wednesdays at 2:00 PM ET)
- Feelings Friday (Fridays at 10:00 AM ET)
- Frontend Friday Folks fighting CSSBattle.dev (Fridays at 11:00 AM ET)
- Savvy Saturday Stylers Slaying CSSBattle.dev (Saturdays at 12:00 PM ET)
📅 Weekly Async Events
- Mondays: Goal-setting post in
#goals-and-wins - Tuesdays: Trivia in
#game-night - Wednesdays: Midweek check-in in
#general - Thursdays: New book club questions for Cracking the Coding Interview on GitHub
- Fridays: X (formerly Twitter) chat and gratitude post in
#general
☕ Official Virtual Coffee Events
- Virtual Coffee (Tuesdays at 9:00 AM ET | Thursdays at 12:00 PM ET)
- Async Twitter Chat (Fridays — 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 Content Highlights
Some of our member contents we loved in October!
Articles
- Building an Efficient Waitlist App with Next.js and Xata — Teri Eyenike
- Introducing SelectorHound — Frank Paceaux
- 3 Reasons Your Laravel Validations Aren't Working — Camilo Payan
- Lessons I've Learned After Three Years as a Full-time Software Engineer — Neha Maity
- Four Ways To Survive Hacktoberfest As A Maintainer — Christine Belzie
🏆 Member Wins
"I got two talks accepted to ConFoo Montreal! This will be the first time I’m giving a talk in person!"
"Had a win today : an interview tomorrow and I passed the AZ-900 (Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals)."
"I'm unexpectedly speaking at Momentum next week."
"It's official that Christine and I are supporting OpenSauced as community maintainers!"
"You are now looking at one of the newest members on the Developer Advocate Advisory Board at DevNetwork & DeveloperWeek."
👀 What our members are up to
- Chris J. does a weekly post for goals of the week.
- Nick Taylor's newsletter keeps you up to date with the hot topics in tech.
- Dominic Duffin co-hosts ArtTechChat on Twitter every Sunday at 1:00 PM ET.
- Ray Deck is co-hosting a vid-pod about low code/no code solutions on youtube!
💻 Open Source Projects
- VirtualCoffee.io — a Remix Web App for our community created by Dan Ott.
- Virtual Coffee Podcast Transcipts— SRT files for the Virtual Coffee Podcast episodes.
- FreeCodeCamps's Developer Quiz Site — A newbie friendly repo that frequently accepts OSS contributions.
- OpenSauced's Docs — A static rendered documentation for open source developer onboarding to OpenSauced's projects.
- Intro to Open Source — An introduction to open source and guide through the process of contributing to projects.
- Python Turtle Art Canvas — The aim of this project is to create a collaborative piece of creative coding using Python Turtle Graphics.
- Hacktoberfest How To — Hugo blog template for Hacktoberfest HOW-TO.
- Classic Memory Game — Memory card game from 1968.
- Tiny Troves of Dev Wisdom — A small Unity 2D game made for Hacktoberfest 2023.
- Elm TTRPG Session — A session manager, ttrpg character builder, and dice roller built with Elm and Lamdera.
Thanks to this issue's sponsor, LevelUP Financial Planning, who understands the importance of finding balance between having an awesome life today, and being confident and excited about your future possibilities.