Hey Friends!
After a successful blogging challenge with NaNoWriMo in November, we're enjoying the creative parts of ourselves with Creative Community!
💞 Kindness and Gratitude
Spotlighting some of the kindness happening in our community.
"Grateful for feedback from Justin, Meg, and Ryan for my new educational static site. Thanks to everyone for helping me get it out there!"
"Managed to get two nights of restful sleep after having a night with almost no sleep. Grateful for all the support from VC."
"I participated in my first Hacktoberfest this year and just received my reward kit. The content is really sick!!! I'm so grateful for this community cause you guys really gave me the push through all your messages here."
📆 What's happening at Virtual Coffee
November Recap
💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: NaNoWriMo!
November was our annual Writing Challenge and it was amazing! We got over 150,000 words as a community. Shoutout to Amy Shackles for her massive contribution this month of almost 60,000 words!
December: Creative Community!
💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Creative Community Challenge!
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 other hobbies that spark your joy.
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 work on things that aren't necessarily code-specific or use code to improve other hobbies and outlets.
Bekah wrote an amazing blog post called Join Virtual Coffee in the Creative Community Monthly Challenge! to get us started!
☕🪑 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.
🆕 New Channels Alert
We've added three new private channels — Senior+, Mid-level, Early-career — to our Slack for peer-to-peer conversation, because we know that it's good to be able to support and nurture conversations specific to your career level. If you're interested in joining the one you identify with most, DM Bekah on Slack.
📝 Survey
The end of the year survey will be ready soon. We ask you take a couple of minutes to fill it out so we can continue to improve this community and make it a space that provides value to our members.
🤝 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 posts we loved during our Writing Challenge
Articles
- Demystifying the Internet — Fatima Adekunle-logun
- TypeScript and React: Enforcing Props for Accessibility — Nick Taylor
- Volunteering as a Developer: Win-Win for You and the Tech Community — Klesta L
- Using Primary Constructors in C# 12 & .NET 8 — Michael Jolley
- Binary Search Finding Max/Min Template in Javascript — Raynaldo Sutisna
- Hiring, Firing, and Becoming Indispensable — BekahHW
- How to Write Commit Messages that Project Maintainers Will Appreciate — Christine Belzie
- Lessons from Starting an Open Source Project — Alex Curtis-Slep
🏆 Member Wins
"My blog reached 10K+ views!"
"I am so excited to officially be launching my new service, Say My Name, on Product Hunt today."
"Win: I had my PR merged into create-typescript-app."
"Completed 3 blogs for this month!"
"Finally finished building my blog."
👀 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.
- 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.
If you're a member and you’d like to give a Lunch & Learn or Workshop, you can submit your idea here.
Have a question, suggestion, or want to nominate someone’s act of kindness or blogpost? Email us at hello@virtualcoffee.io.