Hey Friends!
2023 was a whirlwind year, for good and for bad, but the strength and energy of this community shone through it all. We're looking forward to a bright 2024, and starting it off with a goal-setting theme for January!
💞 Kindness and Gratitude
Spotlighting some of the kindness happening in our community.
"Been loving the group pomodoro sessions in the
#co-working-room! Definitely help my ADHD brain get/stay in flow state!"
"I spent all day in bed yesterday due to a migraine. Today, I didn't really want to do anything, but I saw we needed a room leader for today's coffee. Grudgingly, I volunteered. I had a great time and was immediately lifted out of my horrible mood. Thanks so much to everyone that started and helps keep VC running. My life would be a much darker place without all of you."
"I started a four month contract at EA this week as a Technical Writer! This group has helped me feel more confident navigating a career in tech, so thank you all so much."
📆 What's happening at Virtual Coffee
December Recap
💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Creative Community!
Keeping up a VC tradition, our December focus was on making, sharing, and creativity. We baked, crocheted, sewed, built with Legos, photographed, and everything in between. If you enjoyed it, you can join in the fun all year in the #making-stuff channel!
January: Goal Get It!
💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: New Year, New Goals!
Setting goals is a pretty well-worn practice for January, but New Year's resolutions are notoriously hard to keep. This month's challenge is about setting better goals that will serve you all year long, then building the habits and tools to help you achieve. Check out the VC Monthly Challenge page or Ayu's blog post for more inspiration and info!
Some of our Coffee Table groups and Slack channels will have special sessions and posts focused on the theme, including a goal-setting workshop in #tech-interview-study-group on January 8 and some creative goal tracking activities in The Pack Hunt.
In past years, our January theme has been "Month of Learning", and we'd love to see folks setting goals to learn new tech stacks, data structures and algorithms, RegEx wizardry, or tech interviewing skills. But this community is more than tech! The goals to find more work/life balance, improve your 5K time, or be a better ally are all just as worthwhile. Whatever goals you set for this year, VC members are ready to support you and cheer you on.
☕🪑 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 Career Focus 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
Our members are making the internet a better place with their words and wisdom!
Articles
- Novice To Expert: My freeCodeCamp Writing Journey — Christine Belzie
- Choosing Between Controllers and Minimal API for .NET APIs — Michael Jolley
- Ugly Sweater CSS: Spider-man. — Chris Jarvis
- Migrating from Jest to Vitest for your React Application — Nick Taylor
- Gathering Feedback (Build In Public project) — Jörn Bernhardt
Videos
- Introduction to Consumer Group IDs (Apache Kafka Explained) — Lucia Cerchie
- The Power of Communities for Self-Taught Devs — Ayu Adiati
- Learn JavaScript Interactively in New freeCodeCamp.org Curriculum — Jessica Wilkins
🏆 Member Wins
"My blog reached 10K+ views!"
"I finally broke a million post views on dev.to!"
"Woohoo! Bekah's New Maintainers Resources making it into Favorite Series of the year on DEV! Congrats!!!"
"I deleted over 20,000 emails and freed 16% of my inbox."
"I've been really into both scrollytales and clis for a while now... and now I'm iterating faster and faster! The hard work is paying off."
"Just submitted the final draft of my final article for Stoplight, and I think it’s one of the best articles I’ve ever written. My editor agrees!"
👀 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.