CodeBuddies: 2015 Year In Review
January 2015
http://codebuddies.org (a beta version) is deployed around January 1st, 2015! I spend a holiday break building this open-sourced platform on top of Telescope, an open-sourced Reddit/HN clone created by Sacha Greif.
Ethereum, a crypotocurrency platform, forks the repo and briefly uses a CodeBuddies-styled platform to organize their own ethereum peer-to-peer google hangout meetups.
February 2015
CodeBuddies is featured on Skillcrush’s “13 Meetup Groups You Need To Join If You’re New To Tech” article.
CodeBuddies is an online web development community that is both free and open-sourced. Their focus is on virtual learning via Google+ Hangouts using audio and screen sharing. Hangouts are generally 1 to 2 hours long and based around specific topics that are proposed by CodeBuddies members.
Sacha and a few volunteer developers experiment with using the hangouts platform to teach specific chapters from the Discover Meteor book.
March 2015
The CodeBuddies Slack is created, and people invite themselves to the chatroom by signing up here: http://codebuddiesmeet.herokuapp.com.
The project becomes one of four open-sourced projects featured on the Telescope homepage.
Members start scheduling “silent hangouts” — where instead of talking out loud and discussing the same code together, we work individually and silently, optionally screensharing to hold ourselves accountable or to get help more easily, but use the chat to discuss what we’re learning or things we get stuck on. The effect is like being in a virtual coffeeshop environment, and knowing that others are being productive and can potentially help you out makes the learning less lonely.
February-May 2015
Excluding Sacha, four people (@wuworkshop, @slava, @curioussavage, and @Paulie-P) one of whom worked at the Meteor Development Group, submit pull requests to the hangouts platform.
The pull requests are so helpful. The times for each scheduled hangout now change automatically in tune with the local timezone of the user, and hangouts that are in progress get hoisted to the top of the and get a starry animated background.
October 2015
I wanted to create a better space for people to share personal accomplishments, shout-outs, and links to projects they were working on, so I launch an anonymous crowdsourced newsletter. Anyone in the community can submit something, and each message is published anonymously (unless the sender identifies him/herself in the message).
You can read the archive of newsletters here: http://tinyletter.com/codebuddies/archive or subscribe here.
The newsletter goes out to roughly 1300 people.
Some members, led by @wuworkshop, start a CodeBuddies clan on codewars.com.
November 2015
The moderators of what used to be a The Odin Project-specific Facebook group (@kevinmulhern, @will, @bryantt23, among others) decide they want to join forces with the CodeBuddies community.
@will and @kevinmulhern start a book club to work through Sandi Metz’s Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby in the #ruby channel. Participants update each other on progress made by posting in the channel.
All Throughout 2015
Multiple volunteers schedule hangouts to learn together, to practice teaching a web development topic, or as study motivation.
- @shethrives11 schedules a four-week set of silent hangouts on a Coursera Bootstrap course — one hour a week, with a talking check-in at the end — and completes the course.
- @wuworkshop schedules a couple of silent meteorJS hangouts to motivate folks to finish the four-week MeteorJS course offered by Coursera.
- I schedule a couple of non-silent Django hangouts to get some practice teaching an Intro. to Django workshop in real life, and am incredibly happy with how the experience helps me understand Django a lot better.
- @imdaveho wants to learn web stacks by building projects with a group, and schedules a series of #codequarters hangouts and writes a bunch of blog posts and records tutorial screencasts as he’s learning, including this latest YouTube video that walks through Static Pages, Routes, SCSS, and Templating in Rails.
- @colbycheeze schedules a hangout to work on creating a voting app with meteorJS, and it turns into a mini-hackathon collaboration over google hangouts and github.
Volunteer moderators like @wuworkshop, @will, @sbe, @kevinmulhern, @anbuselvan — and several other active community members — consistently paste in helpful resources on Slack containing links to free discounts and events and interesting articles, share advice about freelancing, share advice about switching to tech careers from other industries, and generally try to help each other out to the best of their ability.
I personally find out about a free several-month pass to frontendmasters.com offered in early 2015, learn that there is an *annotated* version of Eloquent Javascript, learn that TreeHouse used to offer a free pass for library card holders of certain boroughs in NYC, and find out about coupon codes like this free How to Automate the Boring Stuff python video course and this free 6-month access to Pluralsight.
@wuworkshop integrates /prowd into the Slack, which lets any member award points to another member by typing `/prowd` and `@username`.
December 2015
The Slack tips over 1000 members, and gets a more vocal Slackbot, which answers FAQs like “What is CodeBuddies”?
There are 88 channels in the Slack, and not all of them are active — but there are gems like #nyc and #javascript and #python and #ruby.
@abdulhannanali courageously starts working on a @100daysofcode bot using Slack webhooks to let members make pledges to the bot to share something they learn about code every day. A public #testchannel is created for testing purposes.
I create http://codebuddies.org/todayilearned, an experimental feed that pulls in messages containing the #todayilearned hashtag published on the Slack and allows sharing on twitter.
Some volunteers start discussing in the #codebuddies-meta channel how to create a hangouts platform version 2.0. that better explains how hangouts work, and would also make it more easy to know at a glance what everyone is working on. @mattierae and @adachiu take the lead on some UX mockups, and we sign up as interested contributors and write out some specs and thoughts here: http://bit.ly/codebuddies-hangouts-platform-v2-googledoc
January 2016 Goals
Build out the Hangouts v2.0 platform to improve the community’s ability to connect with one another and track progress updates. Continue to support each other and help each other accomplish our learning goals faster, no matter what level of experience we have with code.
Thank you for being part of the learning community, guys.
Best,
Linda
