CodeBuddies Community OFFICIAL SURVEY RESULTS

Hello all,

It seems like it was WEEKS ago when we last sent out the CodeBuddies community survey. (Oh, wait. What’s that? It was weeks ago?)

Erm… anyway, thank you so all so much for taking a look at it! As promised, we usedimport random to choose two winners of the $5 Amazon.com gift cards; congratulations, Wendy Z. and Konuko J.!

To everyone who expressed an interest in contributing to the codebase, stepping up as a study group organizer, helping us all get cool perks from sponsors, or contributing to the community in general: a double thank you. Please watch out for an email in your inbox in the next few weeks.

Some highlights from the survey results:

• Most of you identify as developers or software engineers, or are working in other roles in tech. 10% of you identify coding as “just a hobby”, and another 10% of you are “learning to get into tech” or “just exploring.”

• Within the community, most of you identified as a Slack user, lurker, or advice seeker.

When asked about what you hoped to get out of CodeBuddies, many of you said CodeBuddies was “a space for me to help others and give back.”

• When asked “How would you want to be recognized on our About page?” you said:

• And these are the programming languages/frameworks/topics you’re most focused on right now:

The MOST insightful commentary came from three free-range questions we asked you:

How would you describe CodeBuddies to someone who knows nothing about it?

How has CodeBuddies helped you?

Do you have any suggestions/feedback for how we could improve our community?

Below are your unfiltered answers to those three questions above. Feel free to scroll through it! We’ve highlighted a few answers that seemed particularly illuminating.

**How would you describe CodeBuddies to someone who knows nothing about it?**

Community for people learning about coding and tech, self-organizing and supportive and diverse, great place to find study groups and motivation to learn.

Like a social study group.

A community of learners.

A way to find study partners and hangouts involving code.

CodeBuddies is a community of people involved in tech and are interested in tech where you can find a study buddy, network with other people, get advice on career paths and tools/technologies to learn, and work together on a code project.

Place where you can meet someone and code together.

A community of group of individual specifically programmers reaching out to one another in the development of individuals and group in general.

A place where people get help from other developers and make friends.

Platform to learn, experiment and teach.

A great area to meet people both studying and teaching in almost any web development language.

Place to learn programming with others.

Not really sure, this group has been on my radar screen but have not gotten deep enough to know, reaching out to know more to help.

Great place to communicate with other developers, to get help to coding questions and or help others.

For me it’s a or should be a group where everyone helps each other out in their coding skills. Being new to Slack I personally need to spend more time with it.

Online community for studying, practicing, engaging with other programming enthusiasts for all levels.

Group that focus in help learning to code.

Place to meet people to study code.

A place to hang out with people who program, pair-program online.

It’s a site where you can organize online study groups and meet people who can help you learn.

A welcoming community of code-learners.

A place to receive encouragement or help with your code, questions about careers in tech, schools/bootcamps, or just get to see some groovy projects people are working on.

Meet and work with coders from around the world.

Forum for the sharing of knowledge.

Forum for innovation.

Pairing for beginners?

A place for help on coding projects.

Learners community for coding.

CodeBuddies is a place where people of all kinds meet up to advance their jobs, skills, and knowledge as a team.

Basically a community of Developers that are trying to get more people (Young and Old) into Programming by providing a free method and work with other educated & experienced programmers.

Community for people learning to code.

A channel/website where you can meet other new programmers and receive help/advice when needed.

Community for people learning about coding and tech, self-organizing and supportive and diverse, great place to find study groups and motivation to learn.

A place to meet like minded friends.

Buddies to code with.

An amazing group of people with dreams and goals in the tech world.

An open community for every buddy in code.

A welcoming and inclusive community of coders.

A friendly online community where you can learn to code with other like-minded individuals through chat or organized hangouts! Don’t code alone!

An active Slack community with a team that genuinely cares. Useful for those learning how to code.

A community that helps coders feel at home!

A virtual space for collaborative learning and sharing

A safe space to learn, teach, and collaborate on programming and development.

Awesome.

A safe space to ask “stupid questions” and share coding experiences.

A community of helpful developers doing remote pair programming and learning from each other

An online space where programmers and prospective programmers connect, having a variety goals: mentorship, accountability, study groups, advice, etc.

A website to meet people who want to improve and learn their coding

Just check it out once I’ll promise you will never feel alone while programming.

A community of tech enthusiasts where you can find study buddies, learn from others, teach, or do any combination of those things.

A slack team where people that are currently learning or want to help others learn CS, programming etc. hangout.

It’s a social place for developers where you can get involved.

A global online community of coders helping each other level up their programming skills.

A good community for learning to code.

A Slack community for learning how to build software.

An online community of people learning to code.

A welcoming place with diverse people from all around the globe. Most of them are inactive though.

Ton of fun to participate in a Hangout/Study Group.

Friendly and chill place to find like-minded people learning code.

No idea. I’ve never really figured out what was at the core of CodeBuddies. (I mean, on a surface level I get it, the motivation was just never 100% clear to me).

I guess I would say a place to find others to code with.

A large study group and community for programming.

A community of code learners.

A place to talk and learn with friendly people of all skill levels in tech.

___How has CodeBuddies helped you?___

It has exposed me to a lot of different technologies and views related to technology.

It hasn’t yet but I hope to start participating.

CodeBuddies has helped me with career advice and being able to talk to others who are in a similar industry.

Career advice.

Not yet. ;)

Make new friends.

Just started to explore.

Hope will do good.

Very helpful to meet people also looking to improve their skills. Helpful also if you are stuck on a concept or piece of code as it can be posted as snippet for others to help resolve issue.

Connected with awesome people like Linda, Omar, Kevin, etc.

Lots of great helpful developers. If I have a question about code I am struggling to find answers to, it usually doesn’t take long to get a response once I post my question on code buddies.

I haven’t used Slack as much hence I feel sorry for myself that I haven’t taken any help from the community or contributed to it. Sorry but I try to start using it and get used to it.

Meeting others in the field and understanding challenges and seeing the different paths people have taken to their current career/skill level. Support group for when I’m feeling stuck or isolated in my own problem.

Accountability when joining Hangouts to keep up with content/studying.

Keep motivation.

Haven’t used it yet.

Coding help, advice, friends.

Organize myself and choose a studying path.

I loved seeing all the positivity, especially when I was having a hair-pulling-out day. It’s great to see people helping and giving advice and genuinely being good and nice people to their fellow developers.

Learn what cool projects people are working on.

Connected me with a strong network

Innovate ideas and thoughts

It’s inspired me

I have been helped when doing my own projects and class work

CodeBuddies has helped me by giving me a place to talk about coding without being judged by who I am and what languages and skills I’m learning.

So far it has given me a lot of connections ( Helped a lot with networking ) and I plan on joining a hangout here soon to get that experience.

Awareness of general support that’s out there.

Getting experience contributing to an open source project. Like-minded + open-minded community

Haven’t used a lot, but will be getting more involved

Its given me an access to a readily available community of peers and mentors who I can not only consult when stuck, but also share tech learning resources and motivation with

Good conversation, great mentoring and advice

First ever open-source project I ever contributed to and became a core contributor and admin/leader.

Learned so much from it!

I work remotely with a couple international teams (much smaller US team) and it’s nice to have found some like minded people with regular hours.

To learn new concepts.

Being in a study group.

I learn a lot of meteorjs and handlebar, brush up on mongodb and css styling with Bootstrap 3.

It’s helped me articulate what I struggle with programming-wise and how to ask for help. It’s enabled me to explain to myself (through explaining to others) complex CS topics and programming principals.

Learn new knowledge.

Keeps me motivated to continue certain projects.

Recruiting!

It hasn’t yet, but that’s because I haven’t used it.

Meeting people and getting advice to cope with the current pace.It helped me get started on my plan to go through fast.ai and feel like there’s accountability/support by seeing another engaged member in my study group.

I got involved in the Pursuance project via CodeBuddies which is an involvement i am really proud of.

I participated in few hangouts and I just love seeing what other people are doing.

Provided lots of good articles and learning materialJust got started, don’t have much to share yet. The study hangouts are great. CodeBuddies also helped me with advice and learning material I did not know existed.

Making connections with new people and new ideas.

Motivation to continue learning to codeThe facebook TOP group was very helpful at a certain period of my studies. I’ve made friends and gotten encouragement!

Hasn’t yet: I am just logging in again after a hiatus.

Meeting people and learning from and helping them.

— Do you have any suggestions/feedback for how we could improve our community? —

Keep up the great work with the newsletter :)

We need to find ways of engaging our users more. Also, we need to improve the experience for new users. Other than that, you’re awesome and doing an excellent job!

Keep doing like this!

It is a little difficult to figure out how to get started.

Would think add like social media platform so people can follow other people

Adding collections of useful links to a single place will be help full. We can directly check them.

The absolute biggest help would be if there were a way to share audio from online training tracks. Currently when trying to host a hangout, no other option but to play sound through speakers while using headset which (at best) is very hard for others in Hangout to understand. Also, I am not worried about the $5 amazon card :) Please give that to someone else.

My hope is this community and project continues to improve is all.

It’s great now.

As I have mentioned earlier I haven’t used Slack much and am not familiar to the slack interface. But as of now I guess there’s nothing to improve.

You welcome new people with your FAQ’s and everything and people chat also with each other and help out. So good work from your side!!

I really enjoy the blog posts and hearing about other’s journeys. Keep up the great work!

I wasn’t sure how to start, there wasn’t a clear welcome message

Maybe make it a little easier to get started with hangouts, in slack, etc. But I have seen great progress over the last year (2 years?!)

No.. I need to find out where y’all’s emails have been going (I suspect a wayward GMail filter), find the slack invite, and do some catching up first!

Great service!

Great interface!

More short sprint course or code katas

No.

Redesigning the hangouts page on CodeBuddies.org it is alot to take in and can be very confusing to someone who is just coming along.

The Slack is really big as an entrypoint. I haven’t really been sure how to get involved.

Not at this time.

Less channels (reduce bloat). Plan for physical meetups (study in person). Like Harry Percival, think about doing more AMA’s with tech authors/gurus to attract more participation (e.g. Dave Beazley, Cal Newton, Katrina Owens, etc.)

No, you’re awesome.

The leadership groups is a great idea, I have no recommendations at present but to keep the community live and strong.

Nope. It’s up to the community to keep it going and cultivate the positive culture. Great job. :)

Continue with those newsletters and medium publications! Study groups should aim to work and complete a small project/app to help with demos and promote the value of the community.

Keep on doing what you’re doing.

Involve group projects.

Hangouts could be made easier and all…it is a bit complicated at the moment to get in.

Regular hangouts by study group organizers. Try to let ppl not in US to take part in hangouts. Send survey out to find out what members want to learn and if anyone can volunteer to teach it.

More emails. Make it easy and simple to join a study group from the homepage. Let people specify their interests when signing up.

More hangout, more pairing between people, dashboard with projects that we could work on.

Interactive sessions and hangouts should be more often.

I’m trying to think of how there could be more people in a study group to help keep ppl accountable (cuz I think it’s too hard to have the same core ppl joining everything [cuz there’s only so much time and energy one can spend], though I do appreciate that ppl joined!), and maybe one way is to just share about this community w/ more people.

Perhaps organizing meetups in meatspace.

I am not that familiar with the slack channels, but slash commands and bot usage is great — especially with serverless. I think Codebuddies is doing grate. I appreciate the community for being low drama and laid back.

None.

I think it’s going well. I think ultimately the goal of remotely helping people to code (at different levels), is always going to be very challenging. I mean, even having everyone in the same room for 3 months is till challenging, so I think you guys are doing a great job. On that note though, I do think that ultimately, “being everything to everyone” is an Achilles heel when it comes to beyond basic success. If I had one suggestion it would be to clearly segment it into 3 to 5 levels of expertise.

Website aesthetics and design could maybe use some work. I hope I can help with it more than just saying “It could maybe use some work.” ;)

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Thank you very much for reading!

Again, to those who expressed an interest in contributing to the codebase, stepping up as a study group organizer, helping us all get cool perks from sponsors, or contributing to the community in general: a double thank you. Please watch out for an email in your inbox in the next few weeks.

— CodeBuddies Team

Written by: Linda Peng

Graphics by: distalx

Survey questions and edits/improvements thanks to: @4imble, @wuworkshop, @distalx, @stain88, @bethanyg, Angelo Cordon, @railsstudent, and @dan737