Not ready to send this email. (Oct. 5th Newsletter)
Note: this is a copy of an email sent out from tinyletter.com/codebuddies.
The short, exciting announcement is:
You can now start a study group on codebuddies.org.
Why am I so excited about this?
I’d often see new members join our Slack community and post looking for study or project partners. This would inevitably lead to private DMs or the creation of offshoot Slack channels. Then, two weeks later, another member would join — and might be the perfect addition to an ongoing group, as they would have the same learning goals. But instead of helping each other through mastering a topic X or motivating each other to complete an MOOC course or a project, these people would never meet.
What a lost opportunity!
But now we have study groups, which you (yes, you!) can start, which’ll let you:
- more easily find people interested in mastering the same topic(s) as you
- join a virtual meetup (each group has a 24/7 hangout tab!) without going through the hassle of starting a hangout and figuring out a time to schedule it for
- log your learnings/accomplishments in a Progress Log
- compile a saved list of links/resources relevant to your group
- choose whether you want to let everyone in your group start hangouts for the group, or only the moderators you assign
This feature would not exist without the amazing work by @distalx, who initially conceptualized and spearheaded the project. Thanks also to those who provided incredibly useful feedback on Github while the feature was still on staging.codebuddies.org — including @osanseviero, @sergeant-q, @abdulhannanali, @bethanyg, @arturolei, and @tonypnode.
We are still going to improve this feature. The list of open issues on https://github.com/codebuddiesdotorg/codebuddies/issues is a big reason the subject line for this newsletter was “Not ready to send this email”; part of me felt like I shouldn’t announce the exciting news until was “more” ready!
But the reality is that it is ready to use, and bound to need improvements, but we won’t really know what improvements we should prioritize until we start using it more.
So please: if you have a suggestion to make, file an issue at https://github.com/codebuddiesdotorg/codebuddies/issues or share your idea in the #codebuddies-meta channel on Slack.
Shout-outs
Shout-out to @osanseviero for spending time creating a powerpoint to help onboard new contributors to the CodeBuddies codebase at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1tlU9hWUsP44W6I0qEre0CgqrjLUaK1Vwr-hGq7phn0Q/edit?usp=sharing! Feedback is welcome!
Shout-out to the #python, #javascript, #ruby-on-rails, and #advice channels for inspiring discussions. :)
Shout-out to a new channel you can now join on Slack: #blockchain
Shout-out to all the new members in the #introduce-yourself channel!
Shout-out to those who’ve been helping others (yay mentors!), including @spetastian, @wuworkshop, @angelocordon, @bethanyg, @olivia, @dan737, @stain88, and @kevinmulhern.
Shout-out to @bethanyg, @bryantt, and @lpatmo for starting PyStudy, Interview Practice, and the TDD Python study groups! (I feel like we’re missing some Javascript and Ruby study group representation…)
Shout-out to @alfougy, @scgisme, @lpatmo, @dan737, and @bethanyg for scheduling recent hangouts!
***
CodeBuddies was started as a free, safe, open-sourced and supportive community entirely backed by independent code learning volunteers, and remains so. The website we started building last year to help ourselves with our programming goals still isn’t completely “done,” but I am incredibly proud of everything that you all (the contributors) have contributed so far. And to think: ALL VOLUNTEERS!
Thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the hosting for our website, and to Al Fougy and Vanessa Gennarelli for being monthly patrons on our Open Collective.
Have a great week,
Linda
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Reminder: You can submit your own anonymous shout-outs for next week’s newsletter here.
