STILL ALIVE! (September 21st Newsletter)

Note: this is a copy of an email sent out from tinyletter.com/codebuddies.

Wow, it’s been almost TWO YEARS since the last CodeBuddies newsletter went out. Sorry about that! A lot has happened since January 2016.

(In case you’ve forgotten who we are — we’re a community of independent code learners, driven 100% by volunteer mentors and core code contributors. We’re pretty active on Slack and we use the open-sourced website we built together to schedule hangouts to learn with each other.)

• Progress has been turtle-slow because everyone is a volunteer and contributing in their free time, but in the past year, we’ve built a BRAND NEW hangouts organizing platform from scratch with MeteorJS. The website is still not “complete” yet (as with all software, of course it’s not!), but it’s perfectly usable for scheduling hangouts — and there have been quite a few. You can check out all the member-organized upcoming hangouts at codebuddies.org/hangouts. The project is open-sourced on Github, and we welcome new contributors!

• We started building out a documentation site at docs.codebuddies.org to make it easier for new contributors to get set up and understand the codebase. The documentation site itself is on Github, so if you see an issue, feel free to file an issue or create a pull request. ;)
• The community on Slack is awesome.
• Seriously, so many wonderful, friendly, funny, supportive people in our community on Slack.
• CodeBuddies is still very much an organizing problem: how do we provide a space that helps people connect with each other to their mutual benefit? How do we help people with similar learning goals find each other? To that end, I’m excited about a new groups feature we’re building out on the site, which is currently only viewable on staging.codebuddies.org. We’re looking for feedback on it, so if you’d like to make suggestions, please create a new issue or comment on this thread. I am hoping this feature will solve a lot of the organizing problems we’re having with trying to organize times to study together, and help more of us more easily connect with “running” partners who can motivate us to accomplish what we set out to learn.
• We now have a project roadmap on Trello.
• In March, because Google deprecated its Hangouts API, we moved from primarily using Google Hangouts to using Jitsi, an open-sourced tool very similar to Google Hangouts that also has features like screensharing, audio chat, and a text chat. A plus: it’s embeddable on the webpage itself! Here’s a diagram of where all the functions on Jitsi are:

(And yep, scheduling a hangout on codebuddies.org will automatically create one of these Jitsi rooms on the page.)

• We now also have a Medium publication, which features some truly inspiring and diverse AMAs from members in the community. If you’d like to submit a post to the publication or help grow it (!), please let me know.
• We now also have an Open Collective, which lets us collect and use donations 100% transparently. Many, many thanks to Vanessa Gennarelli and Al Fougy for donating monthly, and to DigitalOcean for sponsoring our hosting for the past year!
• Our costs are expected to increase very soon as we move off from a free-tier MongoDB sandbox database and upgrade our Sparkpost API services, so if you know of any sponsors who might be willing to contribute to our growing open-sourced community to keep us afloat for another year, please get in touch.

Anonymous Shout-outs

Note: You can submit your own anonymous shout-out for next week’s newsletter here.

• Shout-out to whoever started the #unqualifiedfortech hashtag on twitter; it is inspiring!
• Shout-out to everyone who participated in Hacktoberfest last year.
• Shout-out to @girlie_mac on twitter for creating this helpful drawing:

• Shout-out to @distalx for being awesome. I won’t get into all the accreditation since I know you don’t want the attention — but um, there’s a lot!
• Shout-out to everyone in the #fluentpython channel study group.
• Shout-out to everyone in the #tdd-python channel study group!
• Shout-out to @bethanyg for your leadership and advice.
• Shout-out to @bryantt for being so consistent with the weekly asks on the CodeBuddies & TOP Facebook group.
• Shout-out to @lukecamilleri for the WYSIWYG integration. Still appreciating it.
• Shout-out to @ada for designing the CodeBuddies logo all those months ago.
• Shout-out to @anbuselvan for kickstarting the codebase all those months ago.
• Shout-out to @sergeant-q for giving good pep talks, amongst other skills.
• Shout-out to @wuworkshop for being everywhere. Yes.
• Shout-out to everyone who’s helped me in the #javascript and #ruby-on-rails channels!
• Shout-out to @tallpants for proposing the idea of having an #ama channel on Slack, and to all the volunteers in the community who stepped up and did what turned out to be extraordinarily inspiring AMAs:

https://medium.com/codebuddies/ama-with-steve-phillips-lead-developer-and-project-manager-of-the-pursuance-project-b78d6b8ba414
Steve Phillips (@elimisteve) has co-founded a successful hackerspace, given a DEF CON talk, been programming for 8 years and using Linux for 15, and avoided having a day job for 10+ years through a combination of math tutoring, freelance programming, and entrepreneurship. He is currently Lead Developer and Project Manager of the Pursuance Project, which was started by formerly-imprisoned journalist and activist Barrett Brown.

https://medium.com/codebuddies/ama-with-angelo-cordon-front-end-developer-and-product-designer-on-switching-careers-ff531cb1818c
Angelo Cordon (@angelocordon) switched over from over a decade-long career in retail and customer service to starting his own digital consulting agency to finding full time work as a Front-End Developer / Product Designer. He was happy to talk about personal and working environments, company cultures, how to handle family life like when your kids wants to join your skype meetings.

https://medium.com/codebuddies/ama-with-john-a-on-teaching-full-stack-web-development-at-galvanize-cce6444dfded
John A. (@john.a) is a full-stack web development instructor at Galvanize.​

https://medium.com/codebuddies/ama-with-omar-sanseviero-on-interviewing-at-google-mentoring-at-udacity-and-attending-a-bootcamp-ec5facfc84e0
Omar (@osanseviero) is a college student from Mexico City and a software engineering intern at Google.​

Note: You can submit your own anonymous shout-out for next week’s newsletter here.

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I suppose a recurring theme of the past two years has been the power of collaboration. I’ve learned so much from you all. Thank you — you know who you are!

Linda
@lpnotes
September 2017