2021 Review: Growing Against All Odds

The photo was taken from the codebar Brighton Instagram

This year has taught us that the human spirit is persevering, as it is inspiring. We entered the year with some uncertainty after an eventful 2020. And now, we’re saying goodbye to it feeling proud of everything we have accomplished in spite of our challenges.

Let’s celebrate our most important moments of the year, and look ahead at what’s next for us in 2022.

Our 2021 Highlights

The First codebar Festival

In March, after 4 months of preparation and hard work, we ran our very first codebar Festival. Over 800 community members from 20 countries took part in the virtual event. It was an incredible 3 days packed full of talks, demos, workshops, and panels. You can watch it all back here.

Plans are in place for next year already. The CFP is currently open, so if you’d like to submit a session, please do so here. We strongly encourage everyone to submit their idea, even if you’ve never done a talk before! This is the perfect opportunity to bring your vision to life. If you’d like to talk to us about your idea before submitting, please drop us an email at hello@codebar.io. Should your proposal turn out successful, you will be paid £150 for your time.

Literature Joined Forces with Tech

We collaborated with The Pragmatic Bookshelf for a literary festival in September. Together, we organised 4 days of talks, demos, and quizzes from technical writers and authors. All sessions can be watched back here.

“Get to know a…” Series

Throughout the summer, we ran a Friday lunchtime “Get to know a …” series. Lots of students attending codebar think that a web developer is the main role. We wanted to show that there are many roles in tech that involve coding. In this series, we spoke with a Cloud Engineer, DevOps Engineer, 3D Designer, Hardware Developer, Game Developer, Developer Advocate, Data Scientist, and Accessibility Specialist. Watch all the sessions here.

Workshops Around the World

We ran 158 workshops across 28 active chapters in 2021. 1340 new members joined our community and 2909 attended our workshops, with November being our busiest month. We also saw the relaunch of our Paris chapter. While we ran fewer workshops and saw less attendance than we did in 2020, we’re proud of our community for continuing with their incredible efforts in running free workshops.

Our Brighton and Helsinki chapters ran their first in-person workshops in 18+ months. This is something we’re rolling out very slowly, as we want to ensure that everyone feels comfortable and safe before holding more in-person workshops.

For more stats like the ones we mentioned above, visit our stats website at stats.codebar.io.

Education Beyond Workshops

In 2021, we continued to serve our community with events beyond our regular coding workshops. We ran 65 one-off events including More Robust Servers with Promises in Node.js, Learn about Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD), Learn about Test Driven Development (TDD), and several career panels. These events were particularly successful as anyone from our community was able to attend, regardless of where they were located.

What We Are Looking Forward to in 2022

Return of codebar Festival

Our second codebar Festival will be happening in March 2022. We’ve received feedback after our first Festival and will be improving the experience in 2 ways:

1. Coding day will have two tracks — one track for absolute beginners and another track for more advanced coding topics.
2. Career day will include a 2-hour job fair. You can wander around the virtual booths (on Hopin) and speak with companies about their open positions. There will be roles of all levels, but a special focus will be on open junior positions.

You will be able to RSVP for codebar Festival from 7 February 2022. For now, do consider submitting a session or emailing us to reserve a booth for your company at our job fair.

Hybrid Learning Experience

We also can’t wait to start running our in-person workshops again (only when it is completely safe to do so) while continuing to run virtual workshops. We’ve learned the huge value of virtual events and want to continue providing access to them for those who are not able to attend in-person workshops.

We want to finish by saying a huge thank you to everyone. This year has been a challenge and we’ve learned the power that being part of an online community can have. Have a wonderful and much deserved rest over the break, and we’ll see you in 2022 ❤️