Virtual Coffee - August 2024

Hey Friends!

After a month of sharing some amazing outdoor and pet adventures, we’re finally to get into the best season of the year, Open Source season. September is Preptember, where we get ready for all things Hacktoberfest in October!

💞 Kindness and Gratitude

Spotlighting some of the kindness happening in our community.

I big thank you to our monthly challenge leads, Ayu and Dominic for this new photography monthly challenge. - Bekah

Thank you so much to Michael, Brian, Alex, and Ray for your help with troubleshooting my issue! - Meg

I'm incredibly thankful for this group. - Alexander

📆 What's happening at Virtual Coffee

August Recap

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: New Member Welcome!

The August challenge asked the community to get outside! Go out into the world, have some great moments and then bring them back to share with the community. We’re more than our times behind the desk and we wanted to see all the cool things our members get up to. We asked everyone to share those moments of joy and fun and happiness with each other, and turn the space into a place of inspiration, wonderment, and beauty.

Also, pets! We asked the community to flood our challenge channels with pics of their lovely pets and boy did they deliver! It was absolutely lovely and probably a much needed fun time for the team.

Learn more about this challenge in this blog post.

September? Preptember!!!

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Getting ready for Open Source!

Get ready for Hacktoberfest! This month, our member maintainers will clean up their repos, and our members getting ready to contribute will be writing good issues. We’ve made resources for Maintainers and Contributors so everyone has a clear path and avenue to success!

Maintainers:

• Evaluate your open-source project and complete the checklist before the end of September.

• List your open-source project in our Virtual Coffee Preptember repository after it passes our repository checklist.

Contributors:

• Add yourself as a Preptember participant in our Virtual Coffee Preptember repository.

• Following the guide, evaluate an open-source project to VC-verify it as a good project to contribute to. If the repository doesn't meet our standards, create and submit good issues to suggest updates.

• List the repository in our Virtual Coffee Preptember repository after it passes our repository checklist.

Learn more about this challenge in this blog post.

☕🪑 Coffee Table Events

• Tech Interview Study Group (Mondays at 4:00 PM ET)

• Accountabilibuddies (Tuesdays at 7:00 PM ET | Thursdays at 9:00 AM ET)

• The Pack Hunt (Tandem Job Hunting) (Wednesdays at 10:00 AM ET)

• Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) Office Hours (Wednesdays at 4:00 PM ET)

• Feelings Friday (Fridays at 8:00 PM ET)

• Frontend Friday Folks fighting CSSBattle.dev (Fridays at 11:00 AM ET)

📅 Weekly Async Events

• Mondays: Goal-setting post in #goals-and-wins

• Tuesdays: Trivia in #game-night

• Wednesdays: Midweek check-in in #general

• Fridays:

  • Rust Learning Cohort check-in in #learning-together

  • X (formerly Twitter) chat and gratitude post in #general

☕ Official Virtual Coffee Events

• Virtual Coffee (Tuesdays at 9:00 AM ET | Thursdays at 12:00 PM ET)

• Async Twitter Chat (Weekly chat begins every Friday at 9:00 AM ET)

Note: These are the currently scheduled times for these events at the time of this publication. Please check the official VC #announcements Slack channel, or other noted channels, for any updates and links to event rooms. For the full list of events, check out our events page.

🆕 New Career Focus Channels Alert

We've added three new private channels — Senior+, Mid-level, Early-career — to our Slack for peer-to-peer conversation, because we know that it's good to be able to support and nurture conversations specific to your career level. If you're interested in joining the one you identify with most, DM Bekah or Meg on Slack.

🤝 Volunteering at VC

We're very excited to continue open membership with the support of our active volunteers! All our active volunteers have an invite to send out to someone interested in joining Virtual Coffee. If you're interested in joining the volunteer team, check out some the roles here!

✨ Member Content Highlights

Our members are making the internet a better place with their words and wisdom!

Articles

• Unlocking Open Source Success: The Art of Effective Open Source Contribution - Bekah Hawrot Weigel

• Experiences in the Meta Production Engineer pre-internship program - Satoshi Shirosaka

Videos

• Advanced Paste in PowerToys is About to Change Your Productivity Forever - Michael Jolley

• Understanding and Implementing a Conditional Random Field in Python - Eddie Banner

🏆 Member Wins

• Glad to share that my article about sharing data between components in Angular got included in the featured section in Hashnode. - Naz

• Finally made myself sit down and create a rough draft of my talk at Elixir Conf in a couple of weeks. - Brian

• Finished a demo shown at BlackHat in Vegas last week! - Klesta

• Here's a win I've been striving for for a while:
  I just received my 50th 5-star review for Twelfth Night DJ - Rolando

👀 What our members are up to

• Chris J. does a weekly post for goals of the week.

• Dominic Duffin co-hosts ArtTechChat on Twitter every Sunday at 1:00 PM ET.

• Ray Deck is co-hosting a vid-pod about low code/no code solutions on YouTube!

• Michael Jolley is streaming on twitch!

💻 Resource Highlights!

Monthly Challenge: Welcoming Community - Ayu Adiati

🏆️ Sponsors

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If you're a member and you’d like to give a Lunch & Learn or Workshop, you can submit your idea here.

Have a question, suggestion, or want to nominate someone’s act of kindness or blog post? Email us at [email protected].