We’ve got a conference!

As we ring in the New Year, we’re celebrating a huge milestone: 5 years of Virtual Coffee! What started as a way to connect and support each other has grown into an incredible community, and we couldn’t be more grateful for all of you. In celebration of our 5-year mark in April, we’re doing something new: throwing our first virtual conference! We’ll be kicking it off as a three-month challenge, starting with the CFP challenge next month and ending with the conference on April 25th 🎉 So mark your calendars!

📆 What's happening at Virtual Coffee

January Recap

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: New Year New Goal!

We encouraged our members to start up those dreams and ideas the smart way; making plans with friends! Folks spent the month working on their plans, making smart goals and getting feedback and support from other members!

To view all of the details of how this year's challenge went, check out the January 2025 challenge page.

February

💡Quarterly Theme & Challenge: From Idea To Stage!

Five years going and some big big plans!

As Virtual Coffee celebrates its 5th anniversary, we’re excited to launch our first-ever quarterly challenge! This special initiative embodies what our community unique: supporting developers at all stages, creating opportunities for growth, and fostering genuine connections.

Over the next three months, we'll work together to bring our internal conference to life, creating opportunities for both speakers and event organizers. Whether you dream of sharing your knowledge on stage or want to learn the ins and outs of running tech events, this challenge is for you!

Learn more about this challenge in this blog post.

To view all of the details of this year's challenge, check out the Spring 2025 challenge page.

✨ Member Content Highlights

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

Articles and Videos

• My Taipy: Start Contributing to an Open Source Project - Satoshi S.

• Pomerium and Zero Trust Security - Nick Taylor (video)

• 2024 Year in Review: Brian Meeker

• Introduction to Data Analysis using PySpark - Neha M.

• Typescript: A Lego-Based Guide - Nerajno

• How to Start Technical Writing in 2025 - Victoria Lo

🏆 Member Wins

• The CEO shared my journey about how I joined their company. - Arvind

• Got an interview for an apprenticeship program - Christine

• I met my daily coding goals, completed a small project, and interviewed for a job. - Dorian

• First week of robot class went really well - all possible points earned, easily setup my environment and got the software to work. - Josh B

• Just merged a PR that I've been working towards for a few months now. - Josh G

• I updated my palette-assistant program to show all the Dharma tie-dye colors. - Cris

• Big day, big win! Starting my new role today. Starting a hype train. - Nicky T

👀 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!

💡 Open Source at VC

Here at Virtual Coffee, we’re quite big on open source. So big in fact, that we’ve decided to open source our entire repository of community contribution docs! We really wanted to practice what we preach in terms of transparency, accessibility, and resource-driven project work! So please feel free to check it out!

🤝 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 of the roles here!

☕🪑 Coffee Table Events

Note: These are the times that are currently scheduled 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.

📅 Weekly Async Events

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

• Tuesdays: Trivia in #game-night

• Wednesdays: Midweek check-in in #general

• Fridays: 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)

• Check out our latest podcasts from season 10 here!

🆕 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.

 💙 Donations

Dear Virtual Coffee Community,We've always believed in transparency, so we want to share an important update about Virtual Coffee's financial situation. Recently, we lost two major sponsors, which has created some immediate financial challenges for our community.Virtual Coffee has been free since our first coffee in April 2020, and we remain committed to keeping membership free and accessible to all. However, to maintain our current services and community spaces, we need your help.Our monthly operating costs include:

• Essential services for our twice-weekly coffees and coffee table groups

• Hosting for our site

• Tools that help us coordinate events and maintain our close-knit community

We're actively exploring new sponsorship opportunities and ways to reduce costs. However, to bridge this gap and ensure we can continue providing the same level of support and connection you've come to expect, we're asking community members who are able to consider contributing through GitHub Sponsors. How You Can Help:

1. If you're able, please consider becoming a GitHub Sponsor at any amount - there's are  one-time sponsorship opportunities

2. Share our GitHub Sponsors page with your network

3. If you have connections to companies that might be interested in sponsoring our community, please reach out at hello@virtualcoffee.io or connect them with a maintainer.

Virtual Coffee has always been about supporting each other. We appreciate everything our members have given to the community over the years, and it genuinely pains us to ask for more. Your support, whether financial or through continued participation and engagement, means everything to us.

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 hello@virtualcoffee.io.

Happy New Year Friends!

As we ring in the New Year, we’re celebrating a huge milestone: 5 years of Virtual Coffee! What started as a way to connect and support each other has grown into an incredible community, and we couldn’t be more grateful for all of you. In celebration of our 5-year mark in April, we’re doing something new: throwing our first virtual conference! We’ll be kicking it off as a three-month challenge, starting with the CFP challenge next month and ending with the conference on April 25th 🎉 So mark your calendars!

📆 What's happening at Virtual Coffee

December Recap

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Creative Community!

We encouraged our members to indulge in their alternate interests, hobbies, and games outside of development. We got to share in those joys on our monthly challenge page in Slack as folks shared images and videos of their endeavors. Thank you to all the community members who participated!

To view all of the details of how this year's challenge went, check out the December 2024 challenge page.

January is a Fresh Start

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: New Year, New Goal

Let's make some space for the other parts of ourselves.

The new year is the perfect time to set your new goal. Whether learning new dev-related things, preparing yourself to get a new job, making new habits to be a better developer, or anything you work towards this year. And this month, we're here to support you!

During this month, we'll work on setting your one big goal for the year and breaking it down into achievable goals for each month.

Learn more about this challenge in this blog post.

To view all of the details of this year's challenge, check out the January 2024 challenge page.

✨ Member Content Highlights

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

Articles and Videos

• My experience at CascadiaJS 2024 - Klesta

• Messaging With Limits: Concurrent, Multi-Stage Data Processing in the Real World - Brian Meeker (video)

• Dev Containers: Coding with Zero Dependencies - Jono Yeong (video)

• Cypress Accessibility Roundup - Mark Noonan

• Balancing Empathy and Boundaries - Victoria Lo (video)

• Install Node using the package manager - Micha Rodriguez

• The Cost of Clinging to Legacy Software - Bekah Hawrot Weigel

• Understanding Quake III Fast Inverse Square Root Algorithm - Edward Banner (video)

🏆 Member Wins

• My CFP for Commit Your Code 2025 was accepted! - Nick

• My article got in top 7 must read DEV  articles. - Chris

• Win: Had a poem accepted for a Feb 2025 anthology in the UK! - Mark

• I passed the CISSP exam. It’s a huge cybersecurity milestone and tough to pass. - Q

👀 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!

💡 Open Source at VC

Here at Virtual Coffee, we’re quite big on open source. So big in fact, that we’ve decided to open source our entire repository of community contribution docs! We really wanted to practice what we preach in terms of transparency, accessibility, and resource-driven project work! So please feel free to check it out!

🤝 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 of the roles here!

☕🪑 Coffee Table Events

Note: These are the times that are currently scheduled 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.

📅 Weekly Async Events

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

• Tuesdays: Trivia in #game-night

• Wednesdays: Midweek check-in in #general

• Fridays:

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

• Practical Deep Learning Study Group

☕ 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)

• Check out our latest podcasts from season 10 here!

🆕 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.

🏆️ Sponsors

Level Up Financial Planning helps techies like you take your financial confidence to the next level. It’s real financial planning to help you reach your goals and gain clarity on what actions you need to take now to maximize your tech career. Level Up even has a podcast where you can hear about some of the strategies he uses with his clients. Check out http://levelupfinancialplanning.com and you can get that link in our show notes.

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 hello@virtualcoffee.io.

Hey Friends!

Time for some hobbies! Last month we went all in on writing articles and sharing our word with a wider audience. But now at the end of the year we want to take some time for our passions, hobbies, games, and the little things that provide us joy.

📆 What's happening at Virtual Coffee

November Recap

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Writing!

Based on the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) Challenge, this challenge was the tech and non-tech take on writing and working together towards the goal while posting on our own blogs. Thank you to all the community members who participated!

To view all of the details of how this year's challenge went, check out the November 2024 challenge page.

December is the time for fun!

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Creative Community!

Let's make some space for the other parts of ourselves.

Devs are more than just the code we write. This challenge is all about embracing self-expression. Give back to yourself by indulging in something just for fun. Share the art, music, poetry, sports, games, or other hobbies that spark your joy. We spend so much time grinding away on understanding things in the tech space. Let's make some space for the other parts of ourselves. In this challenge, we encourage folks to spend time working on things that aren't necessarily code-specific or using code to improve other hobbies and outlets.

Learn more about this challenge in this blog post.

To view all of the details of this year's challenge, check out the December 2024 challenge page.

☕🪑 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:

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

• Practical Deep Learning Study Group

☕ 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.

🎙️ The Podcast is Back!

Check out our latest podcasts from season 10 here!

🆕 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

• The Ultimate Networking Guide for Programmers - Victoria Lo

• How I Spent My Time After Getting Laid Off - Neha Maity

• Why Accessibility Is Important - Sarah Dye

• Sophisticated Speed to Text - David Akim

• Lessons, Growth, and Goodbyes: My Time With Scrimba Bootcamp - Micha Rodriguez

🏆 Member Wins

• Have to settle a few details, but I got approval from my manager to enroll in a class here at CMU next spring. - Josh

• Today I reached 600 Kata in Codewars and halfway to 4 kyu!  The more 7 kyu difficulty problems I do, the more JavaScript concepts make sense. - Aaron

• My article got in top 7 must read DEV  articles. - Chris

👀 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: Creative Community - Ayu Adiati

🏆️ Sponsors

Level Up Financial Planning helps techies like you take your financial confidence to the next level. It’s real financial planning to help you reach your goals and gain clarity on what actions you need to take now to maximize your tech career. Level Up even has a podcast where you can hear about some of the strategies he uses with his clients. Check out http://levelupfinancialplanning.com and you can get that link in our show notes.

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 hello@virtualcoffee.io.

Hey Friends!

We’re ready to write! Last month we went all in on Hacktoberfest and open-sourced our VC Community Docs! Community members came together to maintain, contribute, and mentor to and for each other, all aligned on the goals of open-source empowerment and building community.

And now we want to take some time as we approach the year’s end to write some thoughts. Our learning, our aspirations, our takeaways, our lessons. We believe that everyone has a story to tell and an audience that needs to hear that story.

📆 What's happening at Virtual Coffee

September Recap

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Hacktober!

Every year since 2020, we’ve tried to get involved in some way with the Hacktoberfest initiative. Virtual Coffee aligns with the spirit and ethos of open source and tries every year to be an accessible avenue to learning, supporting, and tending to open-source projects. Shoutout to all the folks who participated in another successful hacktoberfest!

November is the time to write!

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: 50k words!

This month, we're working together to blog 50,000 words! Based off the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) Challenge, we'll be doing the tech and non-tech take on writing and working together towards the goal while posting on our own blogs.

Get those blog posts up!

How to Participate

Once you've written and published your content, add your entry to our VC NaNoWriMo entry form!

What kind of content counts towards the challenge?

Any tech-related or non-tech blog posts, articles, or novels published in November! For tech-related posts, feel free to include code samples in your word count totals (if it's a word and you wrote it, we'll count it 😊).

While we love good documentation here at Virtual Coffee, README docs, or anything else you would typically consider documentation, it doesn't count for this challenge.

What if I'm not confident about my writing?

We all start somewhere. The more you practice, the better you'll get. We have volunteers willing to proofread and give you feedback on your writing. Just put a link to your draft in the #monthly-challenge or #content-creation channel and ask for the help you need.

What if I don't know what to write about?

We've got you covered with extensive topic lists in this discussion and this discussion.

And remember, we're always here to help ❤️

Find more resources, and see past challenges on our monthly challenge page!

☕🪑 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:

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

• Practical Deep Learning Study Group

☕ 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.

🎙️ The Podcast is Back!

• Building Relationships in Open Source

• Climbing the Contributor Ladder

• Open Sourcing a Private Repo

🆕 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

• CSS Masonry Catness - Alex Curtis-Slep

• 11 in 11: Concepts Learnt or Relearnt from Zero Day - Nerando Johnson

Videos

• Slots, Slots, Slots, Everybody! - Abbey Perini

🏆 Member Wins

• Not a work win, but... Big news—I made it to the final round of the NPO Concerto Competition! - Lex

• Got a PR merged today, which took me several weeks of working through! - Eddie

• I merged a big-for-me PR yesterday, the intersection points of two splines. - Cris

👀 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

Level Up Financial Planning helps techies like you take your financial confidence to the next level. It’s real financial planning to help you reach your goals and gain clarity on what actions you need to take now to maximize your tech career. Level Up even has a podcast where you can hear about some of the strategies he uses with his clients. Check out http://levelupfinancialplanning.com and you can get that link in our show notes.

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 hello@virtualcoffee.io.

Hey Friends!

Hacktoberfest is here! It’s been a long road of preparation, encouragement, and support. As always, shoutout to all our volunteers who’ve spread the good word about getting our members geared up to contribute!

To start the month off in the true spirit of Hacktoberfest, we’ve done something big. We open-sourced our VC Community Docs! By sharing our playbook, we're not just supporting our immediate community—we're extending a hand to community builders everywhere. We're living our values of creating a positive, inclusive community and removing tech barriers on a broader scale. You can H…

📆 What's happening at Virtual Coffee

September Recap

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Preptember!

Every year since 2020, we’ve tried to get involved in some way with the Hacktoberfest initiative. Virtual Coffee aligns with the spirit and ethos of open source and tries every year to be an accessible avenue to learning, supporting, and tending to open-source projects.

October? You must mean Hacktober!!!

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Time to Open Source!

This challenge is always run during October and was our first-ever monthly challenge. In many ways, we think of Hacktoberfest as the event that solidified Virtual Coffee beyond a pandemic meetup.

We have three tracks: approved maintainers will provide issues labeled for Hacktoberfest, contributors will solve issues, and mentors will help contributors and maintainers be successful.

Maintainers:

They provide the repositories with "hacktoberfest" topic(s) and issues labeled "hacktoberfest" on their repositories. They will also answer the contributors' questions, review the pull requests (PRs), and validate and merge them following the contest rules.

Contributors:

They find repositories with "hacktoberfest" topic(s) and issues they want to solve. The contest's goal is to have four (4) pull requests (PRs) approved during October. Learn more about this challenge in this blog post.

Mentors:

A mentor will be paired with a mentee (contributor or maintainer). They provide support through a 1:1, a pairing session, Slack, or whatever works best for the team!

☕🪑 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:

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

• Practical Deep Learning Study Group

☕ 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.

🎙️ The Podcast is Back!

• Remote Collaboration Tools and Techniques

• How to Build Trust Capital

• 'Big M' versus 'Little m' Mentorship

• How to Make a Positive Impact during Hacktoberfest

• Open Source Maintainer Challenges and Benefits

🆕 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

• Creating a Github Copilot extension: A step-by-step guide - Nick Taylor

• How to Bake an Ortelius Pi Series - Sasha Wharton

Videos

• Never Forget a Command Again with this Windows Terminal Trick - Michael Jolley

🏆 Member Wins

• Just got accepted to speak at CodeMash - Brian

• I hit my goal weight of 180. - Justin

• Did my very first Open-Source contribution last week. - B Suraj

• Exciting week—started a new contract-to-hire role and just received another job offer - Derek

👀 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

Level Up Financial Planning helps techies like you take your financial confidence to the next level. It’s real financial planning to help you reach your goals and gain clarity on what actions you need to take now to maximize your tech career. Level Up even has a podcast where you can hear about some of the strategies he uses with his clients. Check out http://levelupfinancialplanning.com and you can get that link in our show notes.

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 hello@virtualcoffee.io.

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

Level Up Financial Planning helps techies like you take your financial confidence to the next level. It’s real financial planning to help you reach your goals and gain clarity on what actions you need to take now to maximize your tech career. Level Up even has a podcast where you can hear about some of the strategies he uses with his clients. Check out http://levelupfinancialplanning.com and you can get that link in our show notes.

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 hello@virtualcoffee.io.