virtualcoffee.io VS guestbook

Let’s go back to April of 2020. The early days of the pandemic when the world seemed to close in around us. The pandemic had left us isolated, uncertain, and craving connection. It was in this time that something beautiful was born: Virtual Coffee. I put out one, simple tweet: Is anyone interested in Virtual Coffee. And what started as one coffee turned into finding hope together in the one place we could safely gather: online. Virtual Coffee was built out of necessity but grown through compassion and shared experiences.

Thankfully I am part of an awesome online community of developers: https://virtualcoffee.io

I've been learning how to code for the past five months and let me tell you, it really is a whirlwind of emotions! After an amazing mentorship that ended too soon, I realized something: I thrive when I learn with others. That's when I found Virtual Coffee, a tech community that uplifts and celebrates wins of all kinds! Just one virtual coffee in, Chris Nowicki, a generous full stack developer in the community, already dropped a goldmine with us--learning and building in public!

I joined an online developer community called Virtual Coffee last year and saw Klesta’s post about Web Dev Path on their Slack channel. I remember I read her interview to know better about it. I was familiar with building something on my own but I didn’t have much experience to develop within a team. Web Dev Path sounded like a good place to improve skills to work in a team.

Next month at Virtual Coffee, we're doing a monthly challenge for public speaking. What are your favorite tips or resources?

VC Link

Since last September, I have had the opportunity to be an open source project maintainer. I help maintain some project repositories at Virtual Coffee, OpenSauced, and SheSharp communities. And now, I can see the view from a different perspective.

I'm part of some tech communities and love documentation. Together with the core team of the Virtual Coffee Community, I actively discuss ideas and contribute to creating and shaping the community documentation. From there, I was trusted to be the Documentation Team Lead.

Virtual Coffee

Update monthly challenge page to Hacktoberfest — Virtual Coffee

In one of my experiences, my team and I repeatedly gave feedback to resolve merge conflicts on the guestbook repository at OpenSauced. Most of the time, contributors needed to make several attempts until we could merge their PR. Resolving merge conflicts is a daunting task, especially for beginners. Going back and forth to resolve the conflicts would likely discourage them from contributing to any open source project in the future.

At OpenSauced, we’ve been working to curate a contributor journey that allows for contributors to grow. We have repositories made for new contributors, like our Intro Course, pizza-verse, and guestbook. We also include good first issue labels on some of the issues in our app, which is generally geared towards someone leaving the new stage and entering the intermediate stage. In the same way, our docs repo has a variety of issues open to different levels. And finally, there’s always space for our expert contributors across the repositories.

View on GitHub

A couple of months ago, we launched the Intro to Open Source Course, which connects to another repository called guestbook. When the person taking the course gets to chapter five, they put their new-found knowledge to work and create a pull request on the guestbook.

If you want to follow the steps below, I’ll be focusing on the scenario where you've forked and cloned the guestbook repository and are adding yourself using a CLI tool, but this is generally applicable to staying up to date.