virtualcoffee.io VS website

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

The Collab Lab is a non-profit organization that runs a program where early career developers can apply to work together on a team to complete a project led by mentors who work in the field.

TCL Link

I recently completed a full-stack project at The Collab Lab and developed a shopping list app with 3 other developers. Throughout this journey, I gained a profound appreciation for the importance of accessibility in web development. It is crucial for front-end developers to have accessibility awareness in mind so the apps we are building can be user-friendly to all. While I don't claim to be an accessibility expert, below are the 6 simple low-hanging fruit that you can grab to significantly enhance your site's accessibility.

I had first-hand experience leaving a community because I didn't feel welcome and secure as a newbie from an underrepresented group. I realized later that this community lacked moderators to catch up with all conversations in their forum and Discord. Based on this experience, when DEV (and CodeNewbie) offered me to be one of the moderators, I accepted it without a second thought! Not only here, but I'm also one of the Code of Conduct responders at The Collab Lab community and an advisor at the Virtual Coffee community because I want to help create and maintain a safe and inclusive space in the tech community for everyone.

As a self-taught developer, there are 2 things that I always missed during my learning journey: building projects in a team and getting feedback. I thought that both things could help me improve my coding skills much faster so I started to look for any kind of experience or community that could provide me that. And one day I luckily came across The Collab Lab.

The Collab Lab repository