Code Buddies Blog

Whew, it's been a while since I've updated this tumblr. Sorry about that! A lot has happened since early 2016 with CodeBuddies.

A team of volunteers built a BRAND NEW platform from scratch. The website is still not "complete" yet (of course it’s not), but it's perfectly usable for scheduling hangouts -- and there have been a few. Check it out. The project is open-sourced on Github, so you can contribute, too.

We started building out a documentation site to make it easier for new contributors at docs.codebuddies.org.

The community is thriving on Slack.

Seriously, many wonderful, friendly, funny, supportive people on Slack.

We now have an Open Collective which lets us collect donations and use the money completely transparently.

I’m excited about a new groups feature we’re building out, which is currently only viewable on staging.codebuddies.org. We’re looking for feedback on it, so if you’d like to make suggestions, please create a new issue or comment on this thread. I am hopeful this feature will make the site a lot more useful and lower the barrier to finding study partners.

We now have a project roadmap on Trello. 

I am restarting a weekly newsletter.

We also have a Medium publication, which features some truly inspiring AMAs a few members recently volunteered to do.

A shout-out to those whose contributions have incontestably changed the community for the better: Ada, Anbuselvan, Alice W., Bryant, Olivia, Will, Roberto, Bethany, Omar, Luke, Angelo, and Dhaval.

I suppose a recurring theme of the past year has been the power of collaboration. I’ve learned so much from you all. 

Exhibit #1: https://www.discovermeteor.com/blog/study-plan-meteor-1-3/#es6-modules-&-syntax

Exhibit #2: http://skillcrush.com/2016/03/15/64-online-resources-to-learn-to-code-for-free/

UPDATE: this post is now on Medium: https://medium.com/@lpnotes/codebuddies-what-happened-in-2015-70013dae6f01#.dxcd7mq5f

January: http://hangouts.codebuddies.org (a beta version) is deployed around January 1st! I spend a holiday break building it on top of Telescope, an open-sourced Reddit/HN clone founded by Sacha Greif.

Ethereum, a crypotocurrency platform, forks the repo and briefly uses a CodeBuddies-like platform to organize their own ethereum peer-to-peer google hangouts. 

February: Is featured on Skillcrush’s “13 Meetup Groups You Need To Join If You’re New To Tech” article. 

CodeBuddies is an online web development community that is both free and open-sourced. Their focus is on virtual learning via Google+ Hangouts using audio and screen sharing. Hangouts are generally 1 to 2 hours long and based around specific topics that are proposed by CodeBuddies members.

March: The CodeBuddies Slack is created, and people can invite themselves to the Slack: http://codebuddiesmeet.herokuapp.com. 

Becomes one of four open-sourced projects featured on the Telescope homepage.

February-May:

Excluding Sacha, four people (@wuworkshop, @slava, @curioussavage, and @Paulie-P) submit pull requests, one of whom worked at the Meteor Development Group. 

October:

CodeBuddies’ Anonymous Crowdsourced Newsletter launches. It’s a newsletter that crowdsources shout-outs, learnings, and links to personal projects from everyone in the community who wants to submit something, and publishes each message anonymously. You can read the archive of newsletters here: http://tinyletter.com/codebuddies/archive or subscribe here: http://tinyletter.com/codebuddies. The newsletter goes out to roughly 1300 people. 

Some members, led by @wuworkshop, start a CodeBuddies clan on codewars.com. 

November:

The moderators of what used to be an Odin Project-specific Facebook group (Kevin, Will, Bryant, among others) decide they want to join forces with the CodeBuddies community.

All Throughout 2015:

Multiple volunteers schedule hangouts to learn together, to practice teaching a topic, or as study motivation. Below is just a sample of some hangouts that have happened:

@colbycheeze schedules a hangout to work on creating a voting app with meteorJS, and it turns into a mini-hackathon collaboration over google hangouts and github. 

@imdaveho wants to learn new technologies by building projects with a group, and schedules a series of #codequarters hangouts and writes a bunch of blog posts and records tutorial screencasts as he’s learning, including this latest one that walks through Static Pages, Routes, SCSS, and Templating in Rails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EovQjsesFOA&feature=youtu.be

@shethrives11 schedules a four-week set of silent hangouts on a Coursera Bootstrap course -- one hour a week, with a talking check-in at the end -- and completes the course.

@wuworkshop schedules a couple of silent meteorJS hangouts to motivate folks to finish the four-week MeteorJS course offered by Coursera.

I schedule a couple of non-silent Django hangouts to get some practice teaching an Intro. to Django workshop in real life, and am incredibly happy with how much more Django I master from the experience. 

December:

The CodeBuddies Slack tips over 1000 members, and gets a more vocal Slackbot, which answers FAQs like “What is CodeBuddies”?

Volunteer moderators like @wuworkshop, @will, @sbe and @anbuselvan -- and several other active community members -- consistently paste in helpful resources on Slack containing links to free discounts and events and interesting articles, share advice about freelancing, share advice about switching to tech careers from other industries, and consistently try to help each other out to the best of their ability.

I personally find out about a free several-month pass to frontendmasters.com offered in early 2015, learn that there is an *annotated* version of Eloquent Javascript, learn that TreeHouse used to offer a free pass for library card holders of certain boroughs in NYC, and find out about coupon codes like this and this.

There are 88 channels in the Slack, and not all of them are active -- but there are gems like #nyc and #javascript and #python and #rubyonrails. 

@abdulhannanali courageously starts working on a @100daysofcode bot using Slack webhooks to let members make pledges to the bot to share something they learn about code every day. A public #testchannel is created for testing purposes.

I create http://codebuddies.org/todayilearned, a feed that pulls in messages containing the #todayilearned hashtag published on the Slack and allows sharing on twitter, as an experiment. 

Some volunteers discuss in the #codebuddies-meta channel how to create a hangouts platform version 2.0. that better explains how hangouts work, and would also make it more easy to know at a glance what everyone is working on. We write out some specs and thoughts here: http://bit.ly/codebuddies-hangouts-platform-v2-googledoc 

January 2016 Goals:

Build out the Hangouts v2.0 platform. Continue to support each other and help each other accomplish our learning goals faster, no matter what level of experience we have with code.

Thank you for being part of the learning community, guys.

Best,

Hey @everyone!

Quick reminder to new people here, since I recently got some questions about it: -> Anyone can create a hangout at http://hangouts.codebuddies.org/submit. -> You don’t have to have special privileges to host one or wait around for someone to create one. -> CodeBuddies is language and framework-neutral, so even if you may have noticed a lot of python/django hangouts here, you can create a hangout about literally any language or framework you want. FIGHT FOR YOUR TECHNOLOGY! Just kidding. (But seriously. Fight.)

For example, if you’re learning ruby, and want to find study partners, you can: -> schedule a hangout named “Ruby Study Group” (or "[Name of Tutorial] Study Group”) -> copy the permalink of the post you created, and then paste it into the #ruby channel here. -> use the @channel tag to notify those following the channel about the study session you created.

If you’re a member of Free Code Camp and want some study motivation as you complete the waypoints or bonfires, you can: -> Schedule a hangout named “Free Code Camp Silent Study" -> copy the permalink of the post you created, and then paste it the #javascript channel here. -> use the @channel tag to notify those following the channel about the study session you created.

This community is all about peer-to-peer learning and productivity motivation, and we’re pretty informal, and I’m sorry about any confusion around permissions.

And big thanks to folks who’ve been creating the hangouts or actively helping each other out here right in this Slack chatroom, sharing links and good conversation and answering each other's questions. Shout-outs to @wuworkshop, @princess-eva, @iancmason, @cbelsole, @shethrives11, @dho825, @russeby, @tammy, @sdlambert, @pushorpull, @jack, and many more.

Hey there! You're getting this e-mail because you have an account at codebuddies.org. Codebuddies.org now has a Slack chatroom to help people share knowledge, ask questions, and find hangout study partners more easily than before!

It's a public-invite slack, so if you have not yet received an invitation (or if you know others who might be interested), you can get access here: http://codebuddiesmeet.herokuapp.com.

Slack chatrooms are divided into “channels.” For example, there’s an #html-css channel, a #javascript channel, a #personal-projects channel, and a #pair-programming channel.

Inside a Slack channel, you can:

type “@channel” to make an announcement to everyone in a particular channel. 

choose which channels you wish to follow and which ones you do not wish to subscribe to.

create new channels for topics that you don't already see on the list.

I also highly recommend getting the desktop app for Slack so that you can chat in multiple slack communities at once.

On another note, codebuddies.org recently went through a bit of a redesign so that all the "in progress" hangouts are automatically hoisted to the top at the scheduled time. (Thanks to Slava Kim, a core meteorJS developer, for submitting CodeBuddies’ second-ever pull request to make that happen!)

Thinking of a new look. Y/N? 

A couple of useful new commits have been deployed to http://hangouts:codebuddies.org:

1. The very large and very yellow "members" count at the very top of the home page is reactive, reflecting the true number of user accounts on the platform!

2. The submission form to schedule a study session now has a "start date" and "end date" field. Previously, users were proposing the time directly in the title.

3. Previously, users were typing the hangout link (e.g. "http://codebuddies.org/javascript-hangout") DIRECTLY on the form. Now users can simply select from a pre-filled dropdown of "Hangout Rooms."

4. If a scheduled hangout time has passed for 24 hours, the "LAUNCH HANGOUT" green button and the RSVP button will both disappear.

5. Users can now distinguish -- from a glance -- all the upcoming vs. past hangouts. Upcoming hangout dates are colored in blue, while past hangout dates are greyed out. 

I wouldn't have been able to push out these advances as quickly without the help of @sachagreif and the Telescope community. More recently (as of the last two evenings), @curioussavage, someone I've never met before, also submitted the first-ever pull request on the platform and did significant work figuring out how to render the new dates/times for the posts. Here are the two pull requests he submitted: https://github.com/lpatmo/cb/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed. Apparently this was his first ever pull request on an open-sourced project, too!

Just jumped off a 4.5-hour session studying meteorJS (specifically, studying the Discover Meteor book: http://hangouts.codebuddies.org/posts/Bwu4L66JPg6QErwgW

Some thoughts:

1. Once again, it's really fun to study in a "coffee-shop"-like environment when you know other people/new friends are working on similar things. "Silent" google hangouts reflect this. We ended up sharing lots of helpful links with each other, helping to answer some questions, and talking about where we were in the book.

2. Two hours is probably the threshold before people will start to need a break. 

3. People really hate scheduling times to propose to study! They'd rather join times that other people have proposed. 

4. To solve the previous issue, http://hangouts.codebuddies.org will need to be improved so that users would be able to see who else is online at the same time, and then spontaneously join hangouts to work on similar things. 

In other words, instead of the focus being around scheduled meetups, the focus could be more "spontaneous coffeeshop." 

A space would always be open (there is *always* a hangout happening); instead of asking people to schedule times, we'd ask people to people simply take the initiative to check on the site whenever they're working on a tutorial or a project to see who else is there. 

Fixed some bugs today and also changed the description in the banner area.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

I find myself thinking about productivity a lot (maybe not too surprising, haha?), and what I've been realizing lately is that many days I don't learn anything new coding-skills-wise. 

I go to work, work on familiar things (for me, it's often html/css/sass/jquery with django or perl as the backend), maybe google a couple of questions, and then I spend the evening cooking dinner and watching Agents of SHIELD or something.

If there's a CodeBuddies hangout I proposed or signed up for I might jump on and have fun while discussing/reviewing a part of a programming book or tutorial, but otherwise there are a bunch of skills I haven't mastered and a bunch of awesome tutorials others have recommended to me that's still on my TODO list.

Usually hangouts work like this:

- The organizer proposes a time to meet and a topic

- We share screens and audio

- We talk out loud and work through a tutorial or some coding exercises together (sometimes the audio quality is questionable because of shoddy wifi, but we deal with it)

These hangouts are great, but they're not spontaneous. And this style works best when everyone is on the same page, and when the number of active participants is small (ideally just two people, and no more than five or six people). So in short, maybe the reason we haven't had more hangouts is because they're not the easiest to organize. 

More recently, though, I've joined a couple of more relaxed hangouts where a couple of us might share screens but *not* audio, and we work at our own pace at different sections of the same tutorial, only pausing to join in the chat conversation going on in the Google Hangout sidebar if we run into an issue or a question. 

Surprisingly, these "silent"-style hangouts were still really fun! And even though I generally enjoy explaining or summarizing concepts out loud, it was also nice not having to deal with microphone/audio quality problems.

My question is: does a more laid-back, no-audio hangout at a scheduled time where people work on the same topic but at their own pace make sense to you? 

If so, is there a tutorial or coding-related skill you've been meaning to get around to but never seem to have the time for? Would you be interested in scheduling a block of time to work on it "silently" (chat and screen share only) with others?

Just pushed out a new version of the landing page for http://codebuddies.org!

People have jumped onto Google Hangouts to study or co-work together from:

St. Petersburg, Florida

Berkeley, California

Minnesota

NYC

Alaska

Philadelphia, PA

Connecticut

D.C.

Singapore

Australia

London, England

Dublin, Ireland

India

Javascript community:

124 people

HTML/CSS community:

71 people

Python + Flask + Data Structures & Algorithms community:

83 people

Ruby on Rails community:

67 people

Git community: 

Man, drawing tree pictures with other people is fun.