CodeBuddies: 2015 In Review
UPDATE: this post is now on Medium:Â 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.Â
February: Is featured on Skillcrushâs â13 Meetup Groups You Need To Join If Youâre New To Techâ article.Â
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.Â
Becomes one of four open-sourced projects featured on the Telescope homepage.
Excluding Sacha, four people (@wuworkshop, @slava, @curioussavage, and @Paulie-P) submit pull requests, one of whom worked at the Meteor Development Group.Â
CodeBuddiesâ Anonymous Crowdsourced Newsletter launches. Itâs 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.Â
Some members, led by @wuworkshop, start a CodeBuddies clan on codewars.com.Â
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.
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.Â
@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 heâs learning, including this latest one that walks through Static Pages, Routes, SCSS, and Templating in Rails:Â 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.Â
The CodeBuddies Slack tips over 1000 members, and gets a more vocal Slackbot, which answers FAQs like âWhat is CodeBuddiesâ?
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.Â
@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.Â
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-googledocÂ
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.