Virtual Coffee, February 2025 - From Idea to Stage

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 [email protected] 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 [email protected].