Virtual Coffee, January 2025 - New Year, New Goal

Happy New Year Friends!

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

December Recap

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Creative Community!

We encouraged our members to indulge in their alternate interests, hobbies, and games outside of development. We got to share in those joys on our monthly challenge page in Slack as folks shared images and videos of their endeavors. Thank you to all the community members who participated!

To view all of the details of how this year's challenge went, check out the December 2024 challenge page.

January is a Fresh Start

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: New Year, New Goal

Let's make some space for the other parts of ourselves.

The new year is the perfect time to set your new goal. Whether learning new dev-related things, preparing yourself to get a new job, making new habits to be a better developer, or anything you work towards this year. And this month, we're here to support you!

During this month, we'll work on setting your one big goal for the year and breaking it down into achievable goals for each month.

Learn more about this challenge in this blog post.

To view all of the details of this year's challenge, check out the January 2024 challenge page.

✨ Member Content Highlights

Our members are making the internet a better place with their words and wisdom!

Articles and Videos

• My experience at CascadiaJS 2024 - Klesta

• Messaging With Limits: Concurrent, Multi-Stage Data Processing in the Real World - Brian Meeker (video)

• Dev Containers: Coding with Zero Dependencies - Jono Yeong (video)

• Cypress Accessibility Roundup - Mark Noonan

• Balancing Empathy and Boundaries - Victoria Lo (video)

• Install Node using the package manager - Micha Rodriguez

• The Cost of Clinging to Legacy Software - Bekah Hawrot Weigel

• Understanding Quake III Fast Inverse Square Root Algorithm - Edward Banner (video)

🏆 Member Wins

• My CFP for Commit Your Code 2025 was accepted! - Nick

• My article got in top 7 must read DEV  articles. - Chris

• Win: Had a poem accepted for a Feb 2025 anthology in the UK! - Mark

• I passed the CISSP exam. It’s a huge cybersecurity milestone and tough to pass. - Q

👀 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

• Practical Deep Learning Study Group

☕ 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.

🏆️ Sponsors

Level Up Financial Planning helps techies like you take your financial confidence to the next level. It’s real financial planning to help you reach your goals and gain clarity on what actions you need to take now to maximize your tech career. Level Up even has a podcast where you can hear about some of the strategies he uses with his clients. Check out http://levelupfinancialplanning.com and you can get that link in our show notes.

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].