Virtual Coffee, October 2024 - Hacktoberfest

It's one of our favorite months at Virtual Coffee! It's time to do some open source.

Author

VirtualCoffee Maintainers
October 15, 2024

Hey Friends!

Hacktoberfest is here! It’s been a long road of preparation, encouragement, and support. As always, shoutout to all our volunteers who’ve spread the good word about getting our members geared up to contribute!

To start the month off in the true spirit of Hacktoberfest, we’ve done something big. We open-sourced our VC Community Docs! By sharing our playbook, we're not just supporting our immediate community—we're extending a hand to community builders everywhere. We're living our values of creating a positive, inclusive community and removing tech barriers on a broader scale. You can H…

💖 Community Gratitude 

I am grateful for everyone at Virtual Coffee. ☕️❤️ I want to give a special shout-out to Megan though! We had an awesome 'coffee chat' yesterday and she let me pick her brain about developer education roles.

- Micha

📆 What's happening at Virtual Coffee

September Recap

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Preptember!

Every year since 2020, we’ve tried to get involved in some way with the Hacktoberfest initiative. Virtual Coffee aligns with the spirit and ethos of open source and tries every year to be an accessible avenue to learning, supporting, and tending to open-source projects.

Check out the workshops we ran to prepare for Hacktoberfest:

- Introduction to Open Source

- Becoming a Maintainer

- Hacktoberfest Kickoff

💖 Community Gratitude 

I'm super grateful for Bekah for her continuous support in many ways💖 

- Ayu

October? You must mean Hacktober!!!

💡Monthly Theme & Challenge: Time to Open Source!

This challenge is always run during October and was our first-ever monthly challenge. In many ways, we think of Hacktoberfest as the event that solidified Virtual Coffee beyond a pandemic meetup.

We have three tracks: approved maintainers will provide issues labeled for Hacktoberfest, contributors will solve issues, and mentors will help contributors and maintainers be successful.

Maintainers:

They provide the repositories with "hacktoberfest" topic(s) and issues labeled "hacktoberfest" on their repositories. They will also answer the contributors' questions, review the pull requests (PRs), and validate and merge them following the contest rules.

Contributors:

They find repositories with "hacktoberfest" topic(s) and issues they want to solve. The contest's goal is to have four (4) pull requests (PRs) approved during October. Learn more about this challenge in this blog post.

Mentors:

A mentor will be paired with a mentee (contributor or maintainer). They provide support through a 1:1, a pairing session, Slack, or whatever works best for the team!

☕🪑 Coffee Table Events

  • Tech Interview Study Group (Mondays at 4:00 PM ET)

  • Accountabilibuddies (Tuesdays at 7:00 PM ET | Thursdays at 9:00 AM ET)

  • The Pack Hunt (Tandem Job Hunting) (Wednesdays at 10:00 AM ET)

  • Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) Office Hours (Wednesdays at 4:00 PM ET)

  • Feelings Friday (Fridays at 8:00 PM ET)

  • Frontend Friday Folks fighting CSSBattle.dev (Fridays at 11:00 AM ET)

📅 Weekly Async Events

💖 Community Gratitude 

So grateful to have met Stephanie in person!! 🙌

- Jono

☕ 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)

Note: These are the currently scheduled times 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.

🎙️ The Podcast is Back!

🆕 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.

🤝 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 the roles here!

✨ Member Content Highlights

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

Articles

Videos

🏆 Member Wins

  • Just got accepted to speak at CodeMash - Brian

  • I hit my goal weight of 180. - Justin

  • Did my very first Open-Source contribution last week. - B Suraj

  • Exciting week—started a new contract-to-hire role and just received another job offer - Derek

👀 What our members are up to

💻 Resource Highlights!

🏆️ 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].