When I think of community, I think of safe spaces for everyone with diverse folks who I can learn from and contribute to.
We work in tech, so many communities we're a part of definitely lean into that, but there's more to life than tech.
My favourite communities
I'm active on Twitter and Mastodon, but if you want to connect on more than a Tweet or toot level, these are the places you can find me.
Virtual Coffee
I first joined Virtual Coffee sometime in April 2020. It's my favourite community. It was created by one of my now good friends, Bekah Hawrot Weigel .
It's weird. Before the pandemic, I had no Internet friends, just good old irl friends. The pandemic changed that for me.
I'm always in the community Slack, but you can usually find me at the Thursday Zoom call and occasionally the Tuesday one too.
The community has exploded in popularity. Given that it's all run by volunteers, we've had to slow down new members to offer an excellent experience for everyone. Having said that, if you are interested, I have some invites. If you're interested in joining the community, please reply in the comments with a short message on why you'd like to join.
OpenSauced
I was mainly a lurker here initially, but I am more active in the OpenSauced community now. What brought me there was Brian Douglas. Brian used to work at GitHub and is a big proponent of open source, as am I. I like what the community and he are doing around building a new product, OpenSauced.
It's now a business, but this community is more than a business. It's a great place to dive into open source with supportive people like Brandon Roberts. I've contributed a bit to the project and plan to contribute more.
If you're interested in getting into open source, look as far as OpenSauced.
Lunch Dev
The Lunch Dev community, started by Chan (@chantastic), is one of my new favourite communities. I've been a lurker here for a while, but I've slowly become active.
Chan is good people, and I love their energy.
If you're interested in this community, here's Chan talking about Lunch Dev on a live stream we did together last year.
dev.to
DEV has been great to me. I used to work there, met many great people, and learnt a lot about building community.
Working in open source and being able to interact with the developer community is one of my favourite things to do.
Aside from interacting with folks on the site, this is also what started my live-streaming journey. Lots of good times meeting tonnes of folks from the community.
A big shoutout to Christina Gorton for being my weekly partner in crime on the DEV Twitch stream!
iamdeveloper.com community
Yes, I'm plugging my own community. Not because it's necessarily the best community out there, but because I'm enjoying building out this community.
It's still early days, but I'm learning more about Discord. Looking at you Discord bots! After shutting down the VSCodeTips community, I decided to embark on this community as it ties to another implicit community of mine, my Twitch and YouTube channels.
If you're looking for another friendly nook on the Internet, come say hey in our community.
Join the iamdeveloper.com community
Community fatigue
Community fatigue is real. I'm in more Discord and Slack communities than mentioned above, but I'm less active or barely active in them. Some are for conferences or projects I've been involved in, but honestly, there are only so many hours in the day.
I mention this in case you feel pressured to participate in many communities. It's OK to be a lurker or to interact infrequently.
Building community
Building a community is hard, and I'm still gaining experience. Still, I look to what Bekah has done with Virtual Coffee and the work-related communities she's built for inspiration.
She recently started a series about community on her YouTube channel that I strongly encourage you to check out.
Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash