Comunidad 👥

One of the things you may hear while starting your career in tech is to join a community. That's all well and good, but there's literally a TON of communities out there and it can be super daunting to know where to start.

And that's ok. It's ok to be a bit unsure and scope things out. See what all is out there and try out a whole bunch of communities -- you can be as involved as you want and find your "home base". But that is sort of the key. You want to find at least one community that you can call your "home base" in order to better establish stability and support.

This has been my strategy at least and so far, so good! I've "joined" a whole bunch but really landed on a couple to call home -- one large and another small.

I feel like this is a nice middle ground in that one community has a ton of members and resources, and the other is a small budding community where I can have a much more involved presence.

We got Techqueria (this the big one). And we got Hispanic Hackers (the small one). Techqueria is actually a sponsor of Hispanic Hackers, so that's cool. As mentioned above, because Hispanic Hackers is a bit smaller, I feel like I can get involved more. I've started to assist with our monthly online social in our Discord and it's been really fun. So far, it's been pretty chill -- just joining in a voice chat with folks and talking about our current projects and really just anything interesting going on.

Alrighty, so let's wrap this whole thing up. I'll leave you with a bunch of tech communities that you can check out:

• Hispanic Hackers - I mean yeah I am a bit biased but it's pretty cool

• Techqueria - It's like Hispanic Hackers but much much larger with chapters across the US and even Puerto Rico and Mexico City!

• freeCodeCamp - Not just great for learning to code, but also a fantastic community for new devs

• Major League Hacking - Awesome resource for hackathons. They also run a monthly "Global Hack Week" where they live stream and host sessions focusing on a specific topic.

• 100Devs - I heard some great things about this bootcamp/community/agency(?). There's a bumpin Discord too. I haven't participated but heard nothing but good things. Def going to be seeing how I can get involved.

• Equipt - This is like a professional development type community that hosts regular live sessions with industry professionals.

• And then you got a whole bunch of other communities for specific languages (Python and Go have really good communities), Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) for cloud and DevOps stuff, communities around dev podcasts (Sytax.fm, The Changelog, Boot.dev), and even communities around dev Twitch streamers and Youtubers.

Yeah and that's just scratching the surface...

Well what are you doing still reading? Go out there and ✨network✨