Forem: Lara

The Power of a Developer Community

Lara — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 12:29:32 +0000

Outline

Four Practical Ways to Join, Engage and Grow with a Developer Community
How Can You Find a Community or Conference Near You?
Key Benefits of Becoming Part of a Developer Community

Today, I want to provide practical ways to join a developer community, share my experiences, and highlight the value of being part of one .

A year ago, I changed my career path from HR Management to Software Engineering. In November 2024, I started my software developer studies at 42 Berlin. It’s a two-year program where I learn programming through a project-based and peer-to-peer-driven concept.

Before becoming a student at 42 Berlin, I began my developer journey self-driven and, more importantly, by becoming part of a community

If you’re also starting your developer journey, or you are a developer who just moved to a new city, or someone who enjoys networking, then this post is for you!

Four Practical Ways to Join, Engage and Grow with a Developer Community

1. Local Meetups & Mentoring Events

As an Attendee

Do you sometimes feel stuck with a bug? ChatGPT, DeepSeek, or any other chatbot also drives you nuts, and you just need personal exchange about it. Or do you seek support brainstorming a portfolio idea? Maybe you want to network because you’re looking for a job, or you simply enjoy the company and want to learn? Meetups are a wonderful way to start!

Local developer events are a great way to:

Ask for help when you’re stuck during a project.
Seek inspiration for new ideas.
Satisfy curiosity about different topics.

As a self-learner, I quickly encountered challenges like feeling lonely and isolated with code bugs, career worries, or a lack of inspiration for portfolio projects. That’s when I went to my first networking event hosted by codebar in Berlin.

Codebar is a community charity that facilitates the growth of a diverse tech community by organizing free, regular programming workshops for minority groups in tech. Participants are paired with mentors who have experience in the tech stack they need help with. You can also attend simply for networking. Codebar Berlin has massively contributed to my journey, with mentors offering their time and expertise. I’m still a regular student and attendee of their monthly meetups. You can check if Codebar organizes events in your area.

Recent codebar event. Credits to Bernadetta Nycz

Through one of the Codebar events, I learned about the next mentoring program: the Django Girls Workshop. Kudos to Lisa Quatmann, one of the organizers of Django Girls, a huge Python & Django ambassador, and a regular host of Codebar events at MPB in Berlin.

Django Girls is a community that “organizes free Python and Django workshops, creates open-sourced online tutorials, and curates amazing first experiences with technology.” I attended their workshop in 2024, where I learned to develop and deploy my first web application—a blog! This blog, where you’re reading my post, is also based on the Django Girls handbook. Lastly, thanks to the Django Girls Workshop, I also found my mentor from the Women Techmakers Ambassador Program , who has been guiding me on my developer journey since the summer of 2024.

These experiences convinced me to keep investing time in becoming an active part of the developer community in Berlin. Since then, I’ve been a regular attendee at different Python community events in Berlin.

As a Speaker

Speaking at meetups is a nice way to give back to the community, improve your public speaking skills, and even build your personal brand. It is completely normal to be nervous and maybe insecure. I can share with you that I have only experienced communities being extremely welcoming and supportive for new voices!

Share your knowledge and inspire others by presenting your experiences or projects.
Build your confidence in public speaking.
Get valuable feedback and ideas from attendees.

2. Conferences

As an Attendee

Another approach to joining a community is to attend conferences. Conferences are typically organized by companies or larger organizations, but many are also community-driven. They offer opportunities to attend talks, network, participate in workshops, and learn from experts. Conferences often span several days and usually require purchasing a ticket. Alternatively, you can volunteer to attend for free—more on that in a bit!
Why should you consider attending a conference? Here are some benefits:

Networking: Connect with professionals, peers, and potential mentors.
Learning: Gain insights from speakers, workshops, and panel discussions.
Inspiration: Discover ideas and inspiring stories to spark creativity.
Career Growth: Access job opportunities and connect with recruiters.
Skill Building: Participate in hands-on sessions to improve technical and soft skills.

Let me tell you about my conference journey and how I got into it. At some point, I noticed a lot of conferences popping up on my LinkedIn feed and in community Slack channels. Another opportunity arose, thanks to the power of the developer community

Through PyLadies Berlin (another non-profit community), I was lucky enough to receive a free ticket for the Merge Conference organized by GitButler. How did I get so lucky? I was simply part of their Slack channel and stayed updated with their feed. Conferences often partner with non-profits and give free tickets to increase diversity and give minority groups the chance to attend such events.

At the Merge conference, I:

Learned a lot (even though I didn’t understand everything!).
Met developers curious about my career change and projects.
Played Doom for the first time.

It was a fantastic time and reinforced my belief in the power of developer communities.

As a Volunteer

Volunteering at conferences is another nice way to engage with and give back to the community, all while avoiding the need to spend hundreds of euros for a ticket.
Here’s why:

You meet fellow developers.
You get a behind-the-scenes look at organizing conferences.
You usually receive free tickets as well as food and drinks in return for volunteering shifts.

Here’s how I got started:

I signed up as a volunteer for the WeAreDevelopers WorldCongress in Berlin because I couldn’t afford a regular ticket. Volunteers work dedicated shifts and receive a free ticket for the rest of the time.
At the conference, I worked two 8-hour shifts over two days and attended as a participant on the third. It was overwhelming but exciting, with over 10,000 attendees.

Later, I volunteered at DevFest, organized by the Google for Developer community, and PyConWeb, where I even took on a moderator role. Stepping out of my comfort zone and moderating was nerve-wracking but rewarding.

3. Hackathons

Hackathons are coding events organised by communities or directly by companies where developers, designers, and other tech enthusiasts come together to solve challenges or create projects in a short period (e.g. over the weekend - coding two days non-stop and learning). They provide a creative environment for learning, experimenting, and building connections.

Participate in hackathons to collaborate with others on coding challenges.
Build a portfolio of projects you can showcase to potential employers.
Learn new technologies and frameworks in a practical, fast-paced environment.

I have yet to personally participate in a hackathon, so I cannot share any firsthand experiences.

4. Makerspaces

Makerspaces are creative workspaces equipped with tools and resources for building and prototyping. Whether you're into hardware, software, laser cutting, 3D printing, wood work, sewing or a combination, these spaces foster creativity and innovation while bringing people together to share skills and support each other.

Makerspaces offer a physical space to work on hardware and software projects.
They provide access to tools and resources you might not have at home.
You can meet and collaborate with like-minded individuals and receive support.

How Can You Find a Community or Conference Near You?

These were my four practical approaches to joining a developer community, along with my personal experiences on how they’ve helped me learn and grow as a developer.
Below, I’m sharing links to lists of communities, conferences, makerspaces, and hackathons which you can join.

Communities

GitHub Repositories:

Developer Communities Collection: A curated list of developer communities. ⭐️ This is my new repo. The goal is to create a list of active communities on from holistic view. Add your community with a Pull Request! ⭐️
Awesome Developer Communities: A curated list of awesome developer communities (Discord, Slack, Telegram, etc.).

Specific Tech Communities & Mentorship Programs:

Women Who Code: A global organization supporting women in tech.
PyLadies: A worldwide community for women in the Python programming language.
PyBerlin: A list of Python events happening in Berlin.
Women Techmakers Ambassador Program: Provides visibility, community, mentorship, and resources for women in technology.
Codebar: A nonprofit community offering mentoring workshops in programming for minority groups.
Django Girls: International non-profit organization, that want inspire women from any backgrounds to get interested in technology and to become developer.
Google Developer Groups: Groups hosted by Google to help developers learn and connect.

Open Source and Contribution Platforms:

Open Source Friday: A great place to discover open-source projects and communities to contribute to.
Hacktoberfest: An annual event encouraging contributions to open-source projects.

Social Media & Forums:

Reddit Stackoverflow: Subreddits like r/learnprogramming, r/webdev, or r/Python are great for connecting with like-minded developers.
Dev.to: An online community for developers to share articles, ask questions, and network.

General Community Platforms:

Meetup: A platform to find local meetups and events near you across various interests, including tech and development.
Eventbrite: Search for tech-related workshops, meetups, and conferences in your area.

Conferences

Developers Conferences Agenda : A comprehensive list of conferences worldwide.
Python Conference Agenda:Community tool that serves as a central repository for deadlines of calls for participation, proposals, workshops, and tutorials at Python conferences.

Makerspaces

Makerspace Directory: A comprehensive guide to the growing community of makerspaces around the globe

Hackathons

Awesome Hackathons: Hackathons-related awesome list.

Key Benefits of Becoming Part of a Developer Community

Thank you Maxim Danilov for sharing the illustration

To wrap up my post, I want to emphasize the key benefits of developer communities and the value of becoming part of one:

Networking: Meet like-minded individuals, mentors, and potential employers.
Support: Get help with bugs, ideas, and career advice.
Learning: Discover new technologies and stay updated on industry trends.
Inspiration: Collaborate on projects and gain fresh perspectives.
Opportunities: Access free events, mentoring programs, and even job leads.

This is how I’ve experienced the power of developer communities firsthand. They are helping me learn, grow, and connect with people along the way. I want to thank all developer communities and their work! If you’re new to coding or looking to take the next step, find a local community or conference and experience it yourself!

Thank you for reading,

Lara

👾 Original post on my own blog

42 Piscine - How To Prepare? A Reflection And The Golden Ticket

Lara — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 18:01:32 +0000

This post is a continuation and the last post of my personal experiences during the 42 Piscine. I will write about my reflection and how I prepared for the Piscine. Do you want to know more about the 42 School and their piscine program? Read my previous two posts.

A Blink Of The Final Weeks

My last post ended with a reflection on the second week of the Piscine and my experience with failure. The third and fourth weeks (the final week) were very exhausting for me. During the middle of the third week, I felt tired, energy-wise. The projects became more complex, and my brain felt slower in terms of functionality. I was not alone in this feeling; everyone felt similarly, and we motivated each other to keep swimming. We were in this together.

That being said, the learning continued. We learned to create funky functions like atoi, Fibonacci, and putnbr. New concepts like recursion were on my learning list. I also completed a community service. Community service is a volunteering program where students can sign up for various tasks (e.g., cleaning equipment). In return, students receive virtual coins, which can be used to buy merch, drinks, etc.

In the final week, peer evaluations were hard to get. Everyone wanted to advance in their level and get their projects reviewed and validated. It became a hunt for points and peer review slots. Unfortunately, I also got sick during the last week and was knocked out for a few days. However, two days before the final exam, I was able to attend school again, and it felt like a final fight with my own willpower. The end was so near that it was almost sad, as it meant the month full of fast-paced learning was coming to an end.

As for the exams, I failed the third one but passed the final one. The relief after the final exam was unreal. I was happy, relieved, but also soooooo tired. And still a bit sick. Some students organized a party as a celebration. We partied—or rather, my peers partied. Unfortunately, I had to go back to bed to fully recover from my sick days.

And that was it. Four weeks of learning, failing, and growing came to an end. I was sad and happy.

Kudos to one of our peers who baked this cake for our celebration party 🧡

A Final Round Reflection

The Piscine was a roller coaster of emotions for me. It was a month full of humbling interactions and experiences with my peers, full of ups and downs. It wasn’t just about learning C; it was much more about reaching my limits, stepping out of my comfort zone, and becoming a team with 150 strangers. I struggled with failure, overcame it, and continued learning. I had to accept when I couldn't push further and needed to prioritize my health. Besides the daily interactions on campus with my peers, I couldn’t have many other social interactions with my friends. I left in the morning, headed to campus, and came back in the evening—tired, but somehow filled with a sense of power and an overwhelming curiosity to repeat the same schedule the next day.

Within two weeks after the final exam, I was waiting to hear whether I had been accepted to enroll in the core program. And guess what? I still can’t believe it—I got the Golden Ticket. I was accepted. I passed the Piscine. May the 42 School story continue.

The Factors That Helped Me Prepare And Pass The Piscine

I honestly believe it is hard to be fully prepared for the Piscine. Also, it’s a known fact that no one knows exactly what it takes to be accepted. I doubt that it’s about reaching a super high level in your projects or passing all the exams. I got as far as C06 and passed two out of four exams. I believe it’s more about the individual learning journey and progress throughout the month and how you engage with and support your peers and the community.

That being said, I nailed it down to three factors that I reflected on and which supported me get closer to the golden ticket.

Learn C Basic [Before]

Courses: Crash course C w3school, Havardx
Books: How computers really work

Relax [Before]

Get a good rest and fill your energy bars beforehand (if you can). Also if possible, try to fully be free of other duties for the Piscine. The Piscine is an intense month. I probably used the word "intense" very often in my last posts. But this is what it was.

Be kind to Yourself and Other. Your aren't Alone in this. Grow together, Fail together. [During]

Remember to be kind to yourself and others, it is an intense month full of learning. There are students from various backgrounds starting the Piscine at different levels.
Try not to compare yourself against your peers, instead be a supportive shoulder for each other and grow from each other.

This is a wrap about my experience going through the Piscine at the Berliner campus. I want to express my gratitude to my support system: my closed ones and my mentor, my fellow Pisciners and soon-to-be 42 student peers (YAY), the staff of 42 Berlin, and the Grizzlies.

👾 Original post on my own blog

42 Piscine - Overcoming Challenges

Lara — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 10:36:09 +0000

This post is a continuation of my personal experiences during the 42 Piscine. I will describe rush evaluations and the topic of dealing with failure and learning to grow from it. Do you want to know more about the 42 School and their piscine program? I recommend first reading my previous post.

How Rush Evaluations Work

Let's continue from where my last post ended, which concluded with the completion of the first Rush project. Over the course of the 4 weeks, there were three Rushes (team projects) we could sign up for. Rushes took place during the weekends. The Rush projects were evaluated by the coding standard tool Norminette, and additionally tested and evaluated by Grizzlies (42 Students). The in-person evaluations with Grizzlies were held on Tuesdays. On the first Tuesday, we had our first evaluation and sat down a Grizzly to review our projects. The evaluation was based on the following factors:

Code runs correctly
Various tests
Norminette
The team member who explained the code the worst

Yes, really, I’m not joking. The purpose behind this type of evaluation is that encourage accountability, teamwork, and communication. These are all important aspects of both learning and professional coding environments that we will be faced with. 42 wants to ensure that we focus on these skills.

Our evaluation lasted an hour. As mentioned, the program was tested for correctness and functionality. Then each team member had to individually explain the codebase and what we had done. Each of us explained the code with our own logic, and it was fascinating for me to observe (we could have simply copied or adapted what the others said). But no, we all had the same code in front of us, yet each of us interpreted and explained the algorithm in our own unique way. This highlighted something I’ve noticed about software development: there are often, or even always, multiple valid ways to approach building a program, and everyone seems to have their own method of problem-solving. This brings a lot of creativity into coding and allows you to see the code from different perspectives. That's something I really enjoy about coding. Lastly, our code was checked by Norminette, the coding standard tool. It was validated! YAY, we passed the Rush project. This was a great accomplishment we achieved as a team.

From Tuesday until Thursday, my focus for the week was learning how to deal with pointers and string manipulations. I had to prepare for the second exam on Friday, and my expectations were somewhat higher since I had passed the first one.

After Ups can come Downs - the Beauty of Failing

42 designed the piscine in a way that can make some tasks and exams feel nearly impossible to pass. There's a beautiful thought behind this design: 42 encourages failures and setbacks and wants to see how individuals handle them. The school emphasizes the importance of resilience, problem-solving, and adaptability, all of which are crucial in a professional coding environment. I faced failure during and after the second exam—more specifically, the first task. During my second exam I spent two hours on the first task and couldn't identify the issue, which turned out to be a problem with allocating too many bytes. Ironically, my first exam had been a success. Maybe, this is also why this one hurt even more. A saying that resonates with my experience of failing at a somewhat "simple" error is:

This was exactly what happened to me. 😭

Growth that comes from Failure

Here’s what I am learning from this experience:

Attention to Detail: It’s crucial to carefully review all parts of your code, not just the complex sections. Sometimes, what seems obvious for our eyes can be misleading, and the computer may interpret things differently.
The Value of Testing: Test your code thoroughly and understand the traces and error files. I didn’t test my code as good as I could have.
Peer-to-Peer Learning: The value of peer-to-peer learning cannot be overstated. If you’re stuck on an error, take a break or get a fresh eyes from a peer. This can help identify mistakes you might have missed. Disclaimer: Obviously not possible during exam ^^.
Incremental Development: Incremental development involves building and testing code in small steps. This approach helps catch and fix errors early. For instance, I could have built a script that uses a while loop to iterate over each character, including the newline, which could have avoided the need for manually allocating the string size.
Learning and Growth: Each failure is an opportunity to grow your problem-solving skills and improve coding practises.

Let's Talk a bit About the Code

Disclaimer, as we are not allowed to share internal information like exam tasks I adjusted the exam task below. The task: Write a program to displays a string followed by a newline. Allowed function are write.

write(1, "42 Berlin\n", 10);

A write function is also called a system function. It makes a call to the system to write something on the standard output or also known as terminal. A write function consist out of three components:

The file descriptor, 1 for stdout (standard output).
The memory address or my case a hardcoded string "42 Berlin\n". Can't recommend this approach.
The length of the string including white spaces and the \n (new line) at the end.

As the string is hardcoded, I had to define the string size (length of the string). If the length is wrongly hardcoded the computer adds garbage data at the end of the string. In my case, the program output one byte more than the actual length of the string, causing my binary output file to differ from the examshell's. ERROR.

C is teaching you extremely well that ignoring explicit memory access allocation can lead to unpredictable results and unsafe memory access. A safer and more professional option solving this task as mentioned above would have been with a while loop. Declaring a variable that holds the string and looping through the string until it reaches the NULL terminator.

Failure is part of the journey of learning and growing, and while it definitely hurts, it also provides important lessons. I am currently learning to grow from these lessons and accept failure. As I am finalising my last lines, I am reminded that writing helps me in a way to process those experiences and understand what I can learn from them.

Join me on this coding journey as I continue to learn.

👾 Original post on my own blog

42 Piscine - Diving In My First Week

Lara — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 10:58:19 +0000

Hi, I am Lara. I am writing about my journey to becoming a professional software developer. This post is about my personal experience at 42 Berlin Piscine. I will share insights from the first week and outline key facts for signing up for the piscine.

About the 42 Piscine

I participated in the Piscine in Berlin, an intensive selection process designed to assess if 42's peer-to-peer learning approach is a good fit for future students like me. It was an amazing, emotional adventure I won't forget. I learned more than I could have imagined, not only about code.

Let's describe the Piscine in a nutshell, it spans over four weeks, with a very intensive 7-day-a-week schedule, where we learned foundational programming concepts in C through hands-on projects and a peer-to-peer learning concept. There were no traditional teachers; learning was driven by me and my peers, supported by feedback tools like Moulinette and coding standards enforced by Norminette. During the weekdays, we focused on individual projects, and peer evaluations, while weekends were reserved for team-based “Rush” projects, which were both challenging and collaborative. Every Friday, we took exams to assess our progress and skills. Participation in the 42 Piscine requires a commitment. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Within two weeks after the Piscine, we will be notified if we are accepted to enroll in the main curriculum.

The education concept of 42 School

> 42 is a future-proof computer science training to educate the next generation of software engineers. The 42 program takes a project-based approach to progress and is designed to develop technical and people skills that match the expectations of the labor market. Source

ℹ️ The Piscine is the selection process to enroll in the core program, which lasts up to 2 years.

The First Day

We arrived on Monday morning, and the room was filled with a sense of overwhelm. The school gave a brief introduction to their mission, values, and rules, and then it was time to head to the clusters—a large room full of computer stations. Once seated at your station, the true experience of the Piscine began. What do I mean by that? Well, no one told us exactly what to do next, other than to find our way to the clusters and start working on our projects. From there, we had to figure everything out on our own: starting the computer, logging into our accounts, navigating the 42 intranet, getting used to the terminal, and understanding the projects.

The First Projects

The piscine projects were divided into two Shell projects and 13 C projects (C00 - C13). In the first days, I was busy getting familiar with the campus rules and shell scripting. I completed Shell00 but chose to skip Shell01 to focus on the first C project. Through Shell00, I learned how to navigate the terminal, modify file permissions, and use Git for version control. Next, I started my first C00 project, where I learned to navigate and (exit 😅) the VIM code editor and gained a deeper understanding of the foundational write system call by recreating the write function from scratch. I also participated in my first peer evaluations and requested feedback from my peers. I learned about the coding standards of Norminette and conducted extensive research.

The First Exam

The first Friday came around quickly, and it was exam day, focused on C programming. I had only just started working on my first C project two days earlier. The first three exams were four hours long, running from 2 PM to 6 PM. We were briefed on the exam rules beforehand, and with everyone feeling the nerves, the 42 staff and grizzlies (42 students who volunteered to support the Piscine) were there to provide moral support and even played some motivational music to set the right mood.

When it was time, we headed to the clusters where 42 had set up a custom exam environment on Linux machines. The process to access it was:

Log in with the given exam username
Log in with the given exam password
Open the terminal and enter the command: examshell (this launches the 42-designed exam environment in the shell )

Once inside the examshell, we logged in with our intranet username and password, received the first task, and started coding. The exam structure was such that you had to solve each task to unlock the next. If you got stuck on a task, your options were limited: keep trying different solutions, or exit the examshell and leave the clusters.

The exam tasks were randomly assigned to each student. However, everyone started at the same level. When ready to submit a task for grading by Moulinette, the process was to stage, commit, and push your files to a repository, then type grademe in the examshell. The result would be either "Success" or "Failure." If successful, the examshell would unlock the next task.

My first exam went well. I managed to solve the first three tasks, which was enough for a passing grade. I was sooo happy, I couldn't believe it.

The First Rush

Participants had to register for the rush in advance. After the exam at 6:42 PM, randomized groups were assigned. I was placed in a group of three. We connected on Slack that Friday and planned to meet on Saturday morning. We began Saturday with a quick crash course on Git branching and then dove into the task. The rush challenge was quite complex—we had to develop an algorithm that generated a program to execute a specific task in the shell (I can't reveal too much). The program needed to adhere to Norminette standards, which included rules like limiting functions to 25 lines, specific indentation practices, and coding style requirements. We worked around 9 hours on Saturday, and on Sunday, we focused on fine-tuning and ensuring the code passed the Norminette checks. By Sunday evening, the program was running smoothly, our test worked, and Norminette gave it an OK! We submitted our work, hopeful for a positive evaluation on Tuesday. By the end of the week, I felt exhausted but proud, relieved, and motivated.

How to apply for a Piscine and become a 42 Student?

Register at the Admissions Platform and play the logic games (around 2,5 hours)
After passing the logic game, register for an introduction talk where you get more information about the piscine.
Start the Piscine.
Pass the Piscine and start curriculum as 42 Students learning C, C++, and C#.

Interested to read more about my Piscine experience? To be continued soon...

👾 Original post on my own blog

Lara