As someone a little bit older than most in this community, I have been in a few shifts in the workplace. I started working when it was cool to be in a factory or work on a farm. Doing physical labor and being in the middle to upper-middle-class family was a goal in life. My things have changed over the years.
We no longer have a middle class, and doing physical labor seems so 1970’s. My first job was detasseling corn on a farm in the hot summer months so I could buy a new pair of jeans and a bike. I still remember getting up at 5 a.m. and driving with my uncle to the farm every morning. From there, I got my first chef’s job at McDonald’s. Both of those positions and the many that follow were all based on being somewhere and working with others.
Shift into the ’90s when I started my career, and we just went into the cubicle phase. LOL, I still remember everyone complaining about having one office and no privacy, but you know it helped production. We have had many open office concepts over the years, and some are reverting to your own office as well. It seems no one can figure out the best way for production.
Now we have remote work. Work from where ever you want; just be working when we may need to get ahold of you. As cost-cutting has become the norm working alone has become de facto, it seems. While I realize I am getting ahead of myself a little, it does seem we are heading in that direction. As I type right now, I am a student learning to code and an employee doing search engine optimization for an agency in another country and a business in another continent. My school is roughly 15 hours away from my timezone. At one point, I had clients on four continents that I was working with helping their online marketing? I should put on a resume as a talent I have, being able to use worldclock.com or time.is.
So what does this have to do with coding? Wait, young grasshopper; I am getting there. Back in the day when work was completed, we got together as friends and had a beer. We planned the usual outings together without a cell phone! If you look at the positions I had in my young career, we all worked face to face. If I wanted to see someone, you went to their house. You got done working, and you hung out for a bit together before you went home. It was essential to learn about your co-worker’s families. You had a built-in community of people all around you.
So what do we have as a community as we isolate ourselves more and more? Where do we go to hang out with people in our field? While doing this face to face isn’t as easy anymore, we do have options.
The first place I look when I am in a new country is meetup.com or its equivalent. Most cities have a few Dev meetups where you can be involved and meet local developers. Getting involved is quite dependant on you knowing the language, though.
My favorite place online is Dev.to for meeting other like-minded developers. I feel it is a vibrant community that shares a lot and isn’t afraid to chat a little on the side. You can choose the topics you want, and you will get quality articles daily to read.
Dzone is a favorite for many online workers as the information shared is quite vast. They have over a million devs on the site, and you can find some peeps to chat with. Here is a place to read about everything in development: https://dzone.com/web-development-programming-tutorials-tools-news/list
As developers, we should all be using git for our projects, so Github is a natural place to converse. Many developers have GitHub pages like this one, where you can comment and develop relationships. You can also become a contributor to a project and help non-profits in need.
The final place I will mention here is stackexchange.com. I feel the site is a repository of other sites you can join and build a community. For instance, I am developing a Wordpress theme, so I joined WordPress developers. Find some topics you like and then enter those communities to be active.
The idea of this post was not to point out all the places you can join but to merely show you a path to build remote relationships. The internet has so many dev groups I would be writing for years to cover them all. The key is to join a group and be active in that group. The benefits are endless!