In October 2020 a couple of us had a chance to explore Hacktoberfest Challenge together, for the first time. By the end of the month, we made a nice little page presenting our community using HTML, CSS, and (vanilla) JavaScript. The page we made was displaying every participant’s personalized card, styled to the author’s preferences and it ended up looking like this .
Later in the year we discussed being able to work on projects as an open-source team more often and officially started running the group. You can read more about our beginnings here, but, if you’d like to know how we overcame our challenges and made our first decisions, there is another post for you just here.
What tools and technologies do we use?
We’re primarily focused on Front End and beginner-friendly projects, built with HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS. Our projects are run by our Team Leads who will be there to support you along the way and give (compassionate) code reviews on all submitted PRs, appropriate to your skill level.
We avoid using any third-party libraries (bootstrap included) if we really don’t have to use them. The idea behind this is to learn the fundamentals and gain the skills needed to build similar solutions ourselves. Usage of any third-party libraries is decided at the start of the project and usually isn’t changed after.
We haven’t been using any JavaScript frameworks either, but as of November this year we’ll be providing Vue learning sessions and projects. Later in the year we will be expanding our learning sessions and introduce other JavaScript frameworks such as Angular and React.
We’re using GitHub to host all of our projects and you can browse through them by clicking here.
We’re using Jira to plan and manage all our project tasks. To join or view our board you will need to share an email address with Likii in order to be added in first.
What’s it like to work with us as a team?
We’re fairly international… Some of our members are USA based, some are in Jamaica, some are in Nigeria, some are in Germany, Italy, Israel, China and a very small portion of us (myself included) are UK based. This means we have to pay extra attention to time zones for our meeting times. Because of that, we’ve decided we’d meet once a week at 7 PM UK time, every Friday of the year.
This is a meeting where we catch up on weekly happenings, check in with each other, and make sure we’re all still happy and motivated to learn.
At these meetings, we’ll also practice Scrum ceremonies called Sprint Reviews, Sprint Retrospectives, and Sprint Planning. If you haven’t heard of it before, Scrum (for the purpose of this paragraph) means we are following ‘a certain way of working’ together so that we can achieve all our goals and all be aligned on our purpose.
These ceremonies (a fancy way of calling special meetings) help us check on the progress of our tasks, give us a place to ask for help with any blockers we might have, but also give us time to celebrate our wins and achievements.
These ceremonies might be (probably will be) something you’ll encounter in your new developer role and the terminology used during our meetings might be very beneficial to you in the future.
If you’re from the UK you might find that we’ll often post interesting job ads and make potential connections with relevant recruiters, while for the rest of our members, we will only promote fully remote (worldwide) roles or those willing to help candidates relocate to new places.
The group is run as a casual and friendly community. We’re against setting deadlines on our projects, but we’d like to be notified if you’re stuck and need help or if you’re not a fan of the task you’re doing anymore.
There are no payments of any kind or affiliate/partnership programs with third parties involved.
Where can you find us: 1. Discord
We use Discord as our main communication platform. Anyone can join in by visiting this invitation link. The link is set to never expire ✨
Discord is available in the browser, as a desktop app (recommended), and as a phone app as well. If you decide to join us, it would be very nice if you posted a little message about yourself in our ‘introductions’ channel ✨
Where can you find us: 2. GatherTown
Gather is a fantastic new platform that is available in the browser, as a desktop app, or on your phone! We’ve created ourselves a Castle (map) and we use it every Friday at 7 PM UK time to host our Friday Focus Sessions.
We’ll use Gather for all our events, workshops, and meetings as we’re very international, and Gather’s characters and atmosphere helps us feel like we’re in the same (physical) place.
If you’d like to check it out feel free to pop in and out, walk around, visit the beach and our study rooms or our big conference room by clicking on an image below or simply clicking here.
Where can you find us: 3. GitHub
Finally, all our projects are available on GitHub and hosted on GitHub Pages. To find more about our previous and current projects, visit our team’s GitHub profile by clicking here.
TEAM PURPOSE:
Learn. Create. Collaborate. Share. Help.
If you’re up for it and can either do research, create tickets, plan things out, create landing pages, center buttons, colour titles, create design materials, create databases and consume APIs or send quality memes – join in and let’s start with simple things ?