Student Communities 101

Hello 👋🏽

Welcome to Dev Shorts. Do reply to me on what you liked this week and what you want to see more. In addition, you could access old issues here!

This week I participated as a panelist in the “Communities 101” session at Github Field Day India — an unconference with 170 student tech community leaders of India. My co-panelists Ankita from Google, Arko from Github, Khushboo from Microsoft, Venkatesh from Springer.

We discussed how student tech communities play a significant role in colleges helping bridge the gap, introduce concepts like Open source.

Many think that building a community of users who engage with each other is easy. But, actually, it isn’t! Community leaders play an essential role in nurturing users’ needs.

I feel that leading communities from a student level help shape one’s career early — give them a chance to lead, organize hackathons, experience failure, and even experiment.

If you are a student/professional, try joining a tech community like Java User Groups, Kubernetes, JavaScript, otherwise create one in your school, college, university. Help organize events, bring in speakers, collect feedback, maybe run an annual hackathon, scout for sponsors. There is a lot you could learn in this process.

Last week I shared a post about how Docker broke in half, which prompted me to write about OSS & Sustainability. So do read and let me know what you think!

GitHub’s ReadME project is an exciting way to follow, learn about Open source software creators. Now they have a newsletter, too, alongside the podcast.

I have coded Feature flags for most of my releases. Sometimes, it even serves as an alternate way to stop a specific code block from executing😅

Ending this week’s newsletter with the life of a typical cloud developer 😂

If you like this week’s newsletter, rate it with “thumbs up/down.”

Sincerely,

Aravind Putrevu 👋🏽