Boosting Your Tech Career Path

As with other professions, being a “tech bro” comes with perks as well, one of which is having your unique community to bond with and rely on. “Do I even need to join a community? I’m fine on my own.” You might think so, but as with human nature, interaction with like-minded individuals has proven to be indispensable over time.
Let us break this down for the various stages of a tech career path.

Baby Developer: you just decided to transition to tech, and there are a thousand questions in your head; you want to know how many thousands of dollars your chosen path of learning will reel in after your first job, you want to know how to learn JavaScript and python in one month, you want to be able to use GitHub with your eyes closed, you want to win every hackathon, the list goes on and on and on.
You can Google all of these things, sure, and get answers at your fingertips, literally, and then there is YouTube. You’d even get to see more challenging articles as part of your search results; become a pro at this in one week, master that in two weeks, get a job with zero tech experience in three months... In your mind, you’re like “let’s do this! Microsoft and Google are not ready for me”. You’re coming to pack their money. Take a step back fam, you’re not ready for them. Maybe you are, you just don’t know how, yet. This is where joining a tech community comes in.

Intermediate Developer: a portfolio website done, a few amazing personal projects to your name, software developer on your Twitter bio. You’ve done pretty well for yourself, using free and paid resources at your disposal. You’ve encountered problems, solved some, and left some behind, on your own. Lone wolf, you’d get better chances when you are part of a pack. That way, you can glean from others and share job opportunities, woes/wins, the good, bad and ugly.

For the expert developers reading this, well, they know what to do. What I mean is this: for a developer to have attained some height in the tech industry, they must have built outstanding projects. Here is the catch; they did not do it alone. They worked in teams, with other “techies”, to get results for the end-user. In other words, they were, and still will be part of communities.

The importance of being in a community cannot be overemphasized. It can be likened to being in a group with people that think like you, that are not you but can proffer solutions in ways you’d do too. You’re hooked now, I can tell. Let us talk about these communities, how to join and how to know the right one for you.

Do Your Research You must do your research. For example, you want to get started with front-end development. It is only advisable you look for communities that accept and currently house front-end developers. That way, you won’t feel left out, and you can make new friends there. This applies to other career tracks. No matter what it is, you will surely find your people.

Where Do I Find Them? Most communities can be found simply by looking up Tech Communities in so and so places on the internet. Others are very active on social media platforms such as Twitter.

Which Ones Do I Join? There are wonderful communities that form a huge part of the tech ecosystem. Some are gender-specific, which cater to the needs of a certain gender, and only accept them. An example of this is Women Who Code. As the name implies, it is female-only. If a male developer were to join, he would not benefit one bit.

Others are all-inclusive, irrespective of gender, experience, and career track. The freeCodeCamp Forum is one, if not the best example of communities for budding and expert developers alike.

You’ve come this far in searching for a tech community to join.

Reward time! This section will feature some of these communities and what they offer so you, my friend can make a choice.

All-Inclusive communities • The freeCodeCamp Forum • DevRant • Code Project • Digital Ocean • GitHub • Stack Exchange • Discord • Reddit Gender-Specific communities • SheCodeAfrica • Women Who Code • Girls Who Code • Pyladies • Rails Girls • DjangoGirls • Women In Technology Programing Language-Specific communities • Java • C/C++ • C# • PHP • Kotlin • Swift • Lua • IOS Developers • Mobile Developers Track-Specific communities • Daily UI • Dev.to • Hashnode • Hackernoon • Code Newbie • Blogging for Devs • Bootstrap • Talk Grapics Nationality-Specific communities- (for Nigeria and other African communities, in this case) • DevCareer Africa • SheCode Africa The communities listed above have proven over time to be wonderful assets in building the careers of developers. Through participation and learning, teaching most times, many developers have made friends, built startups, and landed their dream jobs. This can be you. Go on now, you too can be part of something amazing.