Developer Communities 101 - Introduction

Are you a technology lover who wants to go beyond the limits of your current possibilities? Then, you should know about developer communities.

Developer Communities are a group of people who share similar interests in a particular technology gathered together. But, just think of your favorite technology, let it be anything - Artificial Intelligence, game development, virtual reality, web development, autonomous cars or anything that you love. And now assume that you are in a place where there are a lot of other people who may be students, professionals or even researchers working in that particular domain. It would be the ideal place for you to improve yourself through knowledge sharing and this is a developer community.

What are the benefits?

Being part of a developer community, the most valuable thing that you will get is knowledge. Because you are interacting with a large number of people working in your domain, students who are working on similar projects, and the best of all, a large pool of amazing mentors. Just think how it would be when you are interacting with people working in your favorite tech companies like Google or Microsoft. It is this shared domain-specific information that makes the achieved knowledge priceless.

With this knowledge, your productivity will increase. You will learn to improve your work culture, make new friends with whom you could work with and above all, you will expand your network. This network may include students, professionals, researchers, business owners, etc, giving you a wider reach across the globe and a broad spectrum of information. Also, you will always have someone to call upon when you want to do something productive.

And the one factor that connects all these is the tech events. They may be sometimes BIG or sometimes small. But the outcome is that it is through this one thing that you could achieve the other three factors (Knowledge, network, productivity) effectively. And yes, you will definitely have a lot of fun too!

How to be part of it?

There are numerous developer communities across the globe. Most of the developer communities will have a discussion platform (maybe on WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack or a website). You can search for developer communities on your favorite domain in your area and join the discussion. Also, do attend the meetups, workshops or other events they organize. You can always look out for the posters on social media to find these events. Most communities will have a website, where you can look into their upcoming programs, previous activities and anything and everything related to them. You can search for Google Developer Groups, Mozilla Community, etc to get started.

When you are part of a developer community, all that matters is whether you make good use of the time to learn, improvise and network, such that it will help you to grow.