Why Community Is The Best Source of Growth For Your Tech Career

We talk a lot about “the community” in tech. But not all of us know what it is, how to get involved, or where to find it.

I was talking to some of my friends over the weekend about tech. We talked about keeping our skills sharp and staying up-to-date with the latest and greatest. As most of us know, the tech industry moves super fast. New, innovative features and services are introduced weekly, with opportunities to improve our applications and skill sets popping up every day.

My friends were talking about their struggle to keep up. They feel like they’ve been left behind and that there’s almost too much to learn to get from where they are to where they want to be. I asked what they do to practice new skills and their only answer was coding challenges like the advent of code a couple of times a year.

When they asked me how I do it, I responded with a single word: community.

If you follow my content, be it the blog, newsletter, or podcast, you know I talk about the community all the time. But something occurred to me over the weekend as I was talking to my friends. Not everyone knows what the community is, what community they are a part of, and how to engage with it. So let’s talk about it and why it’s so critical for growing your tech career.

What Is “The Community”?

Simply put — the tech community consists of people who share a common interest in technology and are motivated by the spirit of collaboration, continuous education, and innovation.

These individuals share their findings, ponderings, and open-source code with others online, in-person, or both. They take their lessons learned and share them with others to speed up their learning process and get feedback on what they did. It truly is a selfless place where people are genuinely interested in helping others and sharing their experiences.

The community isn’t a place that you sign into and are thrust into the middle of. It’s people. It takes a little bit of effort to find the folks that match your niche, but certainly not impossible. You unfortunately can’t just login to Twitter and…