Day 043: Accountability Group

A few weeks ago I created a "Daily Standup" group (a la Scrum) which was intended to be more like an accountability group of sorts. I invited random folks from FreeCodeCamp and Newbie Coder Warehouse (the first noob coder group I joined on FB) and got a decent amount of interest for the little group at the time.

The coding accountability group in slack. 

Currently there are 29 people (including yours truly) in the group. I do not believe anyone actually works as a developer right now as we are all currently learning the ropes and aspiring to become developers in the future. There is a variety of skill levels in various stages of learning and I appreciate the diversity.

About 10ish members are actually active and post at least a few times a week. Personally, I haven't missed a day since creating the group. I helps keep me motivated even though it was REALLY difficult to do much during work crunch time.

During those days, I will admit as much if the best thing I can do is put in 15 minutes of watching videos. It was also strangely reassuring to hear from others sheepishly admitting to taking it easy or taking a break too. That's OK by me! You don't want to get burnt out. There is a sense of camaraderie where we're are all in this together.

Some folks in the group also joined the coding challenge @ Lighthouse Labs and it has actually been great to work through the challenges together (or at the very least, checking in that each of us finished the daily challenge).

If you're thinking about starting an accountability group, I say go for it. If you don't know anyone personally who would join your group, I recommend starting an accountability group on Slack (or even Discord, Facebook, or even via email would work). Slack really is the perfect tool for this. A side benefit is simply getting used to using Slack since it is the tool of choice for many tech companies and teams. The extra bonus for me personally is learning how to manage/admin a group on Slack. It's pretty neat to see the digest emails it sends you as an admin!

Or if you don't want to start your own and would like to join the Daily Standup group feel free to email me at 4nnCanCode@gmail.com. It has a pretty low requirement of just posting to the daily checkin channel when you're working on a project or are learning something is all that you need to do to make use of it.

P.S. Today is my last crazy work day for the season! Just one more late night tonight and I am done (until the next crunch time in the winter). I put in a request to take this Friday off so I will have a 4 day weekend (with Memorial Day included, woo!). I am pumped to have a few full days of coding to look forward to soon. I have a lot of catching up to do and really want to get started on building something!