I love the community that I am a part of by default by being a web developer. Almost every person I have ever met that is a developer has been very nice and polite. Every developer I’ve had the opportunity to interact with has been more than willing to lend a helping hand in any way they can, regardless of skill level. A senior developer who has been in the industry for 30+ years is humble enough to know they aren’t above helping someone who’s just starting out. There are exceptions to this of course – there are quite a few bad apples out there. But the majority of the people in my industry are just plain awesome.
Recently I’ve had an opportunity to witness this awesomeness first-hand. I’m a moderator of a subreddit that has approximately 22,500 unique visitors each day – the r/webdev subreddit. For those of you who don’t know, a subreddit is a community within it’s parent platform Reddit that is focused on one particular topic. As a moderator, my duties consist of keeping conversations on topic, making sure posts on our subreddit adhere to our rules, and keeping the trolls/unpleasant people at bay. I applied to the moderator team last time they were accepting applications, and got accepted without a problem. Its entirely volunteer work; I don’t receive any kind of compensation for my efforts.
Anyway, I decided to try and give back to the r/webdev community since, without them, we wouldn’t exist. The information and conversations that happen on the subreddit are quite extensive and almost always great to read. So, I wanted to give them something. I had the idea of giving away a “web development project jumpstart kit,” including some credit to a popular Virtual Private Server provider DigitalOcean, and a gift card to a domain name provider like Namecheap. I asked some of the other moderators and they thought it was a great idea. Some even offered to pitch in.
So, I set about trying to find gift cards for these retailers. I quickly discovered that none of these providers, not even their competitors, sold gift cards or gift certificates of any form. I was a bit bummed, but I didn’t want to give up. I reached out to the support teams of DigitalOcean and Namecheap to see if I could buy some promo credit from them. DigitalOcean had a Developer Relations manager reach out to me and offer to credit the winner of the giveaway $100, free of charge to me. I told him I was in contact with the customer support team from Namecheap, and he put me directly in touch with a decision maker at Namecheap via email.
Namecheap offered a coupon code for a specific domain name type, but I had asked if it was possible to get a coupon code that didn’t limit the winner to one specific domain name type. They agreed, but then told me they had to have a development team create a new coupon code to meet that requirement. They not only agreed to give me something to give away for free, but engaged a development team to work on it too. Wow.
I reached out to Scott Tolinksi too. Scott is a web developer that I look up to (as you know if you’ve read some of my previous posts), and he creates high-quality tutorials with his own Level Up Tutorials platform. He offered a free one year subscription to Level Up Pro, which gives the user access to all of his courses.
I reached out to these companies and individuals and, without hesitation, they were more than happy to provide me with some stuff to give away in my efforts to give back to the development community. I know that the webdev community is awesome, but this still just floored me. I am so happy to be a part of an industry that has such a great group of people working in it.