💜 Pesto Community 2022 rewind

Hello, hello, hello :DAnother year has gone by with the people we treasure the most, you all ✨I am Himani, Community Manager here at Pesto. It’s been almost 7 months since I’ve been a part of Pesto, and my journey has been nothing but EPIC!As I sat down to reflect and rewind this past year, it made me smile ear to ear. I’ve always been fascinated by the power and magic of communities as I have gained immense value from the ones I have been a part of. This year has been filled with serendipity, learnings about life and I discovered the joy of giving back in the truest sense. Community building ftw <3We, at Pesto, have always believed that our ethos lies in advocating for Remote Work, creating equitable outcomes for developers globally and empowering them in every little and major way through the sense of community ✊🏻Here, we took a stab at retrospecting the highlights of 2022 in Pestoverse and is it fair to say that we have brewed something worthwhile? Let’s see…

The major intention behind launching Pesto events was to create a weekly ritual wherein we provide value to the open dev community out there 🙇🏽‍♀️You know, there is something great about putting the time and effort into producing an event and having all the moving pieces come together. Helping people connect and doing events at scale is simply wholesome. Big props to our guest speakers who pushed hard to give back by sharing their insights on all things tech.In hindsight, it helped us build a deeper bond with our audience and motivated a few of our community champions to contribute to something they can subscribe to 🤝We’ve put together an events gallery which is a one-stop audi to replay recordings and visit the resources shared in the various workshops held. Tap here to binge-watch.

We hosted:

• AMAs with certain alums wherein they came and shared their Pesto experiences and spoke about our culture.

• Tech, web3 events with industry experts to level up programming acumen.

• Soft skills sessions to get better at remote work, time management and enhance productivity.

• Townhalls with our founder Ayush to address questions, comments, and community initiatives and help them make it a success 🤝

• Fireside chats with CTOs of startups wherein we learnt what it takes to build tech products at scale.

If you’ve missed any of the workshops or couldn’t get enough in the first time, here you go 👈🏽

📝 Pesto weekly - 30 Newsletter editions

This was a really fun one. Every week, we went down the rabbit holes to hunt and bring about learning resources, a tech product spotlight, some inspo for morale boost, and updates on what’s brewing new at the Pesto corner 😎Our only aim with every edition was to curate something which is actionable as well as aspirational for devs coming from various walks of life. To view previous issues of Pesto weekly newsletters, click here. Happy reading 📚

🌻 Pesto alum summit

Although we love the internet for keeping us connected these last 2 years of the pandemic, we all craved those live human interactions.So, we decided to go from URL to IRL this mid-year to have fun and a celebration like no other! 💃We took our humans of Pesto from various corners of the country to Bir in Himachal for the Pesto Alumni Summit to chill, network, and vibe 🤙🏽💙 20 souls 🌻 3 days⛰️ 1 place ✨ Incredible momentsWhile the vibes of this get-together cannot be described in words, here’s a glimpse of the fun we had!

🔖 Resource DB

There are gazillions of YouTube videos, learning courses, podcasts on every topic imaginable, tech articles and blogs brimming with insights. So, the elephant in the room is – How Do You Navigate This “Age of Data Abundance?” And that’s exactly what we’re here to help you with. We want to give you every advantage to succeed 🎖 We have built a database of 75+ (this just keeps on growing btw) cherry-picked resources ranging from web dev picks to interview prep guides to ideas for side projects! Consider this free DB as an open tech content library that will help you reach your dev goals effectively ✊🏻

Tap this link to visit the library.

👩🏽‍💻 Challenges

3️⃣0️⃣ days of JS

From time immemorial, we have been getting requests to launch something for novice folks in the programming world.And, it got us thinking, what is that which our community can kickstart from the ground up but have been having trouble getting started? And teaching JS seemed like a no-brainer.30 days of JS was set in motion 🚀We ended up creating a daily ritual of adding value to the community (every weekday, 60 mins live stream with a Pesto Alum)The software industry densely relies on collaboration and networked learning. We wanted to provide a space for that to happen and tried to help folks at every step of your Javascript journey 🤜🏽🤛🏽What happened next? 👀

• We successfully ran a free live cohort-based program for 650+ folks to help them get from 0 to 1 on Javascript. It resulted in the majority of them coming out with a solid foundation in the world of JavaScript at the end of the challenge.

A bunch of them also bagged special incentives, shoutouts and some really fantastic Pesto merch. Because, hey, consistency and hard work should be honoured, hands down :D

🌊 Centered challenge

Productivity is something that we chase day in and day out. This includes reducing the no. of distractions around us and doing some focus work 🔕 Most of our alums have been working remotely in various startups globally and sometimes tackling productivity is more than sticking a motivational poster on the wall.

Hence, we introduced the Centered challenge within the alum community to get work done 2x faster and change the game ⚡ And, well, all we hear from the regular participants is that their productivity has gone to the moon :D

🎲 Game night sessions

We wanted to ensure that our cohort folks have ways to de-stress and have a bit of fun and banter along with their program classes.And what better than community mixers every fortnight where the tribe can get together for an hour of entertainment, icebreaking activities, happy faces and loud laughter 🥂Our source of joy was to see folks having a good time with fellow Pesto mates while adding a flavour of festive vibes.And we totally loved witnessing the competitive spirit which the humans of Pesto brought in to move their way for some exciting rewards. Here are a couple of glimpses of merrymaking 😄

🔮 Discord community of ~4.5k members

Creating a safe space for people who share similar values and interests never gets old. It is in our nature to want to build relationships and be connected to our tribe. In our case, it is a community for the next-gen developers of India 🌟The journey of devs can be pretty lonely, and we totally acknowledge that fact.We started thinking….What if we could have a support system to help devs navigate through this? What if you could get your questions asked and stay accountable? What if you could upskill by being a part of fun challenges? And Pesto open discord community germinated 🌱It’s a perfect place to:📺 Participate in exclusive live events to accelerate your dev career🆘 Get help related to coding questions👥 Set daily goals and stay accountable💬 Chat with like-minded folks over check in calls But that doesn’t nearly cover it all. Get the full picture here by checking out this notion page.

Also, hear from the Head of Community, Abhishek himself on why you as a dev, should consider our discord community. Give it a watch here 👈🏽

It's honestly been one of the most interesting things for me to discover a role that brings together all the things I love — building a space for people to discuss ideas and share insights, fostering an environment of connection, organizing events, creating content, gathering feedback, and encouraging people to open up, explore and have fun. Whoever said ‘Life is better connected’ put it really well 🥳And I, on behalf of my team want to thank you all for being a part of this ride. Thank you for choosing to invest in this community, and in this vision. It's a privilege to be creating a community for devs, and it's a responsibility we don't take lightly. Honestly, we can't promise to always get it right. But we do promise to lead with empathy, transparency and a ridiculous amount of passion for helping developers find their place in the world by building careers beyond borders. I hope in the short time we've known each other, you've seen this to be true.This year, we’ll be coming up with community initiatives richer in terms of experience, knowledge, frolic, and most definitely, some healthy banter XDIn 356 days from now, we want us to look back on 2023 with a sense of pride in how far we’ve come, confidence in how we approach building for the world, with gratitude for the support & genuine community we've found in each other. We want to be there for you, always!

Let’s make 2023 count 💛Forever for the long game, Pesto Community team