A truly supportive community that’s here to help you advance

We all have doubts.

We all have times when we are weak.

We all have times when we need people to lean on — to help us, to give us advice. And sometimes we need someone to be here for us as we power through the harshest moments of our lives.

This is what our community is truly about.

Our community is called Dojo

Dojo is a Japanese term that means “place of the Way”. It represents a place of learning, immersion, and a journey toward mastery.

In Dojo, we focus on mastering two things:

• The ways of a developer
• The ways of a human

Becoming masterful in the ways of a developer

We train to become better developers, deliver better quality websites, build performant applications, and improve everything we involve ourselves with.

We learn the fundamentals, we integrate them with our consciousness, and we use our skills to do as much as good as we can.

There are two ways we train to become better developers in Dojo right now:

• We hold training workshops every week — the topic ranges from basic stuff like HTML, CSS, JavaScript to advanced stuff like React, Svelte, Node, MongoDB.
• We participate in discussions, raise questions, and give answers in our discord community.

There may be more ways in the future as we evolve through the years. And exactly how? That’s something I don’t have an answer for.

An inclusive community — without the angst and elitism

There’s an air of pride and elitism in “inclusive” web developer communities — where they quietly exclaim “we are the best because we do certain things that nobody else does”.

• Accessibility professionals bitch about others who share experiments that aren’t perfectly accessible.
• Security professionals bitch about potential dangers and loopholes, causing others to become paralysed with fear.
• CSS people bitch about JavaScript and JavaScript people bitch about CSS…

Everyone is focused on protecting their pride and ego and they’re all missing the point.

The point is: they’re all important, to varying degrees , depending on varying contexts. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

You simply can’t make better decisions without considering the bigger picture.

So instead of shooting you down when you share something you are proud of, we celebrate your victory because you tried and succeeded in becoming a tiny bit better than yesterday.

And we welcome all conversations as long as they forward the two main things we’re all working on — towards becoming better humans and better developers.

Got a conversation you need to hold? Fears you need to voice? Worries about the future? And excitement you can’t contain?

Share it with us. We’re all game since we’re all on the journey together.

We encourage, guide, and help each other move forward

All of us can be lost at some point in our lives, at some point in our careers, and during these down moments in our lives, we simply need people around us to be here for us.

Not in the “you can do it” cheerleading kind of way — because what good does that serve?

Instead, we help each other by helping us think, so we are aligned with our true goals in our lives.

That’s how we move each other forward as humans.

Because we all have a gift to share — and you have yours too, even if you haven’t discovered and expanded on it yet.

Training to live to our fullest potential

Luck favours those who are prepared.

Work goes to those who are ready.

And opportunities are sized by people who dare to take the jump (and sometimes stay with it even when everybody else is telling them not to; when it makes sense, of course).

• Years ago, I took the jump into web development even when I studied finance and was deathly afraid of touching code.
• Today, I’m taking the jump to create a community because I see the value in being around people who’re sincere about being better humans and better developers.
• Tomorrow, I’m taking another jump elsewhere — exactly where, I have no idea at this point.

The point is, we don’t live to our fullest potential by cowering behind our screens and sucking up to others.

We live to our full potential by trusting we have our gifts, seeking them out, and expanding on that to give to the world.

All of us are here to train, uncover this gift and share it— and we just happen to be developers who’re gathering in a community.