The Power of Community

Hello world!

I was invited to talk about my experience engaging with the community over the past years at the PHP Mauritius UG Meetup last month. This blog post is a summary of what I talked about.

 

Whether you are using open source software or you are finding solutions to your problems on forums, behind all these tools, there are people and communities working. These communities are making a huge impact in the world and we often just take it for granted! 
Can you imagine surviving a day at work without using any open source tools or without going to a forum?

By contributing to the community, you are helping thousands or millions of people around the world just by answering a forum threads, writing an articles or fixing a bug in an Open Source Project. 
Even if you speak at a conference and inspire someone to contribute to the community, you are already doing something great!

Moreover, you get to have lots of fun, discuss ideas, meet like-minded people, develop your soft skills and why not even grow your business if you are freelancing! The experience is amazing! 


Being in the community in the past years really changed my life, it helped me a lot to develop my soft skills such a public speaking, and team leadership. 


Also, after speaking at several devcons and bootcamps in the past, this year I had the opportunity to lead the Global Azure Bootcamp team in terms of content delivery! A great experience again!

These skills also help me in my daily life at work and helped me to move from being the traditional isolated programmer to being more conformable leading projects & teams. 

I also actively contribute to communities such as C# Corner and TechNet wiki online. And, combined with my offline contributions, this helped me become a Microsoft MVP, C# Corner and Microsoft Community Contributor.


It’s really awesome to make friends and network with people from all these communities around the world everyday! – All this thanks to the Power of Community!

Contribute! Lead! Grow!
Together let’s make a better world!

Cheers,
Chervine