Community

I think community is pretty neat. There are so many forms of it and it can be thought of in so many different ways. Community can be the people who lived around you while you were growing up, could be people at your church, friends at school, relatives, people with similar interests, etc. Community can even people a ton of people across the world you've never even met.

One community I'm thinking of specifically is the iOS developer community. I realized if I'm going to get serious about doing iOS development I'm probably going to need ways to stay interested and stay motivated. So I took to Reddit, Twitter, and some other social medias to join as many groups and follow as many people with similar interests as I could. It's interesting how without even necessarily interacting directly with others one can feel a sense of community. In a more "real" sense I have also started attending monthly meetups with other iOS developers around the Twin Cities. This has been huge for me because in the couple years I've been interested in this, I've never met any other iOS developers in person. It's a really neat experience to be able to talk with others who I share this hobby with and it gives me an opportunity to learn from others who know a lot more than I do.

I think community is such a crucial element to the human experience because it allows us to help one another in hard times and it allows us to share our joys as well. Also, community gives us a chance to share what makes us special while simultaneously getting to experience that from others as well. My other favorite part about community is it gives us other people to interact with who we can learn from. Every single person out there has something they can teach you.

If you are interested in something and you want to share it with like-minded people, look hard for an existing community. Whether it be in person (www.meetup.com is awesome) or online (there is a subreddit for everything), find one and help motivate others and let them help motivate you. If one doesn't exist, try starting one! Odds are, you aren't the only person out there interested in breeding cat/chinchilla hybrids.


Thanks for reading, hopefully I'll start posting these a bit more frequently!