Introducing the "Community" tab

Exercism is all about community. Without our volunteers, mentors, and everyone that helps and supports our students, we'd be nothing. Yet, we always feel like we're just scratching the surface of all our community has to offer, and all we have to offer our community.

So from today we're starting to focus more heavily on community, launching various initiatives to help bring our community together better and maximise the value of everything you all create!

We’ve added four new parts to Exercism - and they all live under the new Community tab.

Forum

For a long time we’ve wanted to add a forum, but not had the person-power to manage it. Now, after hiring Jonathan - our new community manager - we feel we have the resource to make it work.

Our forum is split into four category: Exercism: A space to discuss everything Exercism - the product, plugins, mentoring, volunteering, and anything else you can think of. Exercism Support: A space for people to get support and help if they get stuck using Exercism or solving an exercise. Post-solving mentoring should still go through the normal mentoring UI, but this adds a layer before for when you struggle to get an exercise over the line. Programming: A general space to explore programming, specific languages, or questions/ideas around any of our exercises. Social: Finally we have a dedicated space to chat, ask questions, and get to know each other better.

This is our first stab at how we feel a forum can work for Exercism, and it’s something we’ll definitely evolve over time. For now we’re using a pretty vanilla Discourse installation, but eventually hope to bake the conversations into Exercism itself. If you’ve got suggestions about how we can evolve or improve the forum, open a new topic in the Exercism category!

Finally on this, we’re really committed to making this forum a fun, safe, non-toxic space, and so we’ve put Community Guidelines in place to guide everyone to the type of interactions we’re desiring. We’re going to enforce these relatively strictly so please do take time to read them before posting. Thanks 🙂

You can visit the forum at https://forum.exercism.org.

Dig Deeper

There’s a huge amount of knowledge about how to solve exercises locked in our community’s brains. Some of it is used be mentors to help students, some by maintainers when designing exercises, and some gets turned into walkthroughs and exploratory videos. Well now we’re bringing all that knowledge together into our new Dig Deeper section.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll start to see the Dig Deeper tab appearing across exercises, with notes from mentors and maintainers, and walkthroughs that we’ve found on YouTube. And if you create your own walkthrough videos, we’ll happily incorporate it into the site. Either click the Add Video link on the Dig Deeper tab, or email Jonathan and he’ll help you out!

Community Stories

We’ve got a community full of amazing people with amazing stories, and so we’re creating a space for those stories to be told. We’ll be releasing a new series of interviews with the community, both for YouTube and later for podcasting services, where you can get inspired and motivated listening to the technical journeys of others.

If you’ve got an interesting story to tell, then email Jonathan and we’ll see if we can feature it!

Subscribe on YouTube to make sure you don’t miss any of our videos!

Swag

Last but not least, we’re finally adding an Exercism Swag Store. This is something we’ve been wanting to do for years, but we wanted to make sure we had the time to do it well and ensure the quality of merchandise was up to scratch. Well, we’ve put some designs together, ordered some samples, and we’re really pleased with what we’ve got!

We’ve tried to price Swag as close to cost as possible so that everyone can get some, but we’ve also added “Donation items” that you can add to your basket to help support Exercism. If you do have the ability to support us, please do - it’s only through your donations that we can do things like hire Jonathan and build tools to support our community further - so please do help out if you can!

You can explore the swag store at https://swag.exercism.org.

Final thoughts

I’m really excited to start growing and nurturing our community more deliberately. Thank you to everyone that’s helped us get to this stage and tested things over the last few weeks - you’re all superstars 💖