If you are looking for an inclusive and diverse tech community, which promotes collaboration first and code second this is the place for you. Here you can accelerate your career and grow your network no matter what stage of the tech journey or level you are. We are proud to have members who have only recently taken their first steps in tech, to seasoned engineers with decades of experience.  

We are not just comprised of “hardcore coders”; but we have UX designers, Devops, testers, technical writers, bloggers and YouTubers in our community. 

Our aim is to create a safe space where anyone can bring their ideas and questions forward. We have the opposite of the "bro culture" found in other communities. At EddieHub we encourage not only the technical development of our community members, but also their personal development. We have seen some of our members go from not feeling confident speaking in our monthly Community Call, to live streaming in their own YouTube channels. We also advocate work/life balance - taking rest and not glamourising work burnout.

We want to ensure that everyone feels safe and respected during their time in EddieHub and for this reason we have a code of conduct at http://coc.eddiehub.org.

EddieHub communicates and collaborates in two different ways: via the community’s Discord server and the GitHub organisation. We would strongly recommend joining both so that you can get the full benefit of joining the community and feel integrated. Both EddieHub and these platforms are free. 

Discord

If you have not done so already, then sign up to Discord on https://discord.com. This is a text, audio and video platform which has many chat channels based on different topics.  Make sure that you customise your profile with a picture or photo, GitHub profile link and Twitter.

Then go on to the EddieHub's server via the Discord invite link. You will be dropped in the #general channel where you will be asked to review and agree our community's Code of Conduct and receive a warm welcome from the members. Now would be a good time to consider introducing yourself and include the link to your GitHub profile. In your introduction we would recommend mentioning what technologies you are into and what you are up to at the moment (for example, are you a student or are you a freelancer?). 

Within the EddieHub Discord server there are around thirty channels which cover topics ranging from a public speaking channel to a databased channel. At first it can seem daunting looking at this list, so we would recommend the #readme channel as a good staring point to understanding the different areas in our server. 

Once you are ready, go for it and join the conversation! 

You might see EddieBot: this is our Open Source bot written by the community to help us be inclusive and ensure that the server is a safe place for all. 

Why might you come across EddieBot? At EddieHub we are passionate about moving away from gender favouring, polarising, race related, religion inconsiderate or other unequal phrasing. Therefore if you use terms such as “Hi Guys”, then EddieBot responds with a notification highlighting that this is not inclusive language and will suggest alternatives.  

We appreciate that the community is a place to share your work, which we encourage for our regular community members (aka “Team Eddie”). If you are concerned that you will be “spammed” with members simply coming in and dropping their links, without engaging or adding value to the community - do not worry! We have NightBot who takes care of this.  

Another bot you will come across is Becca Lyria. One of the features of this bot is to give you a command to self assign community roles. For example; node and typescript.  

One of the things we are proudest of is how helpful and supportive our community members are. In addition we have a great set of moderators across most timezones who are there to ensure the smooth running of the server. 

GitHub

You may already have a GitHub account, but if not you can sign up for free for this social coding platform at www.github.com.  

Here is the link to the EddieHub GitHub organisation, where you will find community projects and discussions as well as a list of the members. The projects range from bots to help the community, to GitHub Actions and APIs.  

Take your time to go through the projects and familiarise yourself with them, so you can find one or more that interests you.  

We welcome any contributions no matter how small! A contribution is not just about code changes, but also any improvements that adds value.  This could be fixing a typo or coming up with ideas on how the project can be improved.