Hello, and welcome to our first blog of 2023! 🥳🎆
First, we wish you a happy new year from our ReactPlay community! We hope this year brings all the positive changes you deserve.
The previous year has been absolutely fantastic for us. We want to share everything with you through this blog. Consider it a retrospective of the year 2022.
Hello, World!
We wanted to build a community for Web developers, especially beginners focusing on the front end to learn, develop and grow their skillset. Hence, we created ReactPlay, an open-source project to learn project-based programming with a hands-on model.
We truly kicked off in April 2022. And soon enough, gain a lot of traction, and developers from around the globe joined us.
The First Play
'Plays' are the foundation of the ReactPlay platform. As you know by now, we are a project-based learning platform. Everything revolves around projects that contributors develop.
Each project submission is called a Play in ReactPlay. Contributors can submit their plays and get reviewed by experienced developers.
Our first project was created on 3rd April 2022. It was a play called Why React contributed by Tapas Adhikary, demonstrating why one should choose React.js.
Throughout the year, many contributors joined us. By the year's end, we had more than 60 projects on our platform.
Explore new plays here.
The Community
Initially, we started a Twitter group with contributors. But as more developers started contributing, we needed something better. As a result, we created a discord server to interact with other community members. We were already active on Twitter by then. And soon enough, we launched our LinkedIn page as well.
Discord is the place where all the fun begins. The community calls, discussions, chats, memes, announcements, and everything is majorly conducted through our Discord server. As of today, we have more than 400 active members on Discord.
We primarily host spaces on Twitter. We talk about [THINGS WE TALK ABOUT]. Additionally, we share insightful and informative content on both Twitter and LinkedIn. We share quizzes, quotes, trips and tricks, and much more. We have more than 2,000 friends on the blue bird app and about 500 followers on LinkedIn.
The Blog
We decided to expand our horizons and step into different areas of software development. Blogging, though not directly connected with development, has an integral role in the developer's journey. Therefore we decided to start a blog.
We started the ReactPlay blog on 23rd June 2023. We encouraged everyone to write about their experiences and learnings. People began writing about creating plays, building personal projects, difficulties faced open source, and many other topics.
We got a positive response from everyone. Today, we have about 50 blogs published on a variety of topics, including but not limited to React, JavaScript, Open source, Git and GitHub.
Hack-R-Play
Another milestone we achieved is our first-ever hackathon!
We hosted Hack-R-Play in October 2022. NHost happily sponsored it. Participants had to create an open-source project using NHost and any React-based technology. Later they had to write a blog and submit it along with the original project.
The hackathon received 82 submissions in total. Seventeen of those projects were completed. Finally, we selected three grand prize winners.
Read more about Hack-R-Play in our separate blog, and check this out to see who won the hackathon.
No Mess November
The codebase became cluttered as more contributors started contributing to the project. We have made a plethora of changes in the codebase since day one.
To make things easier to develop, build and maintain; we made some significant changes in our codebase.
To begin, we divided the platform's functionality into separate repositories. Next, we introduced authentication, made the play-creation process easier, and added play interaction and modification capabilities.
In November 2022, we followed No Mess November. We cleaned up the entire codebase and configured ESLint and Prettier to have opinioned rules for everyone.
It was a hectic task since we had to clean up the existing codebase and create a system for new contributions. But our fellow contributors collaborated and cleaned up the entire codebase.
Code cleanup witnessed the community's most extensive collaboration, where everybody helped fix some part of the codebase.
ReactPlay Live
The third and most recent achievement of our community is ReactPlay Live. We encouraged developers to write, build and showcase. But what after that?
On ReactPlay Live, we call a community member over YouTube live to share their journey and experiences in the domain. This helps both beginner and intermediate members to upskill themselves. At the same time, the guest gets an opportunity to share their story, talk in front of the audience and build public speaking confidence.
We have covered topics such as Jobs, interview preparations, and full-stack development.
The FOSS India Participation
FOSS is a celebration of Open Source. We had a representation of ReactPlay in the Foss India 2.0 help in Bangalore, India. We spoke about the project's vision, community, and the approach we are taking to make learning easy.
It was very well received, with a lot of positive feedback.
The Present
We are so proud of what we have achieved in such a short time. Today, we have about 600 starts, more than 300 forks, and more than 75 contributors to our GitHub Repository.
This must have only been possible with all of our community members. We thank everyone for connecting with us, engaging in the community, and participating in various activities.
We recently crossed 600 stars in our repository. If you haven't starred it yet, this is the perfect time to do it!
The Future
In 2023, we have grand plans to take the project to the next level with a community-first approach.
Here is a short brief on what we have been brainstorming for this year:
User Interface revamp
User profile page
Leaderboard
Follow creators
As per community engagement goes, we have exciting plans for this year.
In-person meetup (Stay tuned for this!) You would surely love those:
More engagement on RaectPlay Live to provide a platform for every beginner who wants to share their journey.
Web Development Workshops
Project-based Cohort
This is just the icing on the cake! There are many other things that we are planning for this year. Please ensure you are part of our community and follow us on the blue bird app for the latest updates.
Wrapping Up
That's it for today! We hope you had a fantastic year and are still sticking with your new year's resolutions. All the best for the upcoming year.
If you want to connect with us, here we are:
Until then, keep contributing!