A couple of weeks ago I was having trouble with one of the tasks on my ALX project, so I reached out to one of the backend specialization groups I am in.  I was able to have my challenged addressed and finish my project on time. It got me thinking about the power of a supporting community. A community can be defined as the condition of sharing or having certain attitude and interests in common. There are different types of communities that can be formed based on a shared interests, struggles, vision or beliefs. You can even have a community within a community, one such example is within a family were certain family members can form their own community based on shared interests.

In this particular article I want to focus on the power a community has of lifting us when we feel we are at our weakest. My first software community was online and it came in the form of stack overflow, I was so surprised to find that they were people who I could relate to in my struggles in the developer world. I was grateful that I had someone who was with me in the journey that I no longer felt alone and isolated. And as grateful as I was for this community it helped me in one aspect of my struggles, I was still the only female developer in our office and there were certain things that I experienced which my male colleagues could not relate to.

Things like dealing with little micro aggressive comments that insinuated my inadequacy in my role due to my gender, assignment and execution of tasks that were rated  on my gender as the basis. There was an incident where I was labeled as being cold towards one of my superiors. Something I found to be inappropriate as this came during my performance appraisal. Whether the person in power is a woman or man, such a comment should be reviewed and taken serious as it can form a toxic work environment. I went and reported this situation to higher powers and even though they agreed that this was inappropriate no action was taken.

Sometimes I wonder and think, had I had a community of female developers I was connected to at the time would navigating the whole situation have been different. I will never know, what I do know is that there are times we all need to be lifted when we cannot move by ourselves or what we are dealing with seems like insurmountable burden to carry. A community can build you, work with you, see you and hear you, all for a greater purpose.

But what I learnt too is that a community is only as strong as you allow it to be. Its effectiveness only being as useful based on how you utilize that particular community. I feel as if the reason the help I received on that day left a profound impact was because that I had forgotten I had people to support me. Thinking I could do it on my own and that somehow if I asked for help I would seem weak. But we are all smaller pieces of a bigger puzzle and one way or another we need to come together to complete that puzzle.