Please note: Just so you know, Grammarly told me my writing is fine. So please blame Grammarly and not me for the typos.
Last summer, I started hosting Office Hours on Friday afternoons. The basic idea around hosting office hours was an excuse to work on various projects and invite people to join to work on whatever projects they wanted to end their week.
Friday afternoons work well for me because I will have finished every task I wanted for the week, or anything left over will take me longer than an afternoon to complete, so I might as well start those on Monday instead.
My first session had 3 to 6 people, and then each week started slowly growing, and our last session had ~15 people. While half of the people who join each week I have known and met outside of a computer, more than half of the people who have joined office hours I have never met in person before. We have had people from all over the world, including Africa, the UK, the Netherlands, India, and Alaska, join in to chat while working on projects.
My humble goals for this time have always been to keep things light and serve as a welcoming space where people can join to discuss Python and Django, work on whatever project they want, and ask questions.
My goal wasn’t to build a community, even if it feels like one from seeing familiar faces week after week. So there is no Discord channel, mailing list, or iCal invite.
Instead, I have a private GitHub gist with the invite details, the starting date + time, and a Zoom link. I DM people who ask or people find the link from having accessed it before. I have not optimized my process for growth, but it works.
On weeks when my son has basketball practice, I have the freedom of moving the time around earlier or later, and to my surprise, a friendly group of people always join and trickle in over the time that I have to keep the Zoom meeting up.
On weeks when I’m out of town or need that Friday afternoon to hit a deadline, I update the gist to let people know that we’ll meet again in a few weeks. The success of office hours is not forcing them and letting people know that we have them most weeks but not every week when something is up.
I intentionally created a space where I don’t have the pressure to feel “on,” which is why it works for me, and I hope people will attend, too. There is no agenda, and I do my best to ensure everyone can talk and feel included while hanging out.
My stretch goal for 2024 might be to add a page on my website with the date of our next open hours that I can share with anyone curious. Maybe I’ll even use a nice font for the page, but for now, I think the gist works as well as anything.
