Community definitions:

a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.

the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common.

I have been thinking about this lately. In the current world, we often have these tribal feelings. As developers, we will even fight tooth and nail to defend our community. If I am part of the Javascript community, I can become offensive and mean towards the C++ community because of the programming language. Or because I believe the member of that community have certain traits...

We hear the word community a lot to describe groups of developers. Sometimes for programming languages, sometimes for frameworks and sometimes for websites. The PHP community, the React community, the DEV community...

But... what makes you part of a community? At what point can you comfortably say: "I am a part of the X community" ?

I'll take myself as an example. I use the following technologies: ReactJS, NodeJS, Java Spring Boot, Typescript, CSS, HTML, Javascript.

I mostly use Javascript technologies. I use Spring Boot also. I consider myself to be part of the Javascript community. But, I don't consider myself part of the Java or Spring Boot community. I could see myself part of the React community, but for some reason, it's not as strong as the Javascript one for me...

This has nothing to do with how much I love those technologies. I love React, and I like to use Spring Boot. So, that can't explain why I feel this way.

To me, I think I comes down to the following question:

• If X didn't exist anymore, would you feel like something was missing?

Spring Boot, TypeScript and React could disappear, and honestly, after a few adjustments, I wouldn't care too much. Yeah, even React, I could move on to something else without an issue.

Now, if you took Javascript or DEV.to from me, I wouldn't be a happy camper. Those are things that define me. They have been a part of me for so long, and they shaped me in so many ways that I couldn't give them away that easily.

So, after all those words, there are two communities I feel a part of:

• the DEV community
• The Javascript community

What do you think? Which communities do you feel you belong to?

Love ❤️ 💕