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It was strength in numbers for the top overall team of our 21-Day Coding Challenge.

With 130 members, the Women in Web Dev FB Group team had the greatest number of participants (by more than two-fold) for our daily JavaScript challenge series. With one point being awarded to each individual team member for every one of the 21 challenges, the team scored 638 points, the highest total score by more than 100 points.

Jenny Chan, who organized the 21DCC team, says that the Women in Web Development Facebook group, of which she's the creator, has more than 1,400 members. "I've been a member of a few supportive female-only Facebook groups and wanted to join an online community for female developers. I couldn't find one, so I started the Facebook group to give us a safe, online space to connect," Chan says.

"The most enjoyable part was being a part of the team and sharing different ways of solving the challenge."

The 21-Day Coding Challenge, which began on Oct. 1, involved completing one challenge per day through the use of JavaScript. Each day, a new challenge was unlocked. Our aim was to help improve digital literacy, introduce people to code and to encourage a daily habit of coding for continued learning, from beginners to seasoned developers. The 21DCC was the first challenge that the members, who live in Canada and around the world, of the Women in Web Development Facebook group completed as a team. "There will definitely be more since it was a lot of fun," she says.

"There are lots of professional women who want to get into web development. The challenge now is how do we help more of them to transition into a web development career."

Chan estimates that upwards of 30 women on the team completed all 21 challenges. "The most enjoyable part was being a part of the team and sharing different ways of solving the challenge," she says. The group stayed in touch through Slack, and a new channel was created for each of the 21 challenges so participants could finish each day at their own pace, and receive feedback and offer input on how to best solve that day's challenge. (Individual channels allowed for the elimination of spoilers being posted for those who were behind.) Slack was also a powerful tool for the purpose of the challenge because one is able to format code within the messaging application itself.

"There are lots of professional women who want to get into web development. The challenge now is how do we help more of them to transition into a web development career," Chan says. "There's also a need for us to connect with each other because we are often the only technical women in our team or company. Local events are great, but they don't happen often enough or the topic might not be the right fit."

Chan went further in supporting the team in completing challenges by creating a pair of videos entitled "What Is The GRID?" and "How To Use The Browser Console." For the first time, we created a forum to encourage discussion specific to the 21-Day Coding Challenge and, thanks to the help of Ramon over at Success In Tech, walkthroughs were available for two of the challenges.

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Here's what some team members said about their 21-Day Coding Challenge experience(s).

"I loved the 21-Day Coding Challenge, and doing it with new friends, and our Slack channel made it so easy to ask for help, and to learn more. So much of JS programming is rendering to the DOM; I appreciated learning how to program functions in JS." - Miriam Peskowitz

"I loved working through these challenges - it helped to solidify that I kinda-actually-know-how-to-code and help beat down that impostor syndrome feeling that I sometimes get when I feel like I don’t know enough, can’t know enough, and will never know enough to get a job." - Christina Kopecky

"Even though I've had experience as a js developer I greatly enjoyed this challenge. It created a sense of community everywhere, between the Women in Web Dev group and on Twitter. Since I was tweeting about the challenge, participants were sending me DMs asking for help. It truly helped spark the inspiration I was searching for to get motivated about coding again." - Alma Sanchez

Miss this round of the 21-Day Coding Challenge? Stay tuned for the next edition coming in 2019!

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