How can the developer community help me?

There's probably two ways. The first is direct and the second is indirect.

Directly has just been a community that I'm part of outside of coding, people that I know who are also coders themselves. Knowing somebody that you can frequently ask questions of is an absolutely massive advantage. If you don't have that, it can be a lot more difficult, and that's probably why people praise the online community so well.

People are working very hard to break down that difference, build places, forums, communities, where you can discourse, where you can talk about problems and try to find answers. But I've found that the most beneficial experiences I've had, have been the ones where I can talk to friends of mine and very quickly move through a problem. It's like when you're in the workplace, it's much faster although it's more costly for the company, to get several people talking about a problem and how to work through it.

You've got three or four devs now who are all working on a single problem rather than four in parallel, so it can be costly, but if the problem is big enough, then it's warranted and you can move through something difficult very quickly. Alternatively, you're just on your own and you're looking for resources online, docs or whatever.

So that's the direct, but the indirect is probably the incredible infrastructure that developers have created for learning coding.

It can be something as core as docs. Documenting how you use a resource is so important and oftentimes done really, really well, sometimes not so well. But oftentimes the things that I've used have been really well polished, and that's awesome. But then there's also the learning platforms. I learned primarily from Codecademy. That's an unbelievable resource where, with no environment set, I go to the internet and I can start coding in a node environment or using React or JavaScript.

You literally just click the link and go. It's unbelievable that people have created these, and there's courses and everything. They're all curated by different people. It's amazing, and other things exist elsewhere. I mean, just cord you could argue the same. It probably helps that software developers are the ones that are making resources for software development.