A tech community, when it matters

I run 3w.am, a community forum for Armenian IT folks. Most days it is what you expect: job posts, hosting questions, arguments about frameworks.

Then hard times came, and I found out what a community is actually for.

During the mobilization period, companies and online platforms needed hands. People with experience to share, people who could propose technical solutions, people who could help block attacks that were already known, people who could just fix urgent problems fast. The forum became a switchboard for that. Need met offer within hours, not weeks.

Nobody charged anyone. Nobody kept score. Senior engineers sat in threads with juniors and worked the problem.

I think about this when people ask why I keep moderating a forum in 2024. Because a community is not the posts. It is the promise that when something breaks, technical or otherwise, you are not debugging alone.