A Day in the Life: Fede Garcia Lorca, Community Coordinator at Codecademy

This month, we’re featuring Fede, the newest member of the Codecademy Community Team!! Fede is a long-time Codecademy learner and community member but now, he’s taking on a different role in the Codecademy ecosystem as a community coordinator, leading the charge on our Codecademy Chapters program. When he’s not doing community things at Codecademy, you can find him coding, taking photographs, and running around NYC!

Please meet Fede! :flight_departure:

Tell us a little about yourself.

Hi there! My name is Federico Garcia Lorca but you can call me Fede for short. Born and raised in southern Spain (Murcia to be exact), I had the luxury of growing up in the rural parts of my country, and about half an hour away from the Mediterranean.

Ever since I was little I was interested in tech. I got into video games early on, and by the time I was a teen I was experimenting with Linux, C programming and assembly. I also love everything and anything that flies, so at first I decided to go for the Spanish air force to be a fighter jet pilot. My mom thought that was too dangerous so instead I went for aerospace engineering (gotta listen to your moms y’all).

How did you end up working for Codecademy?

After graduating college and living in the US for a while I decided that the best part of engineering (or the part I enjoyed the most) was writing the software that made everything work. I came to Codecademy as a student, and quickly got engaged with our vibrant community of learners. When I saw an opportunity to join the community team, I jumped right in.

Did you always want to be a Community Coordinator?

Not at all! This was quite unexpected really. Life sometimes just has a way of showing us where we need to go even before we realize it. I think this was one of those moments. And I’ve never been happier to join a team as I am now, being part of the Codecademy community team.

What are the best aspects of working as a Community Coordinator?

I’m going to focus on my two favorites to keep it short:

Multidisciplinary and open-ended: building and supporting a community has a lot of unexpected turns and twists, especially when considering that the Codecademy community is global and comes from all over the world. I approach every day with a “learner mentality”, trying to discover where we can offer more and do more for all the learners that come to us. These problems aren’t black and white, and often have complicated solutions that involve the interests of multiple stakeholders at odds with each other. Reconciling those needs in a satisfactory way for everybody is very open-ended and full of compromises. There’s no formula for “if this then that” when it comes to our community, and I wouldn’t want it that way anyway. Everything is unique in its own way and that’s a thrilling challenge to solve.

What are the “worst” aspects of working as a Community Coordinator?

The job never ends! I will never be able to look at our community and say “yes, that’s it. We are done here”. We are constantly evolving (as we should) and working with a moving target perpetually can be very challenging. Furthermore, the community “never sleeps”, which means when I’m done with my day, our community is still going, still facing challenges, and still needing support. It can be difficult to step away from my laptop some days when I feel more needs doing.

If you could make one piece of fictional tech reality, what would it be?

Without a doubt, the USS Enterprise from Star Trek. Are you kidding me? A ship to travel the galaxy with? One that can enter and exit planetary atmospheres without a hitch? Yeah, that’s some cool tech.

If I’m not allowed to pick an entire ship, I’ll go for John Wick’s body armor suit. It may not seem high tech, but John Wick gets shot a lot and he gets to walk it off. That’s cool.

Do you have any advice for the learners?

You need to know your why. Why are you learning to code? Why is it web development? Or data science? The importance of knowing why you are doing something cannot be understated: it will be your guiding post, the reason you do it and how you motivate yourself to keep going. If you do not believe in your why, you’re much less likely to succeed (this applies to a lot more than learning to code, btw). Decide your why, then establishing milestones and timelines. Keep yourself accountable to those.

If you could make one brand new course what would it be?

DIY courses! Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, PCB boards, how to solder, anything! I think courses enabling people to build their own things would be an awesome way to put coding to practice

What does a typical day look like for you?

6am - Get up, workout (either outdoor run, or gym)

7:30am - Breakfast, first check-in of the day with my calendar in case I have 9am calls

8:30am - Start my work day, check emails, answer questions from community

9am - 12pm - Miscellaneous things like chapter leader check-ins, following up with the community on ongoing issues, researching solutions to pain points

12pm-1pm - Lunch break

1pm - 5pm - Same as the morning, continue working on projects, keep tabs with our Discord community, answer queries, get on more calls with chapter leaders (if any), update the rest of the team where needed

Rest of the day: I have Discord on my phone, so if something urgent happens, I can quickly get to it

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(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 1 hour unless flagged)

Whoah there, where’s that hate coming from? Jealousy?

How about you can do both - have a goal and work towards it, but also be flexible to grab an opportunity by the horns. I don’t see anything wrong with it. Life is not black and white.

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For context the above flagged post needs to remain present owing to the reply. This will all yet need to be resolved.

Great advice, thank you and congrats on your promotion :smile:

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Thanks for the feature @lilybird ! Always fun to share with the community. I guess this makes me forum-famous? I’ll try not to let go to my head :joy:

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hi there :wave:
Thanks for chiming in. I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. Sorry if I wasn’t clear.
I knew I wanted to be part of this community and why I was here: trust me, you won’t become a super user in our forums (let alone last long as one) if you aren’t crystal clear about why you are here and what motivates you. I logged in every day hoping to help other learners. I came back looking for answers too. I knew this was a special place, one that offers sincere help to those that need it. why keep coming back? It’s brings me tremendous joy to help others, it makes me feel great, and it makes me want to keep doing it. Yes I was lucky to become part of the community team. The team is amazing and anyone would be lucky to join in.

It wouldn’t have happened without me being embedded in this community for over a year, doing it for the right reasons: why was I here? Because I wanted to help and give back to a community that had selflessly helped me first.

TLDR: find what drives you (why), stay consistent to your goals (how), and your discipline will reward with “lucky moments” (what) like landing a dream job. It won’t happen if you don’t do the work first.

PS: feel free to DM me, I’ll be happy to talk all this over. Staying motivated is the crux of a lot of learners in this community. Find me here, or find me on our Discord server and we can chat

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hope the best for you fede and the codecademy team.
this website is amazing so keep the good work

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Congrats Fede -good to see you’ll be around longer.

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Congrats @fedegl for your promotion! Happy to see spanish members in this community. I’m a beginner from Barcelona. Un saludo!

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@fedegl is awesome. Good to see a chapter leader become a part of the Codecademy Team! He is a source of inspiration; that anyone in this community can achieve greatness with consistent efforts.

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