Caleb H. thank you so much for all of this advice! I'm really looking forward to getting some solid practice in. I'm about to log on for a 2 hour coding livestream class with general assembly. I'm hoping to start building my website in the next couple of weeks too.

What about Hashnode Merchandise? Everyone loves t-shirts and then you also get free advertising for the platform when Devs wear them. They would have to be clever though, like programmer humor that makes other devs be like "where did you get that??? I want one" I agree with other commenters that Pro accounts could be used as well. I would pay a few bucks a month for premium features.

thanks so much! Someone on our front end team actually suggested that same link too.

Yes the main React.js subreddit has close to 100,000 subscribers now