Bridge Foundry Staff Coding

Note: this program is on hold. We conducted an initial pilot, which had some success and a lot of learning! We could resume this if we had a volunteer who wanted to lead the initiative. If you are interested, please contact [email protected]

Overview

Bridge Foundry is an organization where volunteers and staff members who are passionate about our vision, come together to continue to make Bridge Foundry the best that it can be. We are excited to transparently have staff members and volunteers working together to execute Bridge Foundry’s vision.

After interviewing and completing our coding challenge, staff members will have the opportunity to receive compensation for their work. Everyone can apply for these positions. We have opportunities for all level of programmers to work on various projects for Bridge Foundry.

Goals

1. To support our community with available jobs and continuing learning: There are individuals that need some sort of compensation in order to pursue their passion in learning more about coding/technology.

2. Sustainable work pace on needed projects: We have development work that needs to get done. It’s easy for us to get busy and push it to the wayside. This way, we will have people dedicated to doing this. The first projects will be Bridge Troll and the Bridge Foundry site.

3. Clearly communicate our needs: To ensure this, we will have IPM’s and stories as needed for each project. There should be one main point of contact for what needs to be done, so that the communication is always there.

Specifications

To validate our idea, we will start with two coding positions. They can be volunteer or paid. One apprentice and one experienced, senior engineer. Pairing can be arranged to support more learning for the apprentice. The various projects they will work on will be storied out and goals will be communicated.

Anyone who has attended teacher training and volunteered at a workshop may apply as a senior engineer. We will establish clear criteria, which may include a pairing interview as well as evidence of good written and verbal communication skills. Our goal would be to have multiple people vetted for this role to expand the pool of available engineers.

Anyone who has attended a workshop, attended teacher training and volunteered as a TA can apply as an apprentice. The application may include submission of a code sample and a pairing interview. All applicants will be given a written evaluation that describes what skills they bring to the apprenticeship or what they would need to learn to become an apprentice.

Start small and find two people to fill these positions for about 1-3 months, we will have monthly retros to determine what is working, what isn’t working and what we can change moving forward. We want to remain volunteer-led, yet still ensure that this program has as big of an impact as possible.

Intial Pilot History

• Bridge Foundry board allocated $1200 in late 2015 for an initial experiment which will fund some program development work as well as engineering work. We have two volunteers willing to act in the senior engineer roles, participating in program ideation and hands-on pairing sessions. The goal for this phase was to spend a few weeks and understand how this would work on a very practical level, and provide a member of our community experience to reference in her job search.

• Bridge Foundry would raise additional funds for additional iterations.