JasterixI've spent the last 3-4 hours struggling to find a great resource for technical project-based volunteering. I'm a future junior developer, who wants to get real-world experience in the time before starting my job search.
As fun as working on personal projects has been, it has been less fun than working on scoped projects with a team. So rather than shifting my direction to open source, I'm interested in a part time volunteer project.
The ideal experience would be:
- guided / overseen by an accountable organization
- scoped to a specific timeline, with mapped deliverables
- part time (5 - 10 hours per week)
- geared to a real-world social issue
- led by a senior developer (this is critical)
- in a dev team (3-10 people)
- mimic a dev workflow
- fullstack
- similar to the (now defunct) freecodecamp nonprofit projects
This list is deliberately project oriented. Though I am still studying and am weeks (if not months) from landing a full time position, I'd love to find a great project part time (5-10 hours per week).
Running list of resources I've applied to or checked out:
- Socialcoder
- BetaNYC
- Benetech
- Catchafire
- Codemontage
- UN Volunteers
- VolunteerMatch
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Chingu
- and many more
This will be in addition to my weekly self study, algo practice, meetups, hackathons, personal projects, etc. Working on a team project is an invaluable experience for any field.
In university, I always pursued competitive summer internships, while volunteering during the semester. So I'm hoping the same will be possible in tech.
Separately, this is a great resource for nonprofits who want to recruit great tech volunteer.
