"Hands on" in a virtual world.

QikPik — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 04:49:04 +0000

Background

More than a month ago, we posted about bridging a student audience traumatised by the uncertainties of the pandemic, with career professionals willing to share their skillsets in an easily accessible technology - frontend development.

Status - hands on in a virtual world

We're thrilled to say that after two weekend sessions, we've had some serious hands-on work and elated students and mentors alike. While the first weekend found a little starting trouble, the mentors were dogged in their determination and in the end the students who stayed with them, profited by gaining the ability to actually write a "Hello world" in kotlin! Some of the students were so inspired that they requested to join the subsequent sessions - this feedback was shared with the mentor community, and based on their feedback, we took out all quotas and limits to participate in the subsequent hackathons!

Feedback - Why doesn't everyone know about this!?

Feedback from students was amazing and encouraging. We were repeatedly asked - "why are my friends missing out ?!", "you should have promoted this much more!". Alas, access to the student community is gated either by small minded moderators on chat channels, or drowned out in the noise of highly funded media blitzkriegs. Our media team is essentially the highly capable and amazing Sreepriya of the Pehia Foundation - huge shoutout! The best way for her to reach you is if you tell your friends about her posts on twitter and facebook. Re-tweet and share!

Students - Help us to help you!

Be an ambassador for the amazing opportunity that the rest of this series of hackathons provide. The weekends of 15,16 Aug will be led by the very amazing team led by Pratik Jain and Steven Deobald. Between them, they have more than 25 years of core Engineering, Management and Development experience. The weekend after (21,22 Aug) will be our final session with iOS/Swift being taught by an equally amazing team. Some of the co-mentors are signing in from overseas. Speakers vary from IT experts in Bangalore, an Open Source activist, Art/Media researcher from MIT and even a part time flutist to serenade you on breaks! Help us to help you access these events by getting your friends to sign up! If you haven't already, please sign up for the remaining two sessions here: https://qikpik.store/hackathon

Mentors - there is another way!

These sessions would never have happened without our mentors. These are kind hearted people who offered their time and effort for FREE. You would normally have to queue up in an interview just to be able to work with them, and yet here they were selflessly throwing away their weekends to educate strangers! It puts our current world based on "what's in it for me" to shame. They have proved that there is another way! Mentors - from the team at QikPik - you are showing us ... that there is another way!

A Monsoon Hackathon - the story of quarantine, opensource and the 2020 uncertainties of student life.

QikPik — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 06:56:39 +0000

When we first started reaching out to the student community in India in early May, we at QikPik quickly realised that, especially for final year students hoping to start a new career, the initial euphoria of a surprise "holiday" from the pandemic quarantine had melted into solitary despair and uncertainty about the future.

Students being ever the innovators, we noticed that they were self-organising online, with lots of meetups and talks. But we noticed that there were few focused meetups where specific skills related to immediate career opportunities after college/University were being addressed.

Since most of us have solid Opensource backgrounds, and appreciate how much that did for our careers, we decided to combine our marketing efforts with opensource and student career building.

A quick search on the internet will tell you that frontend app development presents a really quick and low barrier for entry into the world of work. Good frontend developers are not just programmers - they are also mindful of design and workflow and user experience. Frontend developers not only need to be software engineers, they need to be good communicators and empathetic to the needs of users. At QikPik, we have a specific Student Ambassador partner role which requires these skills - and we felt that the research we had put into that role could be repurposed into helping find the right audience for fronted developer skills - empathetic students with an entrepreneurial touch.

Entrepreneurs are perpetual optimists. We see the Pandemic Quarantine as an opportunity to enjoy the Monsoon from Indoors and learn something new. So we're hosting the QikPik Monsoon Opensource Hackathon for Frontend development. We reached out to our opensource friends, and many of them have graciously offered to mentor the various tracks for absolutely no reward! The hackathon is thus a real opportunity to learn from empathetic, selfless individuals who WANT to share their knowledge.

Here's the announcement on twitter // Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1280899722408980481-446'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1280899722408980481&theme=dark" }

If you're in a hurry, apply here: https://qikpik.store/hackathon/#apply

See you on the other side!