I'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.
Latest comments (7)
First of All I want to thank you for this post, it is a great resource for persons who struggles with finding the new ideas or even ideas to work in order to create the portfolio, I am bookmarking this post so that later I can share this with my other fellows as well.
I recently applied at Chingu, and After initial process, they asked me to build a Project so I build a Book-Search Application whose more information you can get from the link of my GitHub Profile.
Search-Book-Application
Hi Abdur, this is great. Thanks for sharing the github. I'll try to keep it up to date as I come across more resources. How long after applying did they reach out?
I guess after one week I got the Startup Guide and they will now send me more information about getting started on 12th September as well.
Check if these guys are still running cohorts chingu.io/
Ah Chingu still around, might give it another try
Thanks, I just applied! Can't believe I forgot about this program. Did you go through it?
I was a member during 2017.