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
If you're in a hurry, apply here: https://qikpik.store/hackathon/#apply
See you on the other side!
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