I am a recent full stack engineer graduate from the Flatiron School. 2 months ago I came up with the idea that bootcamp graduates were the perfect candidates to help nonprofits with their technology problems. The problems could be as complicated as learning mangements system, or just a simple website redesign implimented by a webbuilder like Wix, Webflow, Wordpress, etc. What I had in mind ended up scoping down to doing what at first was very hard thing to accept; soley working with webbuilder platforms to design/redesign nonprofit websites.
The reason it was hard for me to accept is I felt like as a developer I wasn’t getting the full stack experience that I wanted to curate. It doesn’t help when other ‘real’ developers turn up their noses when you tell them this is the technology tools that you are working with at the moment. Yet in the end I have come away being able to measure my progress, and I found value in what I am doing. BitSized Good is helping nonprofits, helping UX/UI students get experience with developers, and developers getting experience with UX/UI. Ultimately the higher level goals are being manifested, but just not the way we expected.
UX/UI Progress
Our UX/UI members are currently learning what it is like to design within constraints of specific platforms, how to create design systems to standardize design decisions, but also help developers understand what components are reusable without having to discover them on their own. They are also learning about custom fonts being available on their local computer that aren’t available to the project. Our project Self Love Beauty has taught us that we should be designing and implimenting features(agile) vs using waterfall techniques to pass off final developer handoffs. We have experienced issues that the overall design relied upon that would have been addressed from the minute the homepage was passed off to impliment.
Developer Progress
Our Developrs are currently learning new technology tools, why you would use them, and when what it is like to work within technological constraints.
Devolopers are having to figure out how to integrate with third party API’s to fulfill client asks. The progress I see here is gaining the ability to work with microservice like architecture. The developer may not have designed all the services that a company uses, but knows how to speak with them and fulfill the contract between the developers piece of the puzzle and as many other outside pieces needed to complete the puzzle.
Developers are having to work with webbuilders and how they code. I for one have learned a lot more about constructing my CSS so that it truly cascades. Webflow has an interesting way of desiging each element, but when you apply knowledge of how your CSS looks in the background it starts to make sense. As a someone who focuses on backend code the use of Webflow has helped me start to see how I would write the CSS from scratch to get my page to respond the way I want it to. For me this is progress: working with a developer hand off and using training wheels to realize how I would impliment it with 100% code.
Organizational progress
We continue to make connections in the community and develop the overall idea of how to attain our high level goals. We have identified that we need to build out a framework similar to great open source projects. There needs to be documentation for how to contribute, what the expectations are, and a ticketing system that facilitates ease of developers coming in to pick up projects. We need to get mentors involved, and have begun to ideate on what is the smallest(bitsized) amount of time a mentor can be involved on a weekly basis and provide value. I think what is so hard about this process is that I am the driving force behind the growth of the organization, but am distracted with the ever pressing need to get a job.
Progress is being made in being able to identify areas that will develop the skills of tech bootcamp grads. This may be custom code written as components/plugins, UX/UI/Developer collaboration, proving that you can learn new technologies quickly, working with cloud hosting, creating UI components from the beggining of the design process, working with third party services via API’s, and working with a client. As we continue this journey more areas will become apparent, and the value of what we are doing will only become more clear.
My Personal Progress
I have grown to respect what some people scoff at. Webbuilder developers have a whole host of tech that they need to work with to achieve their clients goals. While this might not be ‘true’ development to some people; it is hard work. I still don’t desire this as a career path as there are too many constraints on being able to build it out exactly as I want, but I respect those that have made the decision to have this as a career. Yes this means you PHP developers.
I have also had to learn how to use new tech quickly, and talk to third party API’s to achieve what the client wants. In general this entire experience has been a learning process. Working with different clients to identify what solutions are within their budget, and also what solutions can the reliably maintain on their own have been huge endeavors. A lot of times I don’t know all the answers, but I am willing to figure them out for the clients that BitSized Good is working with. Ultimately I have learned to find value in the work that I am doing, because I am getting experience working with UX/UI, using different tools and languages to achieve my goals, working with clients, and fulfilling my desire to do good. In the end I might not be learning the stack that I wanted, but ultimately I am proving to myself that I can use whatever stack/tool to achieve the goal.
I should say that I am still working on my testing my Rails code with RSpec, and in general working with internalizing the concepts of when to write unit tests vs integration tests, vs E2E tests.