- The story - how I got involved with my local community
- How to wear every hat on a project
- What I learned building a full-stack web application
The barriers to enter a community service project are low; as a bootcamp graduate with nearly 1 year of full-time software development experience, I can confidently say that all developers, whether junior or quite senior, are qualified and able to make an impact on their local community. The infrastructure and model for assistance for the private sector to help the public sector is well established in many cities. For example, many cities have an initiative similar to San Francisco’s Civic Bridge Project; San Jose has the Silicon Valley Talent Partnership, Chicago has the Civic Consulting Alliance, and New York City has the Open Government Initiative, Tech Talent Pipeline, and .nyc.
Partnering with the Civic Bridge Project allowed me to wear many hats and be more than just a developer – I was my own front-end, back-end, UX, QA, scrum master, team lead, and cheerleader. I was responsible for translating the community’s pain points into actionable tech-driven deliverables, driving the project, and being wary of scope creep. Advantages included being revered as a content expert, as opposed to someone junior, and I enjoyed receiving high praise for any work I did. However, I faced challenges obtaining data from a slow-operating agency, working with outdated and siloed information, and navigating interpersonal politics with the client.
My tech stack was JavaScript, jQuery, Python, Flask, Bootstrap, KML, and GoogleMaps JavaScript API. The project was JavaScript-heavy, and constantly demonstrated the importance and use cases for binding, as well as when to take advantage of global variables and functional scope.
