Alaska Developers Alliance

Building a statewide developer alliance is something that I believe everyone in our community can benefit from. Previous attempts to make this happen have died off and while that is certainly a possibility, with some careful planning, forethought, and buy-in, we can build a sustainable developer community in Alaska.

I encourage and welcome your input, feedback, and participation.

Goal 1: Build a distributed, sustainable, and active developer community.

Based on my surveys, interviews with employers, professors, students, and professionals here is my outline of what need to happen to rally the community.

1. Provide learning opportunities by:
   1. high quality talks
   2. mentorship opportunities with community projects
   3. bootcamps (if we have enough interest we can fly in teachers for classes)
2. Encourage participation by:
   1. Allowing developers to buy swag (stickers/hoodies) after:
      1. they’ve gone to a certain number of events
      2. given a talk, been a mentor
      3. participated in a community projected headed up by the club
      4. been a board member
   2. Offering free or discounted bootcamps to heavily participating members
   3. Offer some way for businesses to get developer alliance branded swag with their company name on it as a supporter
   4. Offer mentoree/mentorship opportunities by partnering with small businesses that need tech help. E.G. screen printing shop and pairing up junior/senior devs together to earn trade for the alliance. This will help us bootstrap initial costs, benefit the community, and provide learning and participation opportunities
3. Attract aspiring programmers by:
   1. Offering grade 7-12 programming opportunities organized by Dave Nespoli. Detailed plans are being hashed out
4. Influencing and guiding the University by (more concrete data to come):
   1. Merging  MIS/CS advisory boards in some fashion
   2. Having Dev Alliance Board representatives on advisory boards
   3. Advocating for 100 level CIS/CS course that helps sort students into:
      1. BS in CS
      2. BA in CS
      3. BS in CSE
      4. BBA in MIS

and