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