The software field -- and indeed, the world at large -- owes a great deal to the open source software community. Like most developers, members of Learners Guild benefit daily from the availability of countless freely available software tools and educational resources. We are committed to contributing to these efforts and resources as committers to (and even maintainers of) open source projects.
In this phase, SEPs and learners will collaborate on contributions to OSS projects and possibly on live, production systems like the LOS apps (echo, idm, etc.). SEPs will select projects and work with learners to identify appropriate issues to work on, and learners will be expected to submit pull requests to project maintainers. Learners who wish to work on their own projects may choose to do so, if they follow the guidelines listed in the section below.
Apart from helping you develop stellar technical skills, this phase also offers Career Prep. Career Prep supports learners with interview readiness, job placement support and overarching career development. Learners are responsible for working to become fully employed by the end of their time at the Guild. Since each learner’s application and job search strategy may vary, learners are responsible for keeping track of their job-hunt progress.
In this phase you will learn...
- How to "look under the hood" and understand how larger applications and systems work
- How to be a good contributor: understand OSS (open source software) best practices
- Adapting to the style and conventions of an existing codebase
- How to develop elegant, maintainable solutions to complex problems
- DevOps for live production deployments
- More advanced debugging and problem-solving skills
- How to collaborate on a team and use basic project-management tools
- Start Interviewing
- Practice "live coding" algorithms.
- Practice realtime problem solving in mock technical interviews
- data structures and algorithms
- systems design
- Create and refine all job search materials
- Develop compensation negotiation skills
- Expand Your Career Network
- Attend career development workshops
- Attend meetups and hackathons
- Obtain one or more mentors
- Find engineers who will advocate for you from the inside
- Daily standup at 9am.
- Weekly 1:1 checkin with an SEP.
- End of week project demo.
- A learner should have a plan for their project at the beginning of each week. This plan indicates the work that they intend to do that week, and the names of the learners who are planning to be in the team.
- Once they have this plan in place they can start working on the project.
- During their 1:1 check-in with an SEP, the SEP will follow up with each member of the team to understand their role, and the scope of work that they are planning to engage in during the week.
- All stories/issues must be tracked in Github's project board, to give an SEP a clear idea of the progress each week.
- At the end of the week, the learner will demo the work done by them during the week.
- If the project extends beyond a single week, the same process is applied in the following week.