If you wonder what I’ve been doing for the last year besides my primary job in Toptal.com, then this post if for you. Since the beginning of Q2 2018, I’ve been leading the development of givemepoc.org.

The idea of this project came up to my friend and me when we have been discussing the problem, that there are a lot of junior developers who struggle to find a job because they don’t have enough experience and as a consequence, they can’t pass interviews in many companies. On the other hand, we believe there are a lot of people who do not know anything about software development but have great ideas for projects.

Basically, this is the core model of the project. It should connect these two parties and provide useful tools to make the development more efficient. As an output, we provide MVPs for proposed ideas, experience for developers or even formed development teams, which can be hired by companies.

The whole project is entirely non-profit, nobody gets a reward for the participation in the project, and the most valuable asset is the experience.

Personally, I was doing a lot of leadership activities in addition to product management work. My primary responsibilities included:

  • planning product roadmap
  • leading the engineering team
  • training newcomers
  • designing technical architecture
  • adopting Scrum

Besides obvious leadership experience, I’ve learned that working with junior-level developers requires a bit different focus, since most of them don’t follow the best practices of development, that are widely adopted across many engineering teams. As a result, we collected a pool of ideas for tools, that can improve the effectiveness of any team.

For example, we should check the format of git branch names and PRs. If you do it manually, it becomes annoying, since every newcomer does not pay attention to it. To prevent this routine we can automate this process, so mentors will only pay attention to the implementation of the task bypassing bureaucracy checks.

If you are interested in such ideas or even the project in general, then feel free to look at our list of features.

At the moment I put my activity in this project on hold, since we don’t have enough engineers to move it further and doing everything by myself is quite exhausting.

But anyway we welcome any volunteers who might want to help the project.