A Glimpse of Fall 2020 with Codebase
A warm welcome and an introduction to our club, our plans for the semester, and how to apply!
By Raymond Guo, Fall 2020 President
Welcome to Fall 2020! To any incoming new students, I want to be one of many to congratulate you on making it to Berkeley! And if you’re a returning student, welcome back!
The Berkeley student club scene is one of the many things that makes this school so special. At no other university have I ever seen such a vast variety of student-led organizations, from service-driven initiatives, to diverse cultural groups, to professional consulting programs. But with only a few days until the start of classes, the semester is still looking very uncertain and confusing for many of us, and how clubs will be operating is no exception. For a lot of students, this will be the first time taking online classes, joining new communities over video chats, and getting back into the daily college grind without being able to rely on the physical presence of friends or teachers.
Today, I want to introduce Codebase, one of many tech-focused student organizations on campus, and explain who we are, what we do, and why we exist. I also want to clear up any confusion for our plans this upcoming semester, as well as how you can get involved as a client or mentored developer on our teams.
What is Codebase?
Codebase was founded in 2016 by a small group of undergraduate computer science students with the mission to:
“Build a community of developers that empowers students to break into the software industry.”
The tech industry was, and still is, an extremely competitive field to break into. The founders envisioned creating opportunities for passionate and curious students to join a community of developers with diverse interests, learn from and mentor each other through industry projects, and work with professional software engineers.
This vision has stayed true with us to this day. Today, our organization has grown to over 45 active members, and our efforts have branched into multiple initiatives:
- Developing hands-on technical projects for industry clients
- Bringing industry resources to the wider Berkeley community
- Building a close-knit student community
Let’s dive deeper into each of these!
Our Projects
The largest component of being a Codebase member is working on our projects. Every semester, Codebase works with four high-growth tech companies and one non-profit organization and builds a technical product for them. Each project team, consisting of two project managers (PMs) and six developers, collaborates closely with their client company’s software engineers through 13 weeks of agile development, complete with sprints, standups, and code reviews. Throughout this process, our members are able to build their foundations in software engineering, learn the best industry practices, and work on a product with immediate feedback and users.
Because our developers are still full-time students, we always work remotely from our client, delivering two in-person presentations throughout the semester to present our progress. This semester our projects will fortunately continue operations as normal, with our teams meeting and working together remotely with each other and the engineers.
We have two different types of projects: a mentored project for those new to software engineering, as well as client projects for those with more experience.
Mentored Project
Our mentored project was created as an avenue for students with no industry experience but are interested in software engineering to learn the essentials of web development. Throughout the semester, the two mentored PMs are fully dedicated to teaching you the basics of frontend, backend, and everything in between. Within the first few weeks, developers build their own personal websites, a visualization game, and learn how to interact with APIs, before building their own product from scratch for a non-profit organization. For more information on the mentored project experience, I highly recommend checking out this blog post written by our previous president and mentored PM, Parth.
This semester, we’re extremely excited to be working with CoFED (Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive), an organization that partners with young folks of color to build food and land co-ops. Over the next few months, we’ll be working with CoFED to build a web portal for co-ops to connect with each other!
Client Projects
For those who have a foundation in software engineering, either through developing a significant project or some industry experience, we run four client teams that each work with a tech company. Going into the project, every developer is quickly onboarded onto their respective tech stacks through a curriculum designed by the PMs, before transitioning to the overall project for the semester.
This Fall, we have some amazing projects lined up with awesome clients! Here they are:
Circle enables companies to run an internet business using new standards for money powered by USD Coin, the fastest growing regulated stablecoin. We will be building a USDC dashboard for people to manage/monitor USDC on multiple blockchain networks.
RiskIQ enables discovery of threats and threat actors using unmatched breadth of Internet data and deep intelligence. We will be rebuilding and optimizing a tool for RiskIQ that identifies the security of SSL certificates.
InfluxData is the creator of InfluxDB, an open source time series database, and Telegraf, an agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics. We will be developing cloud-controlled configuration management features for Telegraf.
Our fourth and final client has requested to not be revealed publicly. The project will be a full-stack web application to configure business logic rules!
Our External Initiatives
Outside of our projects, one of our main initiatives is also to provide the wider Berkeley computer science student body with professional development and mentorship resources. This semester, we’re planning a wide variety of remote events, from company tech talks to industry panels. For those who prefer to learn on their own terms, we are also aiming to start publishing our mentored project curriculum, as well as a comprehensive guide on how to start your own tech organization. If you’re interested in any of these initiatives, keep a lookout on our website and Facebook page for updates!
Building Our Community
Beyond our project work, Codebase is first and foremost a community, and this will never change. Every semester, it is my highest priority to make sure that Codebase is a fun and engaging experience for all of our members, and that we all get to form close friendships throughout college. Although our traditional activities, such as retreats, banquets, team dinners, and casual meetups on the glade are not as feasible this semester, we have planned a variety of ways for us to continue hanging out with each other, from game and movie nights to socially distanced hikes. I can say without a doubt that I’ve met some of my closest friends in Codebase, and I hope that you will feel the same after joining our organization.
Joining Our Team
Interested in joining our team? We’re currently recruiting for both client project and mentored project developers this Fall! We’ve released our applications on our website here. Our application deadline is September 5th at 3AM PST (although we highly recommend you submit by September 4th)!
Throughout the first few weeks of the semester, we’ll be hosting a wide variety of recruitment events for you to get to know our members and learn more:
- Infosession 1: September 1, 8–10PM PT → Register
- Women in Codebase Panel: September 2, 7–8PM PT → Register
- Infosession 2: September 2, 8–10PM PT → Register
- Application Office Hours: September 3 (Zoom) and September 4 (Zoom)
Finally, if you would like to receive updates or ask us any questions asynchronously, here are a few ways to connect with us:
- Fill out our interest form for email updates: https://bit.ly/codebase_interest
- Join our “virtual table” Discord for questions: https://bit.ly/codebase_discord
- Visit our website to learn more: https://codebase.berkeley.edu/
- Follow us on Instagram and Facebook
Closing Thoughts
I hope that this post has given you a good idea of what Codebase is, and our plans for this semester. There are a ton of different student organizations at Berkeley, and even if you don’t think that Codebase is the right fit for you, I highly recommend you check out and consider joining another one that is! You can view the full list of Berkeley clubs on Callink, or check out this list of clubs actively looking for new members.
Hope to see you around! :)
