Building a Community with Codebase

By Parth Shah, Codebase President 2019–2020

Computer Science at UC Berkeley is tough. Stuck on that last failed test case? Crying in Moffitt over a project? Yeah, I’ve been there. While this is an amazing university to study computer science, given the rigor and academic diversity, there are nevertheless some problems many of us face when studying computer science here. Here are some of the issues we try to tackle at Codebase.

• Community
• Supportive Learning Environments
• Industry focus

Community

Remember that first 61A lecture? Thousands of students flood the lecture hall. Many people along with myself were still finding our way in college and we sat alone, frazzled by the sheer amount of people. I tried to find a group of people to struggle through this experience with, but at a university with thousands of people taking computer science classes, that can be tough.

Supportive Learning Environments

Discussions are a great way to learn, but often I struggle to voice my questions with the irrational fear of looking stupid. I go to office hours only to enter the hour long queue. I don’t spend as much time with the TA as I wish to because I want to make sure I’m not taking up others’ time. Does this story sound familiar to you?

Industry Focus

After going through one or two computer science classes, I, along with many others, began looking for career opportunities, only to realize that so many job and internship postings listed skills I haven’t even heard of. Does 61A Python and 61B Java not qualify me for these opportunities?

At Codebase, we try to tackle these issues by aligning ourselves with our mission:

“To build a community of developers that empowers students to break into the software industry. To grow together through hands-on technical projects and strive to provide all students with resources to bridge the gap between academic and practical knowledge.”

There are a couple ways we strive to meet our mission:

• Projects to create supportive learning environments
• External initiatives to provide an industry focus
• Internal community for members to form close relationships with each other

Let’s go into a bit more detail for each of these.

Projects

Every semester we run projects in Codebase for students to further hone and develop industry necessary skills. These projects serve as great learning environments and a primary communities for our developers. Project managers and team members often serve as goto resources for both technical and nontechnical problems.

We run two types of projects: a mentored project for new developers and four client projects for experienced developers. Let’s go into these projects a bit more.

Mentored Project

It’s really hard to develop skills for industry with little coding experience. That’s why every semester we run a Mentored Project. In this project, we take students who have no industry experience (the only prerequisite is that you have taken or are concurrently enrolled in 61A) and teach them industry necessary skills by having them work together to build a project for a non-profit. In the past we have built a lesson planning tool for Ygnacio Valley High School, and judging portal for Cal Hacks. In addition to this larger project, students also do a series of mini projects such as building personal websites, applications to interact with APIs, and creative web visualizations. If you wish to read more, here’s a blog post from our Fall 2018 Mentored Project.

Codebase Mentored Project Spring 2019

This semester, we are so happy to announce that for our Mentored Project, we will be working with EthiCAL.

EthiCAL is a student-run initiative that designs and sells ethically made apparel while donating all proceeds to help disadvantaged entrepreneurs grow. We will be building an all-in-one web portal to manage EthiCAL’s sales, inventory, and communications.

After a semester on mentored project, developers move onto our client projects, which we describe below!

Client Projects

For developers confident in their skills, we have four client projects where we partner with companies in the Bay Area and build out a part of their product. Our client projects range industry skills from data visualization to full-stack web applications to backend system integrations. In these projects, you not only learn new skills, but you apply them to real product to be used by companies. In addition, project teams visit their respective companies at least twice a semester to present deliverables.

Here are our client projects this semester:

Postman

Postman is an API collaboration platform that includes a comprehensive set of tools to support every stage of the API development life-cycle. We will be using Postman’s new data visualization feature to create various visual representations of API responses.

Bill.com

Bill.com is a business payment company that automates, streamlines, and controls the payment process, managing over 3 million clients and $70 billion annually. We will be building a full-stack web application to aid the bill payment process for Bill.com.

Storr

Storr is a peer-to-peer marketplace where people make money instead of traditional ecommerce channels, empowering people to sell and share products with their friends. We will be building a social recommendation feature for Storr.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a user analytics and engagement solution that helps businesses innovate faster with data. We will be building a Golang integrations library and framework for Mixpanel.

External

In addition to creating amazing learning experiences with these projects, we also focus on external initiatives to provide our members and the wider computer science community with industry focused opportunities. In the past, we have hosted company tours with Salesforce and Airbnb along with tech talks with Stripe and Palantir for our members. This semester, we plan on expanding our initiatives to provide more experiences for both our members and students for the larger UC Berkeley Computer Science community.

Codebase members enjoy a dinner with Salesforce.

Internal

We also want to ensure that our members have a fun, engaging experience in Codebase. This is college, so let’s have fun in the work we do! From large events like club retreat, banquet, and our annual Thanksgiving meal to small casual meetups like ultimate frisbee, team dinners, and random 2 am Big C hikes, we aim to form close relationships with each other that last beyond our time in college. I am proud to say that I’ve found my best friends in Codebase, and I hope to provide that same opportunity to others.

We taught one of our members, Kelvin Jue, how to swim!

Apply

Did you like what you read? Then, please apply! We have our club info sessions on 8/29 and 9/5 at 7 pm in HP Auditorium if you wish to talk to some of our members and learn more about our community. Our deadline to apply is Thursday night / Friday morning, 9/6 at 3 am.

Here are our prerequisites to apply to become a Mentored Project Developer:

• You are concurrently enrolled or have taken CS 61A
• You have no prior industry experience
• You have at least 3 semesters (including Fall 2019) remaining at UC Berkeley

Here are our prerequisites to apply to become a Client Project Developer:

• You are concurrently enrolled or have taken CS 61A
• You have either completed a software engineering internship or a significant side project
• You have at least 2 semesters (including Fall 2019) remaining at UC Berkeley