Apr 28, 2018
Voyage-5 Prep — Overview of what you need to know
Voyage-5 invites go out May 15th, & the remote dev teams will launch a week later!
A NEW CODING VOYAGE IS UPON US! Hundreds of people from 70+ countries shall come together to collaborate, learn and build together!
Review our standards and practices so that you can be familiar with important topics like the Autobot & milestones, the Elon-Musk-bot, communication guidelines and how NOT to make your team-mates angry.
🔥 Table of Contents 🔥
- Why does the Chingu Voyage cohort exist?
- Voyage-5 Schedule
- The Chingu-Voyage Program Explained
- Standards & Essential skills to learn before you start
- Tools
- Extra links, quotes and resources
Why does the Chingu-Voyage cohort exist?
The Chingu-Voyage cohort exists to give motivated learners a community, an environment and wild challenges to accelerate their skills, create impact, and build a glorious portfolio and experience to get a job.
Why is this important?
There are more people learning to code (and competing for jobs) than ever before. On top of that, how many times have we all seen entry level job ads that require previous developer experience?
The Voyage cohort is a way to gain that experience and meet new coder friends while also leveling-up your skills (both technical and soft).
Put simply: the Voyage cohort is where people build projects to reach their coding goals. Put even more simply:
We build to learn.
Note: it’s possible that dates may change slightly.
April 28 — Prep Packet goes out
May 15 — Voyage-5 invites go out (invite will be emailed to you)
May 15–18 —Sign-up for your developer team (teams launched a week later)
May 15–27 — Live talks & Prep Webinars
May — Remote Dev Teams Launched
June 4** — Act 1 (Project Setup) due-date
Sprints will continue until the project is finished.
July 20th— MVP due (minimum viable project)
The final due date is relative to the project — some projects may take more time to complete. That is okay.
*Teams that have not set up their projects after the first 2 weeks will be removed.
Accountability/Communication Schedule
To support teams and help automate the admissions for future Voyages, we have a system for keeping track of team progress and ensuring team communication & accountability.
It is not abnormal for a Chingu cohort to launch 100+ developer teams in a session. With this level of industriousness, it’s essential that we have a system to keep track of team-progress to support teams when they need assistance.
Because of this, we do the Weekly Check-in.
Each take 3 minutes but can help keep teams accountable, focused, and uncover issues early.
If teams don’t communicate, they fail. If you don’t think you will be able to complete these weekly accountability checks, this Voyage may not be right for you (please let us know).
The Chingu-Voyage program is essentially a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure of level-up opportunities.
Here are the main routes to accelerating your learning:
New friends & your a supportive coder network
A Chingu Voyage is a global community of active learners with similar goals building and learning together.
No more being alone in your coding journey. In Chingu, you’ll be surrounded by super friendly learners from around the world who are on the same journey as you. You’ll motivate, help, and push each other to reach your goals. Friendships, level-ups and hijinks ensues. 🚀
Build-to-Learn
This is one of the guiding principles of Chingu and also what we call our team dev projects. In Chingu, you will learn through building. No more running on tutorial treadmill without purpose.
In Chingu you build/learn with a team and purpose.
Events
During each Voyage we host Talks, makeshift workshops, and nonstop collaboration opportunities. Keep an eye out for the Weekly Update email each week for what’s upcoming.
Also, if you’d like to get involved in these events (got an idea? know someone who would be great in an AMA? want to get involved in another way?) feel free to reach out!
Connect-to-Learns
This is a NEW feature being beta-tested in Voyage-5!
A Connect-to-Learn is a way for you to connect with another active learner to pair-program, exchange knowledge, solidify your understanding of concepts and build! These are separate from the Build-to-Learn team projects and are one-time learning sessions you can signup for each week.
Each week we’ll send out a Signup form and we’ll optimally match you with a learning partner for a 1-hour session.
Chingu is a Meritocracy
No one has to pay money to get this experience.
What does this mean?
This means the currency in Chingu is a hunger to learn, reliableness and excitement to work with others. And what you actually contribute to building.
Enthusiasm, Industriousness, and Kindness.
The people who overcome challenges (whether it be learning new technologies, navigating git/github, or learning to work in teams) will find success here. And then they will find themselves unlocking even bigger opportunities in the future (in the form of being recruited for projects, being placed with other proven members, etc.)
Regardless of your level, if you’ve been accepted it means we believe you have what it takes. But it takes work — a lot of work to learn and succeed and finish remote dev projects.
Your performance in this Voyage will dictate your future opportunities in Chingu (ex. when we see someone had team-mates leave and still completed a project, they deserve to be placed with legends in the next cohort who are as determined as them).
Standards
We’ve launched hundreds of remote team projects and there is a formula for successful teams.
Every successful team has dependable people, an openness to learn, and consistent communication. Every successful team adapts to overcome roadblocks.
- All members are expected to do a Check-in once a week (3 mins). This is so important to team accountability and individual progress that members who fail to do this will be removed.
- All teams are expected to actively pursue the completion of their project. Inactive teams will be removed and replaced with new eager teams from the waitlist.
- All individuals are expected to be respectful, friendly and reliable throughout the Voyage.
If you aren’t determined to learn, be challenged and make it through despite the odds, the Voyage might not be the place for you.
Learn these skills before you start
There are some skills that are like magic keys that’ll allow you to get the most out of your Voyage experience.
1. Have a finished project that you can link to.
If you have never finished a project before, you shouldn’t start with a team-project. This usually ends up in frustration and quitting. To earn a spot on a developer team in Chingu, you will need to show that you have put in enough effort to complete a project of some kind.
Don’t have a project you can link to right now? That is your homework before the cohort starts. If you don’t have a finished project you won’t be placed in a Chingu team, but you will still have access to the benefits of the community, events and can use Chingu’s Connect-to-Learn feature.
We will be releasing several “waves” of developer teams throughout the Voyage so freshly qualified members can have the opportunity to experience team development.
**Note** Most people have already submitted a project on their application, but if you didn’t you can add it to the team signup form when the cohort starts. :)
2. Learn the basics of how to code collaboratively.
Using Git/github effectively is an essential skill for any developer now. For anyone new to a Chingu Build-2-Learn (B2L) project, this will probably be the biggest skill you learn (regardless of what your team builds). It’s that important.
⚠️Learn the foundations of Git/Github on DevGaido.
⚠️Learn the basics of how to collaborate with Git.
⚠️Francesco Agnoletto’s infamous git articles: How to not f- up your local files with Git part 1
Note: you don’t have to have 10000 hours in using github, but knowing the basics is a must. You and your team will work together to figure out the details when you start. Navigating challenges around git/github are going to be numerous no matter what so don’t worry too much — just embrace the challenges as they come. :)
3. The Power of Soft-Skills
Learning soft-skills is like picking up a super-power. Your whole life changes when you earn them.
Here’s a list of some essential Soft-skill principles.
(Quick note: Warren Buffet once did a course centred around the principles in that link. The certificate he got from that little course is the only one he has hanging in his office — not his university degrees. He credits learning soft-skills with changing his life early in his career.)
In your Voyage you’ll be exposed to several tools related to team development and remote collaboration, including git/github, project management tools (trello, waffle), agile methodology, standups, and our in-house collaboration bots. We will cover these later, but here’s a quick glimpse at a few:
The Build-to-Learn roadmap: A roadmap to provide structure and direction to Voyage teams. It is a collection of Acts & Milestones.
The Wizard: this is a slack-bot built by the Chingu-X team (shout-out Vampiire, Musaab Bakheit, Van Tabbert, Jim Medlock and others!) to help guide teams and ensure accountability.
Weekly Check-in: A 3–5 question form (3 mins) sent out each week used to keep track of team progress and effectively support teams that need it.
Kronos Timezoner: A seamless timezone calculator built by a former Voyage team (shout-out JD Richards & Daniel Segovia!).
Connect-to-Learn: Explained above. This tool facilitates one-off lower-commitment collaboration opportunities each week (outside your team projects).
There are some larger projects that will be brought over from Chingu to continue the adventure.
These are all projects that either already are or aim to create create impact and value for others. These are all projects built by people like you, hungry learners with coding goals.
Our ultimate Moonshot mission is to facilitate teams to create impact, and eventually to help ambitious coders go from trying to get jobs via building projects to creating jobs via building products.
A few articles from past Voyagers
Sarah’s article (tier-3)
Eun’s article (tier-2)
Ziggysauce’s article.(tier-2)
A few quotes
The things that are most surprising all have to do with collaboration in real time at a scale that was really unthinkable before, and that’s where a lot of these surprises have been originating (big innovations). Basically we’re kind of organizing work and collaboration at a scale that were just unthinkable before and seemed impossible. — Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. — Margaret Mead, Anthropologist
