Introducing Coderplex Fellowship Program
Hi, Coder! We at Coderplex are happy to announce that we are launching a Fellowship Program for our non-profit organization, through which people will be able to remotely work with us part time and full time as a volunteer to earn some experience in community building, HR or product development, receive a certificate in exchange and also get referred to companies who can hire them. But first, let’s update you on what we have been doing for the past few months.
A little over two months ago, on March 5th, Coderplex Foundation was officially registered as a Section-8 non-profit organization in India. Since then, we have hired an Auditor for our organization and have opened up a bank account. We raised 10,000 Rs through crowd funding, using WhatsApp and UPI. We continued organizing our frequent local meetups, partnered with two Hackathons (Startup Weekend Hyderabad and AngelHack Hyderabad) that took place at the Microsoft Campus in Gachibowli and recently made a new partnership with a co-working space to relaunch our Hackerspace idea (official announcement coming soon).
Now that you’re all caught up, here’s how the idea of the Fellowship Program came to be..
Since the start of this year, our team has been discussing how we can increase and channelize the value we are producing through our community, what are the bottlenecks we have that are stopping us from realizing our monthly goals, and the answer to that is insufficient manpower.
The Coderplex team right now is very small. There is me, and there is our co-director Raya who helps me with the organizational operations to some degree. Then there is also Rahul Raj, our sole part time volunteer who has been helping us plan and organize meetups for the past couple of months.
We have a lot of really good ideas and initiatives that we want to work on, which we think will tremendously impact the state of tech in Hyderabad, but we are unable to properly work on them because we are unable to commit, distribute and juggle the work among the three of us efficiently. In other words, we think that its time we expand our team.
Since we are now a formally registered non-profit organization, we thought that it would be best to make this possible by launching a fellowship program for Coderplex. Our Fellowship Program would be a program through which individuals who believe in our mission and want to support us, can contribute their time and effort as a volunteer. In exchange, we will provide them with a certificate that would validate their contribution and experience and also refer them to companies.
Our mission at Coderplex is to improve the state of tech in Hyderabad, to expand the pool of quality developers in the city across all modern technologies, to build a culture of self-learning, peer-learning and problem solving, by building an active and vibrant developer community with an environment that provides all of it’s members with a holistic learning experience, support, guidance and opportunities, and helps each of them progress in their careers as software developers and engineers.
Our operational strategy right now consists of a priority list of technologies, principles and paradigms that we believe will accelerate the growth of this developer ecosystem. At the top of this list, for example, sits Artificial Intelligence. You would also see Data Science and Open Source high on this list. For each item in this list, we have a series of initiatives, ideas and activities that we plan to execute. These ideas range from creating online resources for learning to planning offline events.
Take Web Development for example. We would start by taking a frontend technology like React JS, creating a online guide for learning it, planning offline meetups, encouraging collaboration and project building among members, encouraging open source contributions in React JS, helping developers get hired by companies in Hyderabad using React JS, planning a React JS conference etc. Basically, taking a top-down approach to community building and expanding the pool of quality React JS developers in the city.
The idea is to do that for every single technology, domain, and tool we believe in. We want to build a healthy vibrant community around every modern technology and paradigm in the city.
To make all of this possible, to improve the state of tech in Hyderabad, we are going to need your help. If you’re passionate about any technology, like say React JS or Python, or you’re really into AI or Open Source, then you can come forward and work with us as a Community Manager for that technology or domain.
You can help us build a vibrant community for that technology or domain. You can help us plan events, initiatives, projects and work on all forms of ideas that can help push the technology or domain forward in the ecosystem, and create more quality developers.
But Community Management is not the only role available. In the last few months, we have been trying to make some serious effort towards helping the developers in our community get hired by local companies.
Going forward, we intend to expand this effort into a core revenue stream for Coderplex. In other words, we want to jump into providing HR services to tech companies, and we’re going to need a few people in our team with prior HR experience to execute this properly.
Other than Community Management and HR, we also want to deploy a lot of new features to our website, https://coderplex.org. This would require the contribution of a web developer (frontend as well as backend) and a designer who can create the mockups.
The best part of this fellowship program is that, you can work remotely! You could be a college student or a working professional, you could even be someone from outside Hyderabad, and work with us remotely from home when you find some time. We also don’t want to delegate too much work onto one individual, and instead would like to distribute it among a group of people, a team.
The following are all the roles currently available at Coderplex :
Roles
Community Managers :
A 3 month long role, where you’ll work with us part time or full time to build a healthy community in Hyderabad for the following domains and initiatives by us :
- Open Source : Are you passionate about Open Source and want to help us promote it in the Hyderabad ecosystem? Then this role is for you!
You need to be able to commit 3 months as part time or full time as a community manager to plan events, initiatives and come up with ideas to improve the Open Source culture in the city.
Your goals are would be :
1. Getting more intermediate and advanced developers to contribute to Open Source projects
2. Making it easier for beginners to get into Open Source
3. Finding and connecting Open Source contributors in the city, making it possible for them to collaborate on projects - Artificial Intelligence : This role is for people who are passionate about Artificial Intelligence, and want to help us in expanding the pool of AI experts in Hyderabad.
You will need to commit 3 months of your time to plan events, initiatives and brainstorm ideas to build a healthy and active AI community in the city with a culture of open knowledge sharing, collaboration and project building.
Your goals would be :
- Make it easier for people to learn AI
- Bring AI enthusiasts together to share knowledge, discuss, solve problems and collaborate on projects
- Helping community members get hired by companies in Hyderabad working with AI
- Building a team under you, to help you execute all of the above - Data Science : If you’re currently learning or are already an expert in Data Science, and want to help us in expanding the pool of Data Science experts in the Hyderabad Developer ecosystem, then this role is for you!
You will need to commit 3 months of your time (part time or full time) to plan events, initiatives and brainstorm ideas to build a healthy and active Data Science community in the city with a culture of open knowledge sharing, collaboration, hacking and problem solving.
Your goals would be :
- Making it easier for people to learn Data Science
- Bringing Data Science enthusiasts together to share knowledge, discuss, solve problems and collaborate on projects
- Helping community members get hired by companies in Hyderabad working with Data Science
- Building a team under you, to help you execute all of the above - Web Dev : Are you passionate about Web Development? Are you currently learning or are already an expert in any modern Web Technology, and do you want to help us in expanding the pool of quality Web Developers in the city? Then this role is for you!
You will need to commit 3 months of your time to build a team of fellows under you for frontend and backend development, and for each of the popular modern web technologies, like React and Vue JS.
You, along with your team, will need to plan events, initiatives and brainstorm ideas to build a healthy and active Web Developer community with a culture of open knowledge sharing, collaboration and project building.
Your goals would be :
- Help people learn various modern Web Technologies
- Bring together web enthusiasts to network, share knowledge, build things and collaborate on projects
- Helping these web developers get hired by Web Tech companies in Hyderabad - Mobile Dev : This role is for people who are currently learning or are already an expert in any of the popular mobile development platforms, and want to help us in expanding the pool of quality Mobile Devs in the city.
You will need to commit 3 months of your time to build a team of fellows under you for Android, iOS, Hybrid and Cross-Native mobile app development.
You will then need to work with your team to plan events, initiatives and brainstorm ideas to build a healthy and active Mobile Developer community in the city with a culture of open knowledge sharing, collaboration and project building.
Your goals would be :
- Help people learn how to build native, hybrid or cross-native mobile apps for Android and/or iOS platform
- Bring the enthusiasts together to share knowledge, discuss, solve problems and collaborate on projects
- Helping community members get hired by Mobile Tech companies in Hyderabad - Cloud, Linux and DevOps : Are you passionate about Cloud Computing, Linux and DevOps? Are you currently learning or are already an expert in any of the popular Cloud platforms, and do you want to help us in expanding the pool of experts in the city? Then this role is for you!
You will need to commit 3 months of your time to build a team of fellows under you for Linux, DevOps and all popular Cloud platforms — AWS, GCP, Azure and Digital Ocean.
You will then need to work with your team to plan events, initiatives and brainstorm ideas to build a healthy and active Cloud Community in the city with a culture of open knowledge sharing.
Your goals would be :
- Making it easier for people to get into Cloud Computing
- Bring the Cloud, Linux and DevOps enthusiasts together to share knowledge
- Helping these members get hired by Cloud companies in Hyderabad - Decentralization : Are you passionate about Decentralization? Do you want to live in a future where vital Internet services stitched into the fabric of our modern society is not centralized and controlled by one entity? Do you want to help us promote decentralization in Hyderabad? Then this role is for you!
You will need to commit 3 months of your time to brainstorm ideas on how to promote and make the general tech community more aware about the importance of Decentralization. You will need to build a team of people who are as passionate as you, and plan events, initiatives and work on ideas to promote decentralization in Banking and Finance, Social Communication, News/Media Consumption, among other areas.
You, along with your team, will need to build a healthy and vibrant community around Decentralization. This would include Blockchain as well.
Your goals would be :
- Making it easier for anyone to learn, understand and build decentralized solutions
- Bringing the enthusiasts together to network, collaborate on projects and solve problems
- Help the members get hired by companies working in the decentralization space, using Blockchain or any other tech - Hackerspace : The Coderplex Hackerspace is a dedicated co-learning space in Hyderabad, where our community members can take membership and come down any time of the day, any day of the week, to engage in peer-learning and collaboration. The idea for us here is to provide a dedicated social element to self-learners, beyond just attending meetups.
We need someone who can take membership at our new Hackerspace, and can also play the role of a Community Manager here.
Your tasks would be to :
- Make sure all the current members are progressing in their learning paths
- Enrolling new members and creating a healthy peer-learning environment
- Encouraging collaboration and project building among members
- Helping our job-seeking members become hirable - Women Developers : One of the initiatives that we want to take up and focus on at Coderplex is improving the gender ratio in the Hyderabad Developer Ecosystem. We have a few ideas we would like to work on regarding this, but we need someone who can focus on this part time or full time.
If you’re a woman who is passionate about tech, and want to help us improve the gender ratio in our community, and the rest of the developer ecosystem by extension, then this role is for you!
We’ll work with you to brainstorm some ideas to discover more women in the city who are passionate about tech and problem solving, and also work on ideas to spread awareness and bring more girls and women into tech, from the school and college level.
Your mission would be :
- Make it easier for women and girls in Hyderabad to get into tech
- Bring women developers together to network, learn and collaborate on projects together
- Help these developers get hired by tech companies
For each of the above Community Management role, at the end of your term, you will be provided a certificate that validates your contribution and referred to companies that are currently looking to hire from us.
HR Manager :
As mentioned earlier, we at Coderplex want to jump into providing HR services to tech companies locally and beyond, so that we can help the developers in our community get hired. To do this, we are going to need the contribution of individuals who have prior experience working in HR.
This would be a 3 month role as well, and you can work with us part time or full time. At the end of the term, you will be provided a certificate to validate your contribution.
Your tasks would be :
- Collecting Job Descriptions and co-coordinating with the companies that want to hire developers from our community
- Keeping track of which members in our community are currently looking for a job
- Helping our members prepare for the interview, providing them feedback on where they can improve and how they can present themselves better
- Building a team of people who can help you execute the above tasks
Web Developer :
Our Coderplex Website needs a lot of updates. There are many features that we want to build and deploy to our website, that we think will help us tremendously to improve the state of tech in Hyderabad. To make this possible, we need the contribution of a web developer.
Our website is currently a simple static website that uses React JS and the Next JS framework. If you’re familiar with React, and want to contribute to our website, then you can apply for this role!
Going forward, we will be building a backend as well. The Backend Stack we plan to have is : Node JS, Express, FeathersJS, PostgresQL or MongoDB, GCP or AWS for Hosting.
This role will likely be 3 months to 6 months long, and you are free to work with us part time or full time. At the end of your term, we will provide you with a certificate that validates your contribution.
Designer
To build the above features for our website, we are also going to need the contribution of a graphical designer who can create the mockups for the screens, that the developer can then convert into code and deploy.
You will need to have an idea of UI and UX, and maintain the same style we have been using until now. You will need to be in constant sync with the web developer. You need to know at least one of the popular Editors, like Photoshop or GIMP.
This role can extend from one month to three months, and you are free to work with us part time or full time. At the end of your term, we’ll provide you with a certificate to validate your contribution.
Note : with all of the above roles, you are free to stop working at any time you like. We will not make you sign any bond or letter that prevents you from leaving your role. We would however request you to give us a one week notice before leaving.
Apply for your desired role by filling this application form :
If you have any questions, you can ask them in our community chatroom or write to us at pr@coderplex.org.
