We’re Building a Hackerspace for Developers in Hyderabad

Month of Code — Day 1

There is a problem with the state of development in Hyderabad. The college students are not learning what they need to, the employed developers are locked in by their mundane office work and are loosing their passion for development, the non-tech folks are struggling to switch careers, the graduates are struggling to get a job, ending up at Ameerpet classes and spending their money on something they could easily receive free of cost.

The mission of our developer community is to improve this state of things, by which we mean to improve the state of Education, quality of development and hiring in the industry. We believe that if we can establish a culture of self-learning, collaboration, peer-learning, active open source development, and promote good coding standards, we can start a snowball effect. One of the ideas we have had for quite some time to make that happen is building a dedicated Hackerspace in Hyderabad.

A hackerspace is a community-operated learning space where people with common interests, often in computers, math, technology and science, can come together to learn, socialize and collaborate.

We want to build such a space in Hyderabad. A self-driven environment for autodidacts, who can come down any time of the week to hangout with other developers, collaborate on side projects, share their knowledge, learn and make open source contributions together.

Who is this for?

• This is for people who are genuinely passionate about tech, who get excited about learning new things, building stuff, solving problems, and discussing the latest in tech.
• This is for graduates who are struggling to get a job, who want to build their expertise in any technical domain and are willing to invest significant amount of their time self-learning.
• This is for students who are willing to learn outside of their college curriculum, who want to become professional developers down the line, and get exposure to the real world.
• This is for working professionals, who want to interact with other developers, expand their horizons and learn new technologies, who want to contribute to open source projects.
• This is for professionals from non-tech background, who want to get started with software development and switch careers.

Activities & Schedule

• We’ll provide you with the resources and ideas to learn and build something on a daily basis
• You’ll be able to engage in daily code review and pair programming exercise with other members
• Every Wednesday, we’ll have a Open Source Evening, for which everyone will be encouraged to find open source projects and contribute to them.
• Every Thursday, we’ll have a causal Coding Competition, where members will participate to solve some coding challenges together. There might be a leaderboard, but no prizes.
• From Friday — Saturday, we’ll have a casual Hackathon, where everyone will participate to build a project, small or big. We will have group votes to declare winners, but no prizes.
• Every Sunday, we’ll screen a tech related documentary, movie or TV show.
• Every Sunday, we’ll also have volunteer presentation of what members have done in the past week (what they learnt or built)
• On the 2nd weekend of the month, we’ll have a mock interview. This is for the members getting started with their development career to prepare for the real world interview process.
• On the last weekend of the month, we’ll have a Speed Interview Round with startups and multi-national companies from Hyderabad. This is again for members looking to get hired to get a job opportunity.

Other than that, members will also have access to technical physical books to read, there will be spontaneous board games and a monthly leader board to show which members made the most amount of progress that month.

Price :

Of course, building such a space comes with it’s expenses. Keeping all things in mind, we've decided to price the membership at 1000 Rs / Month, and make significant discounts available for students as well as anyone who cannot afford the fee but can contribute a lot of value to the space (by sharing their knowledge or showing dedication to learn and make progress).

A lot of people have shown interest in a 3 or 6 month membership plan, which we might actually do a month or two from now, but do not think is a good idea right now. Remember, this is all still an experiment. We do not know if any of this will actually work out. Once it’s established that we can generate the value we’re setting out for, we’ll expand on the idea, iterate over the pricing strategy and membership plans.

Once your membership is confirmed, we’ll give you a tour of the space and tell you how best you can utilize it. We’ll add you to our private online chatroom, where you can engage with the rest of the members.

Application :

We have decided that for the moment we’ll be taking in people in batches, rather than just directly letting them take membership, so that we can maintain a good ratio of beginners, intermediate and advanced developers and maximize the value the space can generate. To apply for membership for the month of August 2017, please fill this Google Form with all the needed information.

We’ll soon send out a response for the application to you. If in case your application get’s rejected, you’ll be provided with a valid reason of why, and know that it doesn't prevent you from applying for the next batch.

We will take in a minimum of 25 people per batch, every two weeks. This also allows us to work on building the bond among people per batch.

This is Still an Experiment

I cannot stress this enough. This idea is really important to us, it’s the best we've come up with until now to make our mission a reality, but that doesn't mean it might not fail. To actually make it work, we’ll need help from all sides. But most importantly, we’ll need developers to show their commitment and prioritize the space, to contribute whatever value they can.

If you’re a company looking to hire, and want to participate in the Speed Interview Round at the end of the month, you can contact me at kapildutta28@gmail.com. If you have any questions or ideas regarding the hackerspace or our community, you can post them below.