What’s up with Coderplex in 2018?
It’s been a while since we last shared with you what we have been working on here at Coderplex. A couple of months actually. In this time, we have hosted a few meetups, built our core team, launched the first version of our website, where we’ve uploaded a couple of guides, recommending the best text and video resources on a concept level for learning Laravel and React JS. That’s about it, at least on the frontend.
On the backend, a lot has been happening. A lot of discussions, planning, brainstorming of ideas, meetings, and all of it just to figure out what we should be doing next. What is our game plan? What is our value and growth model? We were pretty clear about the long term vision, of improving the state of tech across India, but we were not able to settle on how to go about it, what ideas should we invest our time and money in, which ones would have the highest return of investment in terms of bringing us closer to our vision.
Our ideas and plans for the future have been constantly shifting. We have some really good ideas that we want to work on, a lot of initiatives we want to take up, but very recently, we had a revelation. If someone were to ask us what we had tangibly achieved in the last 1 1/2 year of building this developer community in Hyderabad, I would respond by saying that I’ve helped many people learn, get exposure to the latest trends in tech, helped them connect with each other, provided a few with jobs and simultaneously a few companies with some quality devs from our community.
However, I do not have any solid metrics or milestones to share, any significant tangle value we have produced through our community that I can point at. I can’t even give anyone a solid number of how many people are there in our community, because they are all spread across social media. That is bad, especially when we are not just a developer community anymore, we are a team of people working full time on this problem. We are building a real organization now, and it’s vital for us to precisely point at how much value we have produced for the people in our community and society.
So we have come to the decision that, for us at Coderplex, 2018 is all about deliverables, deliverables, deliverables. What value are we producing on a month-on-month basis? How are we measuring it? And how is it improving the state of tech across Hyderabad, right now?
We are building Coderplex with a lot of passion towards solving a real problem, and we are not operating as any other traditional corporation. We are trying to rethink every aspect of what we are building, including the work culture we are trying to establish for our team. For example, we don’t measure productivity here in terms of hours, rather we base it on progress made through tasks. Remote working from home is 100% fine with us.
We want to build Coderplex as a open, transparent, community-driven organization. We want every single person in our community to participate in helping us solve this problem, the problem of scarcity of competent developers in the ecosystem, with qualities like critical thinking, problem solving and a passion towards continuously learning. So let us tell you how we plan to measure the value we deliver, from now on.
Here’s are the metrics we are going to use to measure the value we’re producing through the community on a month-on-month basis :
- Number of opportunities members are receiving through the community (freelancing gigs, internships, part time and full time jobs, paid side-projects etc)
- Number of side-projects being created for learning
- Number of Open Source contributions by all community members
- Progress being made by our members in learning (theory + practical)
- Number of members working in teams or pair programming (and how much this improves their learning and building experience)
- Participation and performance in competitions
- Knowledge sharing, discussions and engagement happening in the community
- Number of people attending our meetups, and percentage of recurring audience
- How helpful our learning environment is in developing growth mindset, confidence, providing motivation and unconditional support to each other for learning and growing
- How actively our members help others learn and progress (through teaching or providing tips and advice)
- Total number of people in our community and our growth rate on month-on-month basis
A big chunk of our measurement would come from feedback forms I suppose, that members can fill at the end of each month. This will give some subjective insight on the experience of each member in part of our community. To measure the value we’re producing based on other metrics, we will need to build a few tools, like deploy our backend and make our website dynamic, build features that can help us in tracking the progress our members are making and the value they are receiving.
We need your help in brainstorming and building more tools that can help us in measuring the value we are producing.
Our goal for 2018 is to build a active and vibrant developer community in Hyderabad for every single modern technology, with a future scope. A community of passionate self-learners to motivate, provide confidence, structure and support to each other, so that we can all learn, grow and progress in our lives, solve problems, and make the world a better place for everyone, than it is today.
The Operating System of Coderplex is to stay lean, question ourselves constantly, experiment with our ideas to achieve validated learning of our assumptions and plans, of our value and growth model i.e how are we providing value to people and how do we make that value sustainable, so that we can keep consistently producing and growing it, and keep the organization alive.
But we would love to know what you think, any ideas or suggestions you have. Remember, we are a community-driven organization, we wanna hear from you valuable constructive criticism, we want to openly brainstorm with you, we want you to help us in executing our ideas and our mission. Join our online chatroom now and participate in the #discussion!
