Programming in a Pandemic
What has the Bridge community been up to?
When it became clear that due to the COVID-19 pandemic we would have to pause our regular in-person programs, the first question we asked ourselves was ‘What does the community need right now?’. We felt strongly that whatever we did, we wanted to be able to offer something of distinct value and provide learning to our students, alumni, and volunteers.
We brainstormed, talked with some key volunteers, and quickly generated a list. We had ideas for workshops, talks, and suggestions for events that we could run virtually and went to work planning.
At this point, we weren’t sure how often folks would want to attend an extra-curricular something (if at all!), how many people would volunteer and really what would even happen. As we like to, we decided to experiment and adapt to whatever we could learn. We’ve had an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response from both volunteers willing to offer their time and with the community signing up to attend.
So far we’ve been able to offer something every week and currently have plans in the works for events through to the end of June!
Here’s what we’ve done!
So, what have we done? We started simple and had a Zoom social and show-and-tell. We wanted to focus on bringing the community together, without pressure to “do more”, during a very difficult time in all of our lives. We got to see some faces from the Bridge alumni community we hadn’t seen in a while and talk about what the upcoming plans were for Bridge and see demos and shares of everything from new websites, new companies and even knitting. Keep an eye on our social media where we’ll be sharing some community profiles of these and other awesome Bridge people!
Since that week we’ve largely focussed on learning events, mostly either a specific technical topic or something related to career momentum. We’ve been able to share content such as how to succeed in technical tests, how to interview authentically while fully remote, and some general good for everybody to know learning with a personal financial workshop.
We’ve had talks on unit testing in Jest & React, an intro to Gatsby and coming up soon we’ll be exploring Security concerns in front-end development, SQL and intro to DevOps, and API design. We’re also working on expanding our ability to offer this amazing content to the broader community of women, non-binary, and agender developers and designers. We’re also starting to record a series of Bridge Talks videos, chats and interviews with interesting folks in the tech industry.
We know that online workshops and talks aren’t everybody’s thing and so we’ve also created a few new Slack channels in our busy Bridge community. In one we post a question each week that you might encounter during an interview and have people discuss their thoughts or solutions. Another is intended just to meet new friends. Using the Donut Slackbot we introduce new to each other folks weekly and they have a virtual coffee chat. Some old friends have even set up chats when paired and specifically shared something they knew they hadn’t shared much about before, deepening these ties. Not surprisingly, for the Bridge community who are always looking to improve their interview skills, the interview prep channel has generated a lot of discussion and enthusiasm.
From the outset of the pandemic, we’ve had great support from all of our sponsor companies, many of whom are joining us to offer talks and workshops. Thanks also to our long-time community supporter Greg Wilson, we’ve been able to offer a four-week professional workshop to our instructors and mentors on how to become even better teachers.
That’s where we’re at right now and while we look forward to being able to offer our regular deep-dive learning programs again someday, we can’t deny that we are having a bit of fun connecting with the wonderful folks in the Bridge community in these new ways each week to learn and be social together. Online.
