Code for Good Week 2018: Compassionate Coding and Sprint

Code for Good Week with Aysegul Yonet and Vanessa Wang

CodeForGoodWeek.org is an initiative dedicated to bringing together web developers, designers, technical writers, and other technologists to discover and contribute to open source projects for civic engagement or social good. The goals of the effort are to help the community learn about and effectively contribute to open source projects.

This is our third annual Code for Good Week, and we welcome anyone interested in learning about contributing to open source software projects, whether you’re just starting out or a seasoned developer.

Talk #1: Coding with Compassion with April Wensel

Software may be built on machines, but it’s built by and for human beings. Compassion presents an optimization problem in software development, inviting us to minimize suffering for the human beings affected by our work. With compassion, we can practice better self-care, collaborate more effectively, create more usable products, and ultimately, transform our coding ability into a powerful tool for promoting social good.

April Wensel (twitter.com/aprilwensel) is the founder of Compassionate Coding(compassionatecoding.com), a conscious business that’s bringing ethics and emotional intelligence to the tech industry. Prior to starting her company, she spent a decade as a software engineer and technical leader at various startups in Silicon Valley. When not coding, she mentors technologists around the world, runs ultramarathons, and cooks vegan food.

Talk #2: Mifos. End Poverty One Line of Code at a Time with Ed Cable

The Mifos Initiative is a 501(c)3 non-profit and FinTech pioneer guiding the community developing the Apache Fineract platform for financial inclusion, an open source financial service engine providing a cloud-based API-driven architecture for scaling digital financial services to the world’s 2 billion poor & unbanked. We aim to create a world of 3 Billion Maries where each of the 2 billion poor and unbanked has access to the financial resources needed to create a better life for themselves and their family. We guide a network of 100+ partners supporting 300 financial institutions & fintech innovators using digital banking solutions powered by our open APIs to reach more than 7 million clients.

Edward Cable (@edcable) is the President/CEO of the Mifos Initiative. Championing our open source community for the past 11 years, he’s passionate about the intersection between fintech, financial inclusion and open source community. Unifying technologists worldwide on top of an open platform with ideas shared across a global community is the only way we can help bank the billions that are underbanked.

Talk #3: Inclusive Web Project with Meggin Kearney

The goal of this project is to build a more inclusive web developer community. While there are many ways to do this, we need to narrow our focus to a starting point. When you look at the Stack Overflow and GitHub surveys, the demographics are fairly skewed toward one narrow demographic. In this project, let’s create a new developer survey. Let’s actively promote it across intentionally inclusive platforms, keeping track of our metrics over time. We will build a campaign around this survey, a newsletter, a community, all toward first representing the parts of the existing web developer community that may not have a voice yet, and next, growing the community to include a much more diverse group of developers.

Meggin Kearney (@MegginKearney) works on the Google Web Developer Relations team, which helps web developers build modern web experiences. She is passionate about creating a more inclusive community. I believe an inclusive web developer community is key to building a better web for our users.

Schedule:

5pm: Doors open
6:30-6:40pm: SFHTML5 intro
6:40-6:50pm: C4GW
6:50-7:30: Compassionate Coding
7:30-7:45: Break
7:45-8:00: Mifos
8:00-8:15: Inclusive Web Project
8:15-8:45 Q&A
8:45-10pm Grab drinks/food and sprint!