Architect, Mentor & Learn: Join the WCC Platform Open Source Projects

Are you an experienced engineer, tech lead, DevOps specialist, QA automation engineer, or UX designer looking for a meaningful way to give back, practice technical leadership, and mentor the next generation in tech?
Or are you an early-career developer, career switcher, or student eager to learn directly from seasoned industry professionals and gain authentic, production-grade work experience for your CV?

At Women Coding Community (WCC), our open-source platform ecosystem is where collaborative tech leadership and hands-on learning come together!
We are expanding our entire platform ecosystem — powering our public community website, content management, events calendar, and our flagship Mentorship Matching Programme. To bring this to life, we are calling for contributors and leaders across 6 vital pillars: Backend, Admin Portal, Public Frontend, QA Automation, UI/UX Design, and DevOps/Cloud Infrastructure.
Join us for an inspiring, interactive evening to meet the team, explore our architecture, and discover how you can get involved!

🌟 What's In It For You?
👩🏽‍💻 For Senior Engineers, Leads & Architects:
Drive Technical Leadership: Step into maintainer, architect, and lead roles. Guide system design, write Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), set coding standards, and shape our roadmaps.
Empowering Mentorship: Uplift emerging talent through structured, kind, and constructive code reviews and pairing sessions.
Modern, Clean Tech Stacks: Enjoy building with modern tooling (Java 21 idioms, Spring Boot 3, Flyway, Next.js 14, Dockerized Playwright, Fly.io, Vercel, and Figma) without legacy corporate baggage.
Boost Your Leadership Profile: Demonstrate public open-source leadership, system design, and community stewardship on your resume and LinkedIn.
🌱 For Juniors, Mid-Levels & Career Switchers:
Bridge the Experience Gap: Gain verifiable commercial-style experience working with pull requests, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and agile workflows.
Learn from the Best: Receive mentorship and detailed feedback on your code and designs from senior engineers working at top tech companies.
Supercharge Your CV & Interviews: Build real features, automate testing, and deploy code you can confidently talk about in job interviews.
A Welcoming, Psychologically Safe Space: Start with curated "good first issues", supported by step-by-step onboarding documentation and dedicated Slack channels.

🗓️ Agenda
20:00 - 20:10 | Welcome & Introduction to Women Coding Community
20:10 - 20:30 | The WCC Platform Vision, Architecture & Impact
The big picture: backend service, Website, Mentorship Administration, automations, and community enablement.
Architectural overview: Connecting wcc-backend, admin-wcc-app, wcc-frontend, wcc-qa, and our Cloud/DevOps infrastructure.
Where senior technical and architectural leadership is needed.
20:30 - 20:50 | Open Opportunities: Engineering, QA, DevOps & UX Design
Deep dive into open roles: Backend, Frontends, QA with Playwright, DevOps with Docker/Fly.io/Vercel, and UX with Figma.
How senior leads guide the way and how emerging engineers can jump in with "good first issues".
How volunteering transforms your CV, career narrative, and interview confidence.
20:50 - 21:05 | Live Walkthrough: From Figma & Fork to Your First PR & Deploy
Setting up repositories locally, finding tickets, following PR guidelines, and our supportive review process.
21:05 - 21:30 | Interactive Q&A, Project Matchmaking & Next Steps
Matching your interests to specific project repos and onboarding onto Slack.

Speakers

Adriana Zencke Zimmermann | LinkedIn | Github

Founder & Director of Women Coding Community and Staff Software Engineer at Centric Software, Adriana brings 17+ years of experience in enterprise systems, backend architecture, and team leadership. She is passionate about empowering women in tech through mentorship, open-source contributions, and community-driven learning.

Sonali Goel | LinkedIn | Github

Senior Software Development Engineer at Tesco Technology & Leader at Women Coding Community with 15+ years of experience working across large-scale e-commerce, cloud-native Java architectures, and Agentic AI. Outside of day-to-day engineering, I focus on supporting the developer community as a leader at the Women Coding Community (WCC), contributing to open-source projects, and mentoring up-and-coming tech talent. I’m passionate about continuous learning, thoughtful system design, and helping others grow in their careers—efforts for which I'm honored to have received community recognition.

🚀 Our Platform Ecosystem & Open Opportunities
1. ⚙️ Backend Engineering — #wcc-backend
Tech Stack: Java 21, Spring Boot 3.2.5, PostgreSQL, Spring Data JDBC, Flyway, Spring Security (API Keys & JWT), OpenAPI/Swagger, Testcontainers, JaCoCo, PMD, and Bruno/Postman collections.
What You'll Work On: Public CMS APIs, Platform APIs, our automated Mentorship Matching algorithm, database schema design, caching, and role-based security.
Opportunities: Backend Developers, Database Engineers, and System Architects (all levels).
2. 🔐 Administration Portal — #admin-wcc-app
Tech Stack: Next.js 14, React 18, TypeScript, Material UI (MUI v6), Emotion, React Hook Form, Zod runtime validation, and Jest.
What You'll Work On: The dedicated back-office portal used by WCC directors and leads to administer mentorship cycles, review member applications, curate events, and manage CMS pages.
Opportunities: Frontend Developers interested in building complex dashboards, forms, and permission-based administrative workflows.
3. 🖥️ Community Website — #wcc-frontend
Tech Stack: Next.js 14, React 18, TypeScript, Material UI (MUI), Emotion, React Hook Form, Zod, and Playwright.
What You'll Work On: The responsive, accessible, public-facing face of Women Coding Community, visited by thousands of members worldwide.
Opportunities: Frontend Developers, Web Performance & SEO enthusiasts, and Accessibility (a11y) advocates.
4. 🧪 QA & Test Automation — #wcc-qa
Tech Stack: Playwright, TypeScript, Zod runtime schema validation, Faker data factories, Page Object Models (POM), and role-scoped session fixtures.
What You'll Work On: Fully type-safe end-to-end automation spanning headless API test flows (permission matrices, token lifecycles) and full UI test automation for the Admin Portal.
Opportunities: QA Automation Engineers, Manual Testers looking to master Playwright & TypeScript, and Test Leads establishing QA automation strategies.
5. 🚀 DevOps, Cloud & Observability
Tech Stack: Docker, Docker Compose, Flyway (database migrations), Fly.io (backend deployment), Vercel (frontend & admin deployments), GitHub Actions CI/CD, and Spring Boot Actuator.
What You'll Work On:
Automating build, test, and release pipelines with GitHub Actions matrix workflows.
Managing database versioning and seamless schema migrations with Flyway.
Containerizing development and testing environments with Docker.
Establishing health checks, monitoring, alerting, error tracking, and performance observability.
Opportunities: DevOps Engineers, Platform/Cloud Engineers, Site Reliability Enthusiasts, and developers wanting to learn modern deployment pipelines.
6. 🎨 UI/UX Design — Figma & Design Systems
Tool: Figma
What You'll Work On: Defining user journeys, wireframing, crafting high-fidelity design prototypes, and evolving our component design system (aligned with Material UI) for both our public site and back-office admin portal.
Opportunities: Product Designers, UI/UX Researchers, Design System Leads, and aspiring designers building a portfolio of live products.