#codemontage

tl:dr; CodeMontage is wrapping up operations, but codemontage.com will remain online and open source.

CodeMontage has brought us incalculable inspiration, social impact, and learning. In three years of operation, we empowered thousands of individuals, supported over one hundred meaningful open source projects, and worked with dozens of technology companies big and small. We ran successful in-person events in half a dozen cities across the US. We engaged a diverse community of coders of all genders and from varied racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. We built a platform that connects coders and projects all around the world. We all got to be superheroes.

We also ran a number of experiments and explored a variety of business models. What we didn't quite find was a model we felt great about scaling to millions. So, we've decided to freeze this version of CodeMontage. Going forward, we will no longer actively recruit and mentor individuals through projects, actively advise project partners, or produce events. The current platform will remain online and open source for the foreseeable future.

Our biggest goals have been to inspire people and to leave things a little better than we found them. We believe we’ve done that, and we hope to do even better in the future. We've spent the last several months sharing lessons learned with community organizers, technology hiring managers, and non-profit project leaders. We hope to publish many of those lessons over time, too. Individually, we're each pursuing other projects that allow us to learn and grow:

Bethany is bringing socially driven businesses online with B. Martin Studio

Courteney is making electronic books more accessible at LibrarySimplified

Elaine is building the Colorado innovation community with LadyCoders Productions

Julia is improving technology for the US government at 18F

Nathan is building great tools for educators at Teachers Pay Teachers

Stephanie is expanding her marketing knowledge with OMD Worldwide

Theresa is improving an online learning platform at IIN

Vanessa is building continuous learning into engineering operations at Etsy

We hope you'll all keep moving social impact technology forward, too. Please check out our resources page to find great more organizations and more opportunities. We'll see you out there in the arena.

Sincerely,

On August 19th, CodeMontage held a Woman Coders Dinner at Amplify’s office. Dozens of open source volunteers teamed up to tackle technical issues in Quill and BeyondZ.org.

The crowd was diverse in experience, ranging from seasoned hackers to novice developers still learning HTML. With experienced volunteers and the Amplify team members on hand, everyone was able to find a partner and jump into a project.  

While turnout was a little lower than last time, we had a very productive hack session, with serious bugs fixed and essential features added to our site.

Some of the highlights include:

Alisha optimized our upcoming “Find Your School” feature.

Katherine created a new error page for us and learned Slim in the process.

Khadija fixed our favicon.

Zarina found and fixed an error in our Easy Install documentation.

Connie fixed a sorting algorithm bug and discovered an OAuth issue with our seed file.