Volunteering

How to start

You can contribute by following these steps:

• Join our discord

• Pick a feature 💡Ideas and Features if you want to work on a large, full-stack part of the product. A feature requires product thinking and multiple expertises - UX, Frontend, Backend, DB, ML. Its a 🐝Team effort
  • In large companies features are maintained by product managers

• Alternatively, pick a task from ☑️Tasks if you want to work on internal, infrastructural task or a feature improvement. Tasks are more specialized.
  • In large companies tasks are managed by a team in JIRA. We don’t use JIRA currently. We tried github issues but those add extra friction.

• Ask for more information in discord to get attention and document more information for the feature as part of ⛰️Feature grooming
  • We use Discord (specialized #layer-* channels for discussion to resolve blockers) and Notion to link results, knowledge and documentation.

• Follow 👋🏻Engineering Onboarding

• Think ahead how your contribution will look like. We use different software 💸Internal tools & cloud services to host results

Why to volunteer

Volunteering means you work for free, because you’re motivated by other things:

• Believing in 🌳Company Mission, trying to help the 🐝 bees

• Learning something new in the area that you are not yet familiar with
  
  (ex. IoT if you are a web developer)

• Having more freedom of trying oneself in different compared to an established enterprise where entry barrier is so high
  
  (ex. trying to be an engineer if you are a PM)

• Sharpening your skills in engineering with a new tech

• Gaining open-source proof of experience you can use at applying to other jobs & positions
  
  (ex. creating CAD model)

• Teaching others if you are experienced in one area
  
  (ex. ML to backend engineers)

Lower expectations, lower entry barrier

As we are in volunteer mode, its expected that people are contributing with different levels of their activity. So if you collaborate with others, do not expect much. People may suddenly disappear due to personal reasons (family, work, study etc). Its natural. ⛺Adapt to change

Contributions

Because of this, short and atomic contributions as artifacts are important both to the community as to the contributor. Contribution 🍯Gather value into the product for the customer.

Contribution is:

• a github commit

• a file, image, cad model etc. shared with us

• contribution must have a permissive license for us to reuse the work

• documenting or clarifying a feature in Notion
  • recording a youtube video how thing is working

Thus asking for information is not a contribution ;)

• See examples of contributions

  A github pull-request to an existing repository or a new repository that we can fork is one way to show your results. Examples - backend services, CAD models

  A penpot draft for UX (ask for invite to get access)

  

  Annotations for training Machine Learning models in clarifai.com
  (ask for invite to get access)
  

  

Communication

If Discord is not enough, we also try to have weekly meetings over google meet. Its free form, but we try to record meetings into 📺All-hands meeting recordings and stream it to twitch.

Be 🧸Humbly kind.

Acknowledgement

If you are a contributor, we try to highlight this.

• you get a 🟡 yellow name if you contributed some code to common namespace

• you are seen in github repository if you are a contributor

• your name remains in Notion tasks if you contributed to it

If you stick around for a long while and do the hard work today, you get a promise to get compensated in the future based on 🦚Equity & fundraising program plan, as it is in company interest to keep the talent