https://github.com/techqueria/website
Techqueria is one of the largest communities of Latinx professionals in the tech industry. We build Latinx-centered spaces that revolve around career advice, technical talks, mentorship, open jobs, upcoming events/conferences, speaking opportunities, and open-source. We come from all walks of life and believe that the diversity of our community is the most reliable asset we have.
We have ~3,000 members in our Slack community, ~6,000 through our newsletter, supporters on Patreon, and thousands of followers on social media through Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The group began in Silicon Valley in 2015 and has since expanded to New York City, Austin, Los Angeles, and Chicago to connect and support Latinx professionals in those cities.
We have also partnered with various organizations to sponsor our events and software such as 1Password, Dropbox, Uber, PayPal (Braintree), Stripe, Spotify, Digital Ocean, GitHub, and Google. In terms of social good, we have an active and open source data structures and algorithm course for developers of all levels to better prepare for their job search. Our members have also presented apps like Notifica at Twilio, which allows you to get in touch quickly with someone you trust in the event of interaction with law enforcement. We have also been involved with the Get out the Vote initiative in order to increase the number of informed voters who will then be more likely to vote.
While there are Latinx in tech-focused organizations in most major cities, our goal is for Techqueria to become the largest networks for Latinx in tech professionals across the country.
3. Your involvement: Tell us about your participation in the project. Why is it significant to you? What contributions have you made to it so far?
I am currently an open source lead and am in the process of being added as a board member. As an open source lead, I helped revamp the website from the bottom up and made it accessible enough so that members from our community felt it was easy enough to contribute to. You can read more about the technical aspects of the website and our contributing guidelines through our GitHub repo.
Techqueria is personally significant because being a Latina growing up in Virginia, I didn't feel I was really like to able to connect with my culture as much until later on when I moved to California. Finding Techqueria.org allowed me to feel connected not only to Latinx community but also as a Latina engineer, it helped me connect to other engineers. Through their community, I was able to find senior engineers that helped me prepare for my interview at Slack which is where I work now.
4. Your plan: How will you spend your time during the 3 months? What do you hope to implement? We recommend providing a week-by-week plan as a minimum, but any additional level of detail is welcome.
Over the course of the 3 months, we want to focus on creating an internal member portal for Techqueria which will have features inspired by Elpha and /dev/color/, two YC backed organizations dedicated to bringing together those underrepresented in tech.
- Recruit help from Techqueria open source/website community on Slack/GitHub
- Set up milestones/project planning through GitHub and assign issues accordingly
- Configure the database (Firebase/NoSQL/ AWS)
- Add in user authentication through Identity platform in Netlify
- Implement appropriate admin/user permissions across the app
- Allow members to input their basic profile information, their current role, career goals, and whether they’re looking for a job
- Create forms where the user can input info
- Implement API that transmits info to the database
- UI that displays member information in a profile
- Create a member directory to more easily connect to members of Techqueria
- UI that displays all the members
- Implement route that returns all active members on chapter/national/leadership levels
- Job board
- Create a form where member or guest can input a job role that is open
- Implement UI that shows open jobs and filters by location and keyword search
- Internal Announcements / Events calendar
- Create a form where an organizer can input chapter event On member portal, have upcoming events, Internal announcements, resources, career prep, mentorship opportunities visible
- Configure more useful analytics to better gauge the health of Techqueria’s network across all our platforms (Slack, Twitter, Facebook, website, etc)
- Implement a referral link/form to invite prospective members via email
- Start onboarding members to the beta version of the platform
- Integrate the member portal with Slack and onboarding so that new users automatically get invited to Slack and are properly onboarded
- Set up NetlifyCMS so it's easier for others to contribute to the website as an integrated CMS
- Various tests for accessibility, performance, SEO, and PWA (Progressive Web App)
- QA/bug fixes
- Officially launch the internal member network and invite current Techqueria community to the new member network
In the event we are able to finish our other weekly goals earlier.
- Internationalization - the website/network would be fully available in Spanish/Portuguese as well to better appeal to our members whose first language is not English
Techqueria's organizer team consists of all volunteers and manages a community of nearly 3,000 Latinx in tech. Most of our members identify as software engineers, many of whom are looking for opportunities to contribute to open-source. We are proud to host projects where many developers have merged their first pull request.
We want to scale and focus our effort on building a platform to better engage our community. Creating this member portal is a big step towards that goal.